Good morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever and whenever you are reading this! My name is Mick, but I am better known as TheGoldenDragon.
I have been around Free and Open software for many years, beginning in my college days at ITT Tech here in Wichita (now since closed as many of you probably know). Oddly enough, my first experience in FOSS was in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. A professor of mine proclaimed that Red Hat would be THE distribution of choice and we should learn it well. He assigned us an extra credit task that seemed simple enough. "Update your VM of RHEL 5 to the most current version". At that time, if memory serves, was RHEL 7. Skipping a version was fairly common to me in Windows, but, I had never even updated a Linux machine. Some Googling and some trick CLI work got me completely up-to-date in about 30 minutes time. This Linux thing was pretty awesome! Shortly after that, I went home and started downloading every ISO I could find! I landed on XFCE and Xubuntu as my choice. The X seemed edgy or something. I love the bog standard Desktop paradigm and still do to this day. These days, I have found myself enamored with Budgie and Fedora. I have been an Arch user (both the easy method through Endeavour and manual install), previous Fedora user (my old setup had an nVidia dGPU and Wayland hated multi monitor at the time), Debian, Puppy, etc. I think I have been on most bases but Gentoo and Slackware. I find that in both GNOME and Budgie, the window snapping is VERY handy and with some extensions, I can get pretty decent 2x2 tiling. As for landing once again with Fedora - the bleeding edge is where I get my most excitement from. Clonezilla and I will probably be the best of friends! In my day to day I don't get to work with tech. I am a parts courier for a local aerospace manufacturing facility. Once I get home, however, I am usually messing with something Linux or writing for my blog over at https://goldenblogathon.com. For now, my skills are mostly in community efforts and learning the intricacies of self-hosting! You can find me around the Jupiter Broadcasting matrix quite frequently as I am a mod in many of their spaces and I am colloquially known as the Linux Unplugged mascot as well as the starter of the Row of Ducks meme in Podcasting 2.0 (that being 2222 sats in boosting)! In my homelab, I am in the process of a N&P of my server so that I can get services running on Fedora Server or a fresh install of Ubuntu Server. I would love to learn Docker or Podman as my extra small business, Kitterman Creative, utilizes Nextcloud as our files infrastructure! For my small biz, I am one half of the design squad (I am getting fairly familiar with some GIMP tools and some Inkscape stuff, as well as learning Ink/Stitch for embroidery) but full-time IT guy for our infra. For non-software goodies, I have been playing guitar for about two-thirds of my life and have a bit of experience in video making and editing. I know I am getting a bit wordy here, so let me see if I can wrap things up! As for Dev-adjacent stuff, I am pretty comfortable in CLI areas. After hearing Carl George's talk at Linux miniFest, I am beginning to learn rpm packaging and have a few packages that I am aiming to either pull in to Fedora proper or package new. My experience in comms platforms isn't too crazy. This is my first mailing list! For real-time chat, I am on both Matrix and Discord and depending on the where-and-when, i am not super picky about either, but, love the FOSS stuff. Ideally, I would love to be able to spend around four to six hours a week volunteering if my time allows! Almost there! I imagine myself as a pillar of community. If LmFNW taught me anything over that weekend is that I love community. Never before have I felt so welcomed or so loved by people. Initially, I thought that I would go up there and not do a ton but, wound up meeting with and chatting with the coolest folks that accepted me for what I was - A Linux geek who found a home. Things that I would love to do would be to get a Linux Users Group formed in my area and advocate Free and Open Source Software to more and more people. Eventually, maybe a Midwest Tech Fest to be organized here in my city! The closest tech conferences we have are Texas Linux Fest and a CyberSec conference here in town (that I didnt know about until after LFNW). Tl;Dr - Hi, I'm Mick! Great to be here and finally be brave enough to contribute back to an area of my life that has given me so much joy and freedom. _______________________________________________ fedora-join mailing list -- fedora-join@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to fedora-join-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/fedora-join@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
