Immutable Charlie

Hi there! I’m Charlie.

My tech journey started in the early ’80s with the ZX81. It was an affordable alternative to the BBC Micro, and for me, it was love at first click! I taught myself the BASIC programming language and even tried writing my first game. It was a clone of that classic puzzle game where a penguin pushes ice blocks to escape a maze. Sadly, I never actually finished it, but was I completed hooked on computers

My very first experience of Linux was with a boxed set of Red Hat that I stumbled onto at PC World. I managed to install it, but without an internet connection, I quickly found myself looking at the screen wondering, “Now what?”

Professionally, I’ve spent most of my life working in the international tourism industry, which has given me the wonderful opportunity to live all over the world. Whenever the tourist season ended, I’d head home and spend all my free tinkering and “messing around” with my computer. Looking back, I have no idea what I did!

In 2001, my adventures took me from France to South Africa. A friend and I teamed up to open our first Internet cafe. I made sure it had the fastest speeds and the highest level of privacy. Things went so well that by 2007, we had expanded to four locations! I was using Linux full-time by then, but unfortunately, the management software just wasn’t robust enough to switch the cafes over from Windows.

A few years later, in 2014, I sold my business and left for Pune, India, where I lived at the OIMR and helped run their website. By 2016, I found my way back to the UK and returned to the international tourism industry.

If you’re a Linux fan, you might relate to my biggest vice: I can’t even tell you how much time I’ve wasted (but loved) distrohopping. It became a bit of an addiction, and honestly, it’s a habit I still wrestle with today! I eventually found a happy home with Fedora Workstation and, later, Fedora Silverblue. I’ve grown to absolutely love immutable distributions. For a tinkerer like me, they are a lifesaver. They stop me from endlessly tweaking things that are perfectly fine as they are, allowing me to actually focus on getting things done.

I was so excited to join the hosts of mintCast, a podcast I have listened to for a long time. I always had a soft spot for Linux Mint, but I mistakenly brushed it off as just a “noobie” distro. I couldn’t have been more wrong! After joining the show and really diving into it, I finally made the switch to Linux Mint myself, and I’m loving every minute. I wish it were immutable, but what to do?

You can find me on Matrix as @immutablecharlie, on email at [email protected], and I’m also on the Linux OTC podcast.