It all started when I was 5 years old. My dad bought me my very first PC, a modest machine running Linux. Even before I could read properly, I was completely hooked. I literally haven’t let go of a keyboard since.

At age 11, I reached a milestone for any tech enthusiast: using my own savings, I built my first PC from scratch. The specs were humble, but it was my machine:

  • An AMD Ryzen 5 4600G CPU (the integrated graphics were a lifesaver, as I couldn’t afford a dedicated GPU).
  • 16GB of DDR4 RAM.
  • A rather low-end MSI motherboard.
  • And the famous “Amazon mistake” that worked in my favor: I received a 1TB SSD instead of the smaller one I ordered!

Since that first build, my PC has become a continuous project. Thanks to successive upgrades gathered every Christmas and birthday, the machine has slowly transformed. Today, I work (and game) on a Ryzen 5 7600X paired with an RTX 5070 and 32GB of DDR5. It’s safe to say it’s come a long way from the little 4600G.

The love for Linux and the Dual Boot burden

Having started on Linux at such a young age, the OS holds a special place in my heart. Today, I’m an avid Arch Linux user (I use Arch, btw). I love the absolute control, the lightweight footprint, and the elegance of the ecosystem.

Yet, a necessary evil persists: the Windows dual boot. The culprit, of course, is gaming. Even though tools like Proton have made giant leaps, some titles (especially those with invasive anti-cheats) still force me to keep a Windows partition on my drive. It breaks my heart a little, but it’s the price to pay to play…

The family “Tech Guy”

My passion for systems and hardware comes with what I jokingly call the IT curse. I’ve inevitably become the official PC repairman for my friends and family. A stubborn printer? A Windows install that won’t boot? A virus on a laptop? That’s on me. I do it often—maybe a bit too often—but deep down, it’s what taught me patience, how to diagnose unlikely hardware failures, and how to tinker with motherboards.

This relentless curiosity about hardware is what pushed me toward systems engineering. Understanding exactly how hardware and software interact has become an everyday learning process for me. And it all started with a little Linux machine, 11 years ago.