2023 was a crazy year for sure, I started by deleting the Windows partition on my laptop (my only device at the time) and switched to Debian, then Arch Linux full-time to really dig down into Linux. But the real fun started when I discovered tiling Window Managers and decided to adopt Qtile as my full time Desktop Environment, as its config file is written in Python, which I was learning at the time. This is where everything changed, as I was forced out of my comfortable GUI-based desktop environment and instead had to edit every aspect of my environment via the config file (as well as learn a load of terminal tools.) This made me spend more time in the terminal than I was previously accustomed to, and the more time that I spent in this environment, the more that I fell in love with it and would just open a terminal to do any and every basic file command. Like, if I had to move a bunch of files from my Downloads folder into a new folder that I needed to create in my home directory, why would I go through the trouble of opening a file explorer, pressing ctrl+shift+n or whatever, naming a folder, then going to my downloads folder, highlighting everything, ctrl+x, BACKSPACE, CLICKING INTO THE FOLDER, then FINALLY, THEN I have earned the right to ctrl+v and finally begin the process of copying my files into my new folder. OR I could open my handy, dandy terminal and just be like 'cd Downloads && cp * ../Example' BOOM, done. This accelerated my descent down the Linux rabbithole like crazy and made setting up headless servers SO MUCH easier when I approached that part of my journey. At this point, I can't imagine using a file explorer instead of a terminal (even the few terminal-based ones that I've used, although vifm is pretty awesome.) Even on Windows machines I find myself defaulting to PowerShell for basic tasks because I've become so accustomed to a terminal-based environment and I feel like its the superior way to go about things. It also made the process learning Cisco IOS significantly easier, in addition to giving me a better understanding of filesystem structure and allowing me to grasp the syntax of various programming languages much easier. I came into 2023 as somebody who had casually used Linux but never dug deep and now I enter 2024 as a somebody who understands computing on a completely different level. I look forward to upgrading my skills more this year as I dwelve into the sauce and learn new things on a daily basis.