<- Home

Hi, I’m Mahdi Mirzadeh. I was born in 2003 and I live in Iran. I care deeply about computers, systems, and the craft of building with them. I’m a FOSS enthusiast and I’ve used GNU/Linux as my daily driver since 2016.

GNU+Linux is not just an OS, it’s a journey

Below is the path I took through Unix-like systems. It’s less about “which distro is best” and more about learning, breaking things, and building a setup that fits me.

Early 2016 - First install

• Dual‑booted Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Unity) with a debloated Windows 7 x86.
• Used Ubuntu for web and media; Windows for Counter‑Strike 1.6.
• Mostly experimenting, browsing docs, and doing small web freelance work.

Late 2016 - I broke the bootloader

• Deleted the Ubuntu partition from Windows Disk Management (don’t do this).
• Reboot… no OS. Without a Manjaro USB ready, I ended up back on a fresh Windows 7 for a while.

2017 - Back to Linux

• New laptop didn’t support Windows 7 well, so I installed Windows 10 x64.
• Used it to download Manjaro and continued my GNU/Linux journey in earnest.

2019 - Down the rabbit hole

• Studied LPIC topics, networking, Bash scripting; played with servers; wrote more C.
• Joined Linux communities; got curious about tooling and workflows.
• Switched to Arch (I didn’t say “btw”).
• Window‑manager hopping began:
  • 2019: xfce → spectrwm → i3‑wm → qtile → xmonad → bspwm / openbox → dwm (by 2021)

2021 - Suckless and minimalism

• Adopted the suckless philosophy; avoided bloat.
• Built and maintained my own patches/builds for dwm, st, tabbed, surf, dmenu, slock, mksh, neatvi, etc.
• Moved heavily to CLI/TUI workflows (see my dotfiles).
• Distro path: ArchLinux → AlpineLinux → FreeBSD | OpenBSD (2022).

Mid 2021 - Late 2022 - Towards Rostam Linux

• I began laying the groundwork for my own OS by bootstrapping packaging infrastructure.
• Binary mirror and automated builder: RostamOS/packages
  • Automates building/updating packages (incl. AUR) roughly every 24h
  • Publishes a pacman repository you can add to /etc/pacman.conf
• "Rostam‑exclusive" packages (sources/PKGBUILDs): RostamOS/rostam-packages

How it works, briefly:

• PKGBUILD‑driven builds scheduled by scripts/CI
• Outputs x86_64 packages, generates the repo database, and serves it as a static pacman repo
• Follows a minimal, reproducible setup with small, focused packages

Mid 2022 - Unix, for real

• Daily‑drove OpenBSD on my PC and FreeBSD on my laptop.
• Learned more about kernel patching, the BSDs’ design, and the Unix way.

Subscribe to the blog to learn more about this work and future updates on Rostam Linux.