20 Years of Ubuntu
20 years ago this month I discovered Ubuntu which led to a life-long love of Linux. My first Linux distro was SUSE 9.0 which I purchased on CD-ROM at Microcenter in 2003. I tinkered with it a bit, but finding the Ubuntu community made a huge difference and made me fall in love.
My love for technology, Linux, and programming grew from the seeds that were planted in the Ubuntu forums in 2004. The first “blog post” on this site is a short collection of some of the posts that I found in the archives.
It’s so wild to look at them now.
Re: How did you find out about Ubuntu?
I found while searching Google for open source software, somehow I wound up on the Ubuntu Website, and i fell in love.
A couple days later on 10/20/2004 I said:
I love ubuntu too, I still can’t get my network set up, but its all good, I will figure it out. I was not able to make a network on suse or fedora either, so ubuntu is still my favorite.
Its so funny to me that I proclaimed my love for Ubuntu even though I couldn’t get my internet to work.
https://levlaz.org/posts-from-ubuntu-forums/
These days I am running Debian, but Ubuntu will always a special place in my heart. Here’s to 20 more years!
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- Edge Detection with Inkscape
- Lev Lazinskiy
- Spring Security, Webjars, and MIME type error
- Using cgit
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Joining Cursor from Fatih Arslan
- Pluralistic: Digital sewer socialism (08 Aug 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global (29 Jul 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making from Ludicity
- No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass from Fernando Borretti
- Is it ethical to use AI? from charity.wtf
- The logical destination of LLMs from Andy Bell
- Revised rules of engineering leadership. from Irrational Exuberance
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things
Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab. I've been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its prede...
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries August 16, 2026“I think there’s a lot of value in these.”
Speaking of user interface guidelines, developer Matt Sephton and others compiled many of Apple’s human interface guidelines, starting from 1980, all the way to 2014, including some goodies like early drafts, NeXT, Newton, and so on. Elsewhere, designer Ge...
via Unsung August 16, 2026Birding photos from Dutch Gap on Aug 15, 2026
Birding photos from Dutch Gap on Aug 15, 2026 My best bird photo from this morning is a dragonfly (Eastern Pondhawk, I think). Least Sandpiper Green Heron Red-headed Woodpecker. It's a juvenile, so its head is not actually red yet.
via O'DonnellWeb August 16, 2026Generated by openring