I was around 18 when I started, so doing nonsensical things was my area of expertise at the time. That helps a bit with the feeling of time waste.
Still, it was not a complete waste, because now I can fix any such problems in minutes, and I always carry an archiso drive on me (which I used maybe once in the past 5 years to fix somebody else's PC which wasn't even running Arch).
I will say, without exaggerating, recovering from Windows boot issues has caused me WAY more issues over the years. It doesn't tell you what's actually wrong, you don't get much in terms of tools, and so it's much harder to fix unless you want to completely reinstall Windows (which apparently is a good idea to do regularly too..).
I wanted to nerd out and learn the Linux ecosystem
My engineer friends were Arch evangelists
I do catch myself saying "just read the manual", but not in a hostile way I think. When you're already in a terminal, once you get used to manuals, it's very accessible and it's quick to get what you need.
However, that usually requires you to know what you're looking for quite specifically, and that is something you can only learn through experience and study.
I'm very happy with my choice and the whole "you can easily fuck up your system" thing also works in reverse - you can just as easily fix your system. I've made a few mistakes over the years but nothing that I couldn't reverse. Just make sure you're not fiddling with partitions and boot loaders during work hours..
I honestly still use Perl for small scripts as a Bash alternative. It is very powerful and is already installed everywhere. I just try not to use it for things others might have to work on..
They have 95% success rate for landing boosters in a relatively new technology, saving loads in terms of trash and pollution (if that's even a metric somebody is remotely interested in for space travel).
This is a huge leap. Probably not worth giving Musk credit for, but still.
For some reason our business policy doesn't allow us to use the web versions..
Ubuntu is very popular in businesses cus it's Debian but with official enterprise support (I strongly dislike both though).
Luckily all my work is in WSL2 Arch terminal with tmux, so it's bearable, but I miss my rice setup so much!