I'm Connor. I am a techie and photographer who work's in the Virginia area. I currently work in Higher Ed working with faculty on how to use and incorporate tech into their courses. It's mostly troubleshooting, but sometimes I get to work on a fun project! I enjoy learning, cooking (mostly eating) and helping others. I try to be practical in my approach to things however I sometimes can be an ignorant idealist. I highly value clear communication and ensuring understanding when working with others. I'll typically give you an answer to your question and then some.
I started using Linux because I had a beat-up Macbook air from ~2013 that had only about 128 GB of usable space. I was doing a lot of freelance photography work at the time and wanted to edit in the field, but the machine just couldn't handle it. After the OS and all the software the drive only had about 40 GB of space usable. Which is fine for a few shoots, but not enough if you are using it for schoolwork as well. I ordered a 1 TB nvme drive to replace the Apple-approved one along with an adapter to fit it into the slot. After inserting the drive, I went to reinstall MacOS and found I couldn't. The machine wouldn't let me upgrade my storage myself unless it was an Apple-approved drive. I couldn't go back to MacOS, and I had already spent the money on the new drive and adapter so I decided to install Linux Mint.
I'd heard about Linux before and had a vague understanding of what it was. I watched a bunch of videos and eventually got a working system together. That Macbook air lasted me another 2-3 years before the external I/O failed.
Did you experience any hiccups with Linux?
It's definitely been a fun ride. The first issue I experienced was during the first install on the mac. I had no idea what I was doing or reading. There were so many options in the install menu for how I wanted the boot disk to be partitioned. I was googling LVM and ZFS on my phone while in the install menu. It's not like I could stop the install and search it up on my laptop. I ended up installing Linux Mint with LVM and the MATE desktop environment. I had so much trouble using it at first, but thought it was just the way Linux was. I used it like that for months.
I did try distro hopping a bit. I really liked Fedora, but the macbook had a proprietary wifi card which needed a blob driver that wasn't in the Fedora repos. Ubuntu and Linux Mint had the driver and made it really easy to install the driver so I would always end up reinstalling Mint after not being able to connect to wifi. Eventually both the USB ports on that macbook died and I was able to buy a used Thinkpad off ebay. I installed Fedora immediately.
Since then it's been mostly smooth sailing. There are still many concepts I don't fully understand, LVM being one of them. I've have an incredible experience using Fedora as my daily driver.