Linux

Screenshots of x-plane and other games on the back of the Red hat 5.2 jewel case.

Windows 10. When your OS no longer respects your choices and you have to fight it every minute, there is something wrong. The creeping invasions on privacy have only cemented my use of Linux

Truthfully, I'm not sure if I would have ever switched over if Microsoft kept the Windows 7 paradigm. But I started my search for alternatives when Windows 8 - already too adventurous for me - came with the computer I bought.

Towards the end of my time using Windows 10 as my primary OS, the realization that the UI is not an inherent component of the OS sealed the deal. As a Windows 2000 fan, I fell in love with the way Chicago95 Debian replicated the look and stability that I had sorely missed.

Linux is foss

and gnome looks neat!

I've been using Linux for something like 27 years, I wouldn't say evangelical or particularly obsessed.

I started using it because some of the guys showing up to my late 90's LAN parties were dual booting Slackware it and it had cool looking boot up messages compared to DOS or Windows at the time. The whole idea of dual booting operating systems was pretty damn wild to me at the time too.

After a while it became obvious to me that Slackware '96 was way more reliable than DOS or Windows 95 at the time, a web browser like Netscape could take out the whole system pretty easily on Windows, but when Netscape crashed on Linux, you opened up a shell and killed off whatever was left of it and started a new one.

I had machines that stayed up for years in the late 90's and that was pretty well impossible on Windows.

I ended up replacing windows with Ubuntu. I liked it a lot but I couldn’t use it because I needed to use FL Studio on windows. I started dual booting Linux with windows to get a sense of the terminal. I’m not the most experienced user but I figured out how to get around and I enjoy using Linux. I have tried Arch, Nix, EndeavorOS, ArcoLinux, Manjaro, and Ubuntu Unity. I want to try OpenSUSE since I’ve been reading up on it and it seems to be my end game distro imo.

Back in the distant past of 2008, a RuneScape player by the name of Icedpizza thought my complaints about driver problems on older hardware would be easily solved by this incredible thing I'd never heard of called Ubuntu. Downloaded 8.04 Hardy Heron and my life has never been the same since.

Cost

Back in the day, it was the cheapest way to get a company online. I built a slakware server with sendmail and squid on our isdn line

one too many BSOD
this was 2005 ish

Cost and price ..... I could never afford much in terms of tech purchases 20 years ago.

Always collected second hand systems, first learned to find and use cracked windows copies, then when that got too complicated and difficult, found Linux and have never looked back. The amount of money I've saved not to paying for proprietary software, went into buying better hardware that I used to install Linux and OSS software.

I've been using Linux for a long time on various other systems but what caused me to finally ditch Windows completely on my daily driver was:

A nonconsensual Windows Update which caused my bitlocker encryption to become corrupted and I lost everything on that disk.

This unscheduled reformat combined with all the other shady practices on Windows lately cemented my choice.

It's been several months now and I couldn't be happier!

The quality of gaming on Linux has advanced an incredible amount in the last year or so since I've tried it. Most of my games will either run natively or require a few extra clicks to use proton in steam. A few outliers that aren't on steam required Lutris.

On average I find the performance in games is better on Linux, even for non-native games using proton/wine.

Definitely would recommend giving it a shot if you are on the fence. Particularly if you've tried gaming in the past and were disappointed.

Wanting to make a custom ROM for a phone.

Self hosting. I was using windows to host teamspeak and game servers. I first got into linux by switching my homelab to linux and running everything in docker containers and VMs. Then from there I started using it on a desktop and laptop as well. Started on manjaro for years. Then went to arch for a year or two. And now I've switched everything over to NixOS.

Windows is boated and eventually becomes unusable or unsupported.
Linux has no such issue.
That was my initial reason for trying it.
Since then I've revived countless computers with Linux.

It was PHP and Laravel.
I started doing fancier things with websockets, redis, cronjobs etc.
Anything "designed for" laravel hosting wasn't cheap. So, I learned how to get a VM going and set it up for webhosting.
Windows is still my daily driver due to Office, Visual Studio and gaming.
But I have a bunch of VMs and servers, and they are all Debian.
I enjoy Linux, but I haven't gone whole-hog into a desktop environment or whatever. Everything has been CLI based

My hard drive on my laptop died in college and I needed to get a paper written in a few days. I didn't money to get a new Windows license and Fedora was free and had a live disc I could burn to install off of in the school's computer lab without getting in trouble. I distro hopped a bit since then, but never went back to Windows. Things worked and it wasn't as hard as people made it sound.

No evangelizing, I just use my computer.

I needed something lighter than windows 7 basic on a cheap network my girlfriend at the time (now wife) bought me when we were in high school. Ended up using Ubuntu 11.10 netbook edition. After spending 5 hours getting my Broadcom wireless card working, I was hooked. Used it until that laptop died and during that time I slowly migrated all of my computers to Linux. Only kept windows on secondary drives or a different partition for the occasional time I need it.

As a young tech trying to get started, Knoppix live CD enabled me to clean viruses and recover data for clients.

After years of using it as a specific tool, I decided to daily drive it when an older machine stopped accepting Windows Updates.

I still run Windows on my big rig, but Debian on everything Else.

i heard about it in a video and immediately went to try it out. i started with linux mint in late 2021!

I borrowed an installation CD from the local library around 1998. It was RedHat 5.x, and I started messing around with it due to me being interested in alternative operating systems. Before it, I had OS/2 Warp 3.0 in our IBM Pentium 100 MHz family computer which didn't really do it for me to be honest.

It took weeks to get anything working with Linux. I went to the library, borrowing books. In our middle school we had an internet connection, so I utilized it to learn how to configure modelines correctly to get X11 running.

When it did finally run, the default window manager was FVWM95, almost like Windows 95!

I used OSX a few years in the power PC times, just to switch back to Linux around 2008.

Edit: my real love for Linux started when I got Debian running. RedHat didn't have anything comparable to apt those days. You needed to download RPM packages manually with all the dependencies, while apt just worked with one command.

I wanted to see what the fuss was about after windows 11 came out, because I was sick of Windows intrusive UI and shady business practices.

I still use windows for some things, but now I duel boot to cinnamon and it is my daily desktop driver. I vastly prefer the clean interface and speed of Linux over windows, and I now play most of my games on it too. I was shocked when I realized that Elden Ring runs great, and looks better, on Linux while it was unplayable on windows at release.

I also installed Fedora to my surface pro after a windows update made it impossible to use without severe slowdown. I've had my surface for 6 years and it runs great on Linux.

The only downside to Linux is that, as am artist, the apps are limited. Blender is fantastic, Krita is catching up, but there is no way to use clip studio, harmony (toon boom, storyboard pro), or Zbrush (yes I can sculpt in blender but it is not quite there yet.)

First real terminal contact (except for limited use in macOS) I had working at a company which now uses embedded Linux in their product. After that I got in a situation where I had no computing device with admin rights running anymore. iPhone, iPad, corporate locked windows. Once there was the day I needed admin again, so I went searching and found an old iMac lying around, macOS was barley useable (low spec) and I just managed to create a bootable stick with it. Fast forward 2 years, I now have the old iMac of my dad with better specs running tumbleweed with Gnome, and I love it, with the right extensions, this frontend is very fun to use.

I’m just now getting into it. Set up a laptop with Ubuntu running Plex media server. Been taking some real baby steps watching basic Linux tutorials.

It did take me about 4 hours to figure out how to mount an ext HDD so that Plex would have proper permissions to find the media. It was very rewarding to finally frickin resolve that! I’m still gonna keep pecking away and learn as I go while watching I keep watching tutorials.

I was massively obsessed with all kinds of computer tech in the late 90s to early 2000s, and read about Linux at some point. I tried a few distros* and enjoyed playing around with them, but a combination of them being a bit rough, and needing to run Windows for games and to support people for my work meant that I couldn't switch.

Over the years I tried out different distros, and even had home servers running before it was cool (obligatory 😎 ), but because I knew Windows inside out, the things that I was trying to do with Linux were much easier for me on Windows.

A few years ago I bought a few older laptops that ran like dogs even under Windows 7, so tried dual booting Mint. The laptops still struggled, so I had to switch my wife's back, but I persevered with mine. I upgraded to new to us refurbished laptops and put Mint on mine again. I also switched our media server to Xubuntu at some point over the last few years.

Windows 10 was getting slower and slower, even though it was a 7th gen i5 with an SSD and 32GB RAM, so I bit the bullet and wiped the Windows partition. I upgraded the RAM and added an SSD to my kid's laptop and did the same. My kid had to have Windows on their desktop because of the problems with Roblox, but the success of the laptops has lead to me dual booting my desktop and trying to switch full time. I've got a batch scanning job to finish under Windows because I can't get the colours to match under Linux, and I've got a few thousand photos to process in Photoshop, and then I'm hoping to switch full time.

I'm not an evangelist by any means, but I do wish that Linux had got to this stage a few years earlier, while I was the go to geek for so many of my friends, because I know loads of people who would have loved using it back then :)

*Hoary Hedgehog as an OS name still makes me laugh :D

Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, ME, Vista...

Stopped evangelising when I realised people hate evangelists telling them what they should do. Started leading by example instead. Curious people approach you if they want to learn.

Won't be going back to proprietary OSs.

Curiosity. Then starting development and figuring out most things non-MS specific assume UNIX/Linux based. I'm not obsessed at all, I quite enjoy macOS, and don't mind Windows too much for what I do with it, but it's my OS of choice for development machines, and any servers I control.

I'm a primarily Windows systems administrator with about 18 years of Iat field experience.

While I initially played with Linux to get war3 running back in the day of mandrake/mandriva on and off it was only a curiosity.

But during covid with work from home windows became synonymous with work. I couldn't sit and use my personal pc any more without a alert, a message, an email, a system in my tool stack (MSP employee). I couldn't relax.

Then I decided to buy a second ssd and I ran just some Linux, I think popOS. I administrate and use Ubuntu servers at work and in labs a lot, so it was familiar enough to get around and wine had improved a lot. New things like lutris showed me that running overwatch and starcraft2 was possible in a wizard.

Next I learned about proton and the upcoming steam deck and the compatibility modes in steam and except for some yakuza games almost my 400 title library was unlocked in Linux.

You know what doesn't work in Linux? Almost all my systems remote management tools. So now if I boot Linux I'm not working.

I'm not really a Linux advocate. I'm not a Windows advocate. I'm not a mac advocate. Right now I design solutions for companies and while I'm biased I'm tools to tasks minded. The right tool for the job for the workflow, that integrates correctly, and improves productivity and enjoyment of the task.

Linux fits that for my case for personal enjoyment, but can't possibly fit my use case for my job. It allows me to be disconnected and relaxed. It gave my personal pc meaning again in a covid and sometimes post covid world.

I worked with Unix before Windows was a thing. I've worked on windows, saw what a shitshot it was (and still is), and work with Linux instead. I do have Windows PCs at the lab for some renitent software, too, but it is always a step backwards when it comes to data procession.

I’ve been using Linux off and on again for the past decade.

The original reason I used Linux was because as a kid I got stuck with whatever old laptop was laying around, so my dad would install Ubuntu to make it usable.

When I built my first computer a couple years ago and started using Windows 10, that’s when Windows stopped working for me. Nothing made me want to switch more than when the major Windows 10 updates broke my software every 6 months.

I wanted to update my family PC (technically, but I don't think anyone else apart from me used it). Windows XP licence was too expensive for me as a kid and I found a CD ROM in my library with a FOSS OS advertised on it.

Fast forward to now, and I have been using Linux almost exclusively for 15 years now (some Windows usage needed for work or gaming)

I heard about it off and on, but this was the days in dial-up and downloading an ISO to install Linux was too expensive in time and bandwidth . I had discovered at my local Office Depot, a Mandrake Linux box set so I splurged on that and got my first taste of Linux then. I also was able to surf the web and learn how to install it manually, but it didn't make any sense at all and was too complex. For Mandrake, I didn't care for it. It wasn't until later on when I started working with hosting sites, that I got used to Centos and Ubuntu for servers. I even had Mac OSX for a while, which taught my about the directory structure, but I went back to Windows until around 2015ish when I jumped ship and went to Linux fulltime. I worked technical support and the servers were Linux based so I had learned a lot more doing that and got very comfortable with it. I then jumped through different distros to where I am now (Arch). I firmly hold belief though that Arch isn't the best and no distro is truly the superior one. Instead, whatever Linux distro you use, if it does what you need it to do, then so be it!

To answer the question though, what pushed me toward Linux was really the whole push toward Windows 10 being more loaded down with the pushed tracking and advertisements that comes with the Windows Territory. Plus - I grew to love the command line and it's sort of my second home now.

Privacy, Windows 11, and the fact that my system is more stable running Linux. I could count on a BSOD happening once or twice a week due to a driver issue with Windows 10. I still get strange crashes on Linux, but much less often.

A friend in high school gave me an Ubuntu live CD and told me I should try it.

Ubuntu used to ship out free installation CDs. Since it was free, I figured why the hell not. Played around with it, loved it, but didn't use it for much more than messing around.

A decade later those fond memories enticed me to buy a Raspberry Pi and play around with Linux again, and a few years later it became my main OS. It's just so much fun to tinker with in a way that Windows never was, and nowadays it runs almost everything without a problem.

I think it was world of warcraft. As a kid I had a very bad computer, so windows (Vista I think ?) Gave me something like 15 fps while Linux+Wine gave me 20. It already felt like wizardry that I had better performance while needing a compatibility layer.

I have also some memories of discovering a new land of freedom. When i plugged a CD from the library, Ubuntu's default music player had a popup "wanna install anti-DRM plugins & make a copy of those tracks?"

I started using foss software for everything, and one day, I realized that all the software I used was available on Linux, so I figured out I could run a foss os as well, and migrating was just straightforward.

I watched a video from the linux experiment and thought it looked cool, so I kept watching his videos, and now here I am.

Curiosity, back around 2010 before I was a teenager. No clue how I heard about it, but the concept of replacing the entire operating system was fascinating. I figured it must be really good if it was such a well kept secret.

A few years later, when I started to learn programming, Linux was the obvious winner. The online course taught C in a Linux environment, and I was amazed that the default Ubuntu build at the time had everything built in, whereas a Windows equivalent required visual studio and licensing adventures.

It really stuck as a daily driver after Windows 7, where a clear trend emerged: Windows got in my way, Linux got out of my way. Simple as.

Well, my experience was always on and off: In the past, I always had my phases of trying it out, be it dual-booting, or outright replacing my OS, but always went back to Windows after a couple of months at most due to some software being Windows-only and both VMs and WINE not being sufficient.

But this year, with Windows continuing to get worse (built-in ads, the fact that it eats 60+ GB on a base install, etc.) and me needing Linux for uni anyway: I made the jump and thanks to the work being done with stuff like Proton for games and FOSS software now being good enough for general productivity, I'm happier than ever.

Obsessed? I like customizability and being able to tinker around, but in the end, it's a tool like any other.

Cut throat environments!

My computer was trash. I migrated out of necessity. It took 40 minutes to boot into Windows XP. Old-timey Lubuntu kept that computer alive for another 5 years.

When I got a real computer, I found that using Windows was unpleasant -- So when Proton started to mature, I switched back to Linux (cuz hey, vidya gaems).

... Then I became an adult and the political radicalisation began.

I'm not "obssessed" so much as I am politically motivated, so I guess I'm an evangelist in a way. If there were ten other mature open source operating systems I'd shill all of them. As it is there's Linux and BSD. So those are the ones I shill.

Generally I'll pester anyone willing to listen to get as far from Big Tech's walled gardens as their life necessities allow them.

I'm not a tech person, I think most Linux people are? Instead I'm just someone who studied basic sociology and history, and can see the kind of power that walled-garden tech can (and HAS, in recent times) give to very few people.

I had known what Linux was but I never really was interested in finding out what it was. That was, until, 2021 came around and I became more privacy conscious. Learning more about Open Source software and it's philosophy, switching completely to FOSS software (besides ROM) on my phone and then slowly looking into Linux. I was fascinated by it, this wholly new world as it seemed to me... ready to explore and learn so much from. Of course, someone who's used windows most of his life will definitely think of it as a challenge to learn to use Linux and adapt to it. I started supporting and using more and more OSS and loved it, so naturally I also had became a bit more interested in Linux. After I became privacy conscious, I also wanted to get away from Big Tech and I already hated using Windows by that point. That was because I've had a low end PC most of my life, I stuck around with Windows 7 until 2019 where it became EOL and I had to switch to Windows 10. It was an awful experience, running windows 10 on older and low end hardware.

Then came 2022, I had a new upgraded system and it was more mid-range than low-end now. I started using Linux in VMs and learnt more and more about it, I tried to switch full time but couldn't because of a few things that I just cannot live without. Truth be told I'm still using Windows, there's just one thing holding me back and all other things I've either adapted to, learnt or have found an alternative for. I know some people will hurl insults at me for saying I dislike Big Tech but also use Windows and call myself privacy conscious but It is what it is. I use Linux part-time in VMs and I really enjoy it. As soon as that use case is covered, I'll be making a full switch to Linux.

Apologies if this went a little off-topic haha, couldn't help myself I'm afraid

Back when the world was young, I had to produce a fairly large chunk of documentation which I started to write in MS Word 2.0 (which ran in Windows 3.11 or Windows for Workgroups).

However, at around 100 pages, I started to have trouble with file corruption. So since the company I worked with had contacts with Microsoft, I got in touch with them. "yes that's a known bug, there's a new version on this FTP site" (we were in the nascent ISP business).

So I got Word 2.0c. Which promptly crapped all over my document. "Oh, yeah, I guess the bug isn't fixed then".

Around the same time, a coworker had been telling me about those guys who were busy writing a Unix from scratch (hah, so silly) and who had, already gotten a usable and stable system (wait, really? cool!). So I grabbed a copy and tested that. It ran fine (it did help that I already knew a bit of Unix). And I did my document there, I don't remember in what, if it was LaTeX or Applixware (maybe that came later).

Since then, Linux has always been on my desktop, with Windows coming and going on a secondary disk or partition, mostly relegated to the running of games.