Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?

The room in one sentence

A sprawling, multi-generational campfire where technologists trade origin stories — from mainframe operators in the 1960s to bootcamp grads in the 2010s — revealing that the common thread into tech was rarely a degree but almost always a broken machine, a borrowed account, a tolerant mentor, or a night alone with a blinking cursor.

Overall mood

Warm, reflective, and quietly proud. The thread feels like a reunion where everyone recognizes the same scars: compiling kernels on 486s, swapping floppies, getting kicked off AOL, talking a hiring manager into an unpaid internship. There’s little posturing; people admit to luck, privilege, heartbreak, and dead ends. A strong current of gratitude runs through it — for parents who bought the 386, teachers who looked the other way, strangers on IRC who SSH’d in to fix your xf86config. The mood is nostalgic but not sentimental; the hardships are remembered as formative, not traumatic.

What people agree on

• Access to hardware was the gatekeeper. Whether a dumpster 486, a school VAX, a parent’s work PC, or a £200 486 bought on credit, the story starts when the machine arrives.
• Community was the accelerator. IRC channels, LUGs, BBSes, 2600 meetings, Usenet, and later forums provided the knowledge that manuals didn’t. “The folks I met on those boards genuinely helped point me in the right direction” (shoes_for_thee).
• Self-teaching via necessity beats curriculum. People learned C to mod Quake, Perl to automate homework, kernel compilation to fit Slackware into 4 MB RAM. The motivation was concrete: make the hardware do something it refused to do.
• Non-linear paths are the norm. Carpenters, youth workers, musicians, neuroscience dropouts, stand-up comics, gas-station attendants — the “traditional” CS grad is the outlier in this thread.
• Linux was the great equalizer. It turned discarded hardware into a workstation, gave root access to teenagers, and cost nothing but time. “I had no money to buy Windows OS” (amitoz_azad) appears in multiple variations.

Points of tension

• Front-end tooling vs. fundamentals. austincheney argues many front-end developers “never seem to figure it out” and are “dependent upon a collection of tools,” calling it “hand-holding possibly infantile.” mynegation pushes back: the stack is too deep; mechanistic work is a rational response to demand.
• Linux on the desktop. plastman states flatly: “Windows is simply a better workstation OS regardless of the great amounts of bazinga we hear nowadays. linux on server/embedded systems is greatness however.” Several others (aloukissas, pjmlp) use macOS or Windows daily while running Linux on servers.
• The “nerd” identity shift. quantumsequoia describes a modern “overachiever clique” driven by status and college admissions, unlike the “pure passion motivation nerds of the 90s.” oalae5niMiel7qu counters that this group existed then too — they were called “preps.”
• Gaming as gateway vs. trap. openfuture credits WoW addiction for leading them to Stallman and Linux; simplism and nullandvoid discuss blockers and scheduled binges to reclaim time. The line between “tinkering with games” and “escapism” is contested.

Notable technical/practical objections

• plastman on desktop Linux: “Windows is simply a better workstation OS… linux on server/embedded systems is greatness however.”
• austincheney on front-end dependency: “Many people who perform front-end development never seem to figure it out. They are dependent upon a collection of tools to do large portions of their job for them.”
• dvh on distro regression: “Best Linux distro was Ubuntu 8.04, everything worked out of box, not even video tearing! It's downhill from back then.”
• Gualdrapo on FOSS design tools: “Photoshop is pretty much the only thing I miss from the proprietary OSes, never managed to match the workflow with Krita or Gimp.”
• ruslan on BSD preference: “I'm not fond of Linux at all, although I run Ubuntu/Kodi on my home media center… FreeBSD, which is my OS #1 till this day.”

Undercurrents, jokes, and skepticism

• The buro9 saga — homeless in a squat, hand-writing 2,000 fan letters for Elastica, stealing power through a hole in the roof to run a 386, building a mail-merge database that launched a music-industry career — draws a chorus of “write a book,” “make a film,” “best post I’ve ever read on HN.”
• GnarfGnarf (started 1965, FORTRAN at math camp, still running a graphics-software company): “There is no job more interesting than programming.”
• dropit_sphere: “A girl broke my heart… plugged ‘Why aren't nerds popular,’ into Google, found PG's essay… decided to become a Lisp Jedi.” Reply: “Has the situation changed?” — “It's a work in progress. :)”
• abecode on kernel panic: “I still get a ‘kernel panic’ in my stomach while installing linux.”
• locusofself on irony: “Somewhat ironically, I work at Microsoft now.” (After learning Linux to be cool on IRC in 1997.)
• quantumsequoia’s sociological breakdown of modern high-school cliques vs. 90s nerds/preps/jocks.
• mabbo linking a friend’s story of saving soldiers’ lives in Afghanistan as the “single greatest ‘how I got onto tech’ story.”

Representative quotes

“I was hanging out in an IRC channel for a local Linux user group, and lo and behold, there was a guy who worked in a local datacenter/hosting company. I got the manager contact from him, and basically called and emailed and bothered the hell out of him until he relented and said OK come work as an unpaid intern.” — indigodaddy

“I lost a night of my life trying to add a cdrom when I didn't know what jumpers were :-)” — p0d

“A walnut creek CDROM? Well look at the mr. millionaire here, I could not afford a CD drive at the time :) My first slackware install took like 5 hours of flipping floppies (40 or so)… I think on the same day I first ran vi, couldn't figure out how to type anything, or exit for that matter, so I ctrl-alt-deleted the computer :)” — terlisimo

“I was homeless, living in a squat… They bought me an IBM 30386 and I had it in the upstairs of the squat. There was a hole in the roof so this part of the room was covered in tarp, and we stole the power from another loft… I had never used a computer before as I came from poverty, but I got a book from a library, a reference book on basic, and used that to programme a simple database based on text files.” — buro9

“I got a job out of college doing at-scale release and infrastructure management, starting with just a bunch of shell scripts, eventually graduating to tools like Chef and Ansible, later Docker and later still orchestrators like Kubernetes.” — don-code

“I was playing Quake and I found out that my ping times were 60ms lower over a modem 33k6 connection than with Windows. That got me sold.” — smooc

“I decided to go all-in. I spent a few weeks trying various free *nixes. Ubuntu was brand new, but it worked well enough to get me to never go back (though I have often explored BSDs and other distros). By my senior year I was working exclusively on back-end Linux stuff. Now I would say I have an exceptionally successful career and I haven't touched a proprietary OS in 9 years!” — TallGuyShort

“The fundamentals change much more slowly. Like http has hardly changed at all until 2.0 showed up. So you can take that knowledge to Laravel, Rails, Express, whatever.” — city41

“Motivation is everything.” — can16358p (after detailing a path from Flash animations to phishing to crypto bots to React Native)

Uncommon or outlier opinions

• plastman treats Linux as a server/embedded tool and prefers Windows for daily workstation use — a minority stance in this thread.
• ruslan (started on Soviet ES-1033 mainframe, moved to OS/2, then FreeBSD) explicitly dislikes Linux: “I'm not fond of Linux at all.”
• pjmlp returned to Windows as primary platform after a UNIX-heavy education and career.
• aloukissas uses macOS for the “perfect blend of a great GUI with a Linux-y terminal” and only touches Linux via Docker.
• openfuture quit gaming entirely (“fed up with electronics”) and prefers physical games with bounded state spaces.
• punchclockhero admits imposter syndrome: “dating programmers and hanging out at hackerspaces… Still have moments of doubt whether I'm the real thing or just a groupie.”
• locusofself works at Microsoft after learning Linux to fit in on IRC — a deliberate irony.
• quantumsequoia argues the “nerd” archetype has been replaced by a status-seeking “overachiever clique,” a claim contested by oalae5niMiel7qu.
• GnarfGnarf (1965 starter) and Tepix (386BSD 0.0) represent the pre-Linux UNIX generation whose entry points were institutional, not hobbyist.

Bottom line

The thread is a living genealogy of the hacker ethos: curiosity + access + community + time. The specific technologies (Slackware floppies, Red Hat CDs, Ubuntu Live USBs, WSL2) change, but the shape of the story doesn’t. Almost no one cites a classroom as the spark; they cite a broken sound card, a borrowed shell account, a teacher who handed them a book, a friend who SSH’d in at 2 AM. The “foot in the door” was almost always held open by another person. For anyone wondering how to start — or how to help someone else start — the answer is scattered across a hundred comments: give them a machine, point them at a community, and get out of the way.