About

Hi! 👋 My name is Ryan!

Hello, and welcome to my site! My name is Ryan Schanzenbacher. I’m currently a fifth-year student at the Rochester Institute of Technology studying Cybersecurity, expecting to graduate in 2025. Now since that’s out of the way, a little about me. I’ve always had a passion for computers from a young age. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by both how they work and how to use them to their fullest potential. Another starting point for my interest in computers was whenever my Dad and I sat down to try and fix a computer. His job required him to fix computers more often than not, and sometimes I would be able to show up at his workplace and just watch what he was doing. Or, another time was when he had an older laptop that we worked together on to try and get Windows 98(!) to run on again. Those types of events helped shape my interests into what they are today.

Another starting point

Another really big starting point had to be sometime in 2010 (I’m not exactly sure of the date anymore, but it was after April and before October. This timeframe will make sense soon). At the time, I was using an older base station running Windows XP. Given that at this time Windows 7 had been released for about 6 months, Windows XP was starting to lose traction. Even though it wouldn’t officially be announced “End-Of-Life” until April of 2014, mainstream support of the OS ended in April of 2009. Given that, applications were starting to not support XP anymore. One stand out in my memory at the time of writing is Chrome; I remember launching the app and seeing the “This Operating System is no longer supported and will no longer receive updates” message. This list of software just kept growing and growing until it became unfeasable for me to run XP anymore. I wanted a copy of Windows 7 at the time, though my Dad had no copies from where he worked and I couldn’t just buy a copy myself, as I was 8 at the time. So, I did the only thing I could think of: I googled solutions. One option in particular caught my eye: Use a free operating system named “Ubuntu.” Now, I’ve never heard of anything other than Windows and OSX at the time, so the notion of a “free” operating system seemed quite interesting. Something that would run on your computer and get updated until your computer couldn’t handle it anymore, all without having to pay for a license really caught my attention. So, I went to website given and downloaded the latest copy of the operating system. Now, I remember this happened between April and October of 2010 specifically because the version I happened to download was Ubuntu 10.04, where the major version represents the release year and the minor version represents the release month. Given two versions are released per year, xx.04 and xx.10, I can say I started using Linux between those two months.

A whole new world

So I downloaded the ISO and burned it to a CD (way back when an ISO could fit on a CD with some extra space, good times.) I popped it into my computer, figured out how to actually boot the disk (I honestly think my computer was already set to boot disks first already, but I don’t remember). I got to the GRUB menu and chose to Try Ubuntu. I waited and…. crash. Well, this wasn’t too great of a first experience. No idea what was happening, but I remember getting some cryptic error related to the CD drive or the CD itself and getting dropped into something called the “initramfs prompt”

So, like any self respecting individual, I promptly gave up for the time being; I had homework I had to get done. I continued to use Windows XP for the rest of the school year. When summer break rolled around, I decided one day I was just going to keep trying until it worked. Less and less apps were working, and the fact I couldn’t figure it out really bothered me. So, probably around the end of June I dedicated a day to just trying to figure it out. I think it had something to do with the way I was burning the CD, so I got into a process of

  • Burning a CD
  • Reboot to see if I get any further than last time
  • Write down the error, then go back to Windows and research it
  • Re-burn the CD and try again.

Finally, after much trial and error, I finally did something that caused me to get all the way to a desktop. I was elated, I was able to figure something out all by myself. So, after giving it a shot on the live disk, I decided I wanted to really try it. Though, at this point I didn’t know anything about partitioning, so I rebooted into Windows and gave something called WUBI a try. WUBI was Canonical’s Windows Ubuntu Installer. I used it, it worked, and I rebooted into a fully functioning GNOME 2 desktop! I gave it a try, doing some web browsing. Luckily whatever method I was using to connect to the internet was supported at the time, so it *just worked*â„¢. So, I surfed the web for a bit and needed to figure out how to actually install things. The whole point of doing this was to install updated software again, so I looked up how to install things on Ubuntu. Given it was 2010, the main way to do this was the command line, so I ended up opening a terminal, copy-pasting what was given to me, and lo and behold I had a new application. This was amazing, I didn’t have to go to a website to download it, I just typed something in and again, it workedâ„¢. I recognize this is a very rare experience, but I happened to get very lucky. It seems the only thing that didn’t work for me was my audio, a common problem at the time. So, I couldn’t do too much because I had no idea what to look for at the time, so I just dual-booted Windows and Linux, using Windows whenever I wanted to play a game or do something with audio. However, as time went on, I tended to use Ubuntu more and more for everyday things. Now, after some amount of time, I decided to remove the WUBI install because it just wasn’t flexible. I think the maximum size for an installation was around 15-20GB. I wanted more, so I uninstalled it completely and took some time to learn how to actually install the OS. I grabbed my CD I made, booted it up, and launched the installer. I was given the option to install alongside Windows, so I just chose that, along with the option to install updates. Afterwards, I rebooted and was presented with a different boot menu than I was used to. I would later come to learn this was GRUB, instead of the Windows Boot Manager. I booted into Ubuntu, and my audio was even working! No idea what had changed, probably installing updates helped.

Taking the plunge

So I used this setup for some time, probably until like mid-2013 or so. I kept using both OSes, though my Windows XP install was just taking up space for not a lot of use. I couldn’t really do too much on it anymore, so I eventually decided to just take the plunge. I put everything I needed on on a USB drive, and just reinstalled everything on the PC, this time choosing “Use this entire drive for Ubuntu.” Goodbye Windows! I realize I probably didn’t need to reformat my entire computer to do this, but at the time this is how I knew to do it. Ever since then, I don’t think I’ve had a permanent Windows install on a computer. I’ve fallen in love with Ubuntu and the ideals surrounding it. Fast-forward to today, I distro-hopped more times than I can count on my hands; all for various reasons. One reason may have been I preferred the DE of another distro, or maybe Ubuntu didn’t have the package I wanted, etc. so I probably have used Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Fedora, Puppy Linux, OpenSUSE, and Arch in my lifetime. At the moment, I use Alpine on my servers and Guix as my daily-driver distribution on my personal computers.