You probably guessed from the name of my YouTube channel, but my name is Drew Howden. As you may know, I make tech videos on YouTube—about Linux in particular. I mainly focus on the desktop, but I have made a few videos covering Linux servers.
I use Linux (Ubuntu) as my daily driver OS. I do all my YouTube video production (screencasting, editing, and thumbnail production) on Linux. I do my financial accounting and budgeting on Linux. I game on Linux. I do my coursework on Linux. I’ve even made documents for other people, and filled out government forms (including tax returns and a passport application) on Linux. In short, you can do almost anything on Linux that you can do on Windows. Only catch is that you will probably need to use different programs to accomplish these tasks, since not all Windows programs are available on Linux.
I switched from Windows to Linux in February 2019. For the first few months I had a dual-boot with Windows, but after that, I removed Windows and went Linux-only. Not long after that, I started to experiment with virtual machines, which eventually allowed me to create tutorial videos about operating systems, without making changes to a physical PC, and while screen recording it. Because I loved Linux so much, and I wanted other people to know about it, I started a YouTube channel about it on October 27, 2019.
If you want to learn more about how I got into Linux and the events in my life leading up to it, check out the video below where I go more in depth into it.
My Accomplishments
- Grew a YouTube channel to over 4,000 subscribers (and counting)
- Got over 100,000 views on a single video
- Built a home file/media server (using both Samba and Nextcloud) on Ubuntu Server
- Self-hosted Minecraft servers with friends over the Internet (on a Ubuntu PC)
- Cloned drives using Acronis, then found a way to do it with free software
- Installed Android in a virtual machine
- Upgraded several PCs to Windows 11 (that did not meet Microsoft’s minimum requirements)
- Worked with various hypervisors (VirtualBox, VMware, and QEMU/KVM)
- Set up Active Directory domains (on both Windows and Linux)
- Replaced computer components such as hard drives and RAM, in both desktops and laptops
- Replaced the battery in my own phone
- Built custom computers
- Created my own Ethernet cable
- Built this website from scratch on a Google Cloud micro instance running Ubuntu Server
- This means I installed the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) and the content management system (WordPress), and configured automatic updates