Linux

i came because of microsoft paranoia, then stayed for the customization

win10 EOL support. Genuinely hate the incorporation of AI into the OS.

NASA.

I was PMing a student project for NASA and the sheer number of tabs and files I had open on my PC killed Windows.

I had a week until the deadline and I'm in a situation where things may or may not save, basic functionality was questionable and I had literally thousands of pages information to format and get out.

Once I turned it in I installed Linux and never looked back.

Servers in school. Learned how to setup a website, Linux tools test. Then at home how to setup a Counter Strike server.

Afterstep on Red Hat 5.1

Story: I started a new job as a system engineer in December 1998, it was the heyday of Windows 9x and NT 4.0. First day on the job, the guy who was sitting across from my assigned desk was running something strange and insanely cool looking on a giant CRT monitor. I was mesmerized by the spinning window animations, the virtual desktops, the cool icons, the falling snow... I struck up a conversation with him, asked him what kind of system he was running there. He told me he was running Linux and this was the Afterstep window manager. Turns out he was the local sysadmin there as well as a Linux evangelist and someone I got along with instantly.

I had already been curious about Linux and wanted to try it, so he gave me a copy of Red Hat 5.1 to install on my home PC and I started my journey there. 25 years later I still run Linux, the expertise I developed with it has helped me immensely in my career and I'm still friends with my former coworker.

Messing around with a Raspberry Pi was what got me over the threshold of learning enough to utilize Linux primarily, and then eventually exclusively.

Obsessed? No. Persistently interested though.

I communicate Linux as an option when the circumstance are appropriate. It is often not worth getting involved in other people's tech decisions. My mother is now a satisfied Mint user, after she asked me if there was more pleasant and private way to use her computer. It has been great for me, because my providing tech support has gone to basically zero.

Bought an eeePC on WinXP that ran like trash and barely could handle simple tasks. Dropped numerous flavors of GNU/Linux on it in a few months. I remember thinking "wtf is this" because the settings and interface felt so bare without the WinXP clutter but things ran much better. Fell in love with the repository model of updating everything with a single command, found the UI was actually simple looking on the surface with a ton of depth available to me when my tinkering became more comfortable and experienced. Stayed because I don't think everything in our lives needs to be stuffed full of micro transactions and ads.

When I left the church, I started directing what was my tithes to nonprofits of my choice including FOSS projects instead.

Here I am a decade and a half later and if I didn't have Linux, I probably wouldn't use computers except in the rarest of circumstances. Its just a high quality experience that commercial software can't measure up to because they have different goals.

On the list of reasons over the years.

1. High School friend showed me their install, and how it had these sick spinning cube desktop. Ditched it once I realized I couldn't do anything I wanted on it.

2. In University, the ComSci labs all had networked machines with Ubuntu installed. It was cool, but again outside of coding, I couldn't do anything I wanted on it.

3. 2022, I got a new Laptop, couldn't use Windows 11 without an account (I know of the work arounds). MS has Windows 10 with a EOL in 2025, and Valve is pushing the Steam Deck hard. Gave it a second shot. I now can do everything I want on it without issue. I even made a 1 year retrospective video about it.

I use arch btw /s

Saw what windows 11 was going to be like and figured I should bail and learn Linux before I had to move over. Been just under 2 years on Linux. Don't regret my decision.

It came to me in a dream

My dad gave me a laptop running ubuntu as my first computer many years ago and I have never found any non-linux operating system I really liked. There are some things I love about Haiku, but it just isn't quite good enough to replace Linux for me, at least not yet

I tried it out and discovered none of the annoyances I had with windows existed here, then I started customizing things, redesigning my interface from the ground up to make everything as optimized as possible, to an extent that would never be possible on windows.

Plus I have massive ethical concerns regarding proprietary software.

Now I can't leave.

Ham Radio, the Raspberry Pi and Windows 8.1.

I first heard about a Raspberry Pi on the 2 meter band, someone mentioned making contacts in Europe with one. Sounded intriguing. I wanted to work digital modes but didn't really want to hook up my laptop to my radio for fear of wiring it wrong, so I bought a Raspberry Pi. Which runs Debian Linux. I learned how to cd and ls and sudo and apt-get.

Then that laptop I was being so precious with suffered a monitor backlight failure. And it was time for a new laptop. This was in 2014, Windows 8.1 was on the shelves at that point.

I was enjoying using the Pi at the time, and decided to try running Linux on my new laptop instead of Windows. And I've been using Linux Mint ever since.

Basically servers and Pis.

If you wanted to host your own site and services, a Linux vps was (and still is) the only choice. Back then it was Debian, nowadays I use Arch on everything. Same with Raspberry Pis when the first one became available in 2012. With university I started using Arch on my laptop and later when Proton and Wayland became good, I moved to it on the Desktop as well.

curiosity, originally. this was back at the very earliest days of slack and debian, some 30 years ago.

i am not 'obsessed' with linux itself, but i have a definite preference for FOSS over proprietary solutions.

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.

Two things made me leave. Both having to do with Windows.

1. Microsoft themselves.

2. My Windows install was just...bad. I'm not sure how else to describe a Windows that frequently crashed and just gave up and Blue Screen. Sure, both probably happen to any normal Windows install (well, the 1st thing. If you get the second, yeah that's a problem)--but not at the frequency it happened with mine, I'm sure. Besides that, it was slow for no reason (AFAIA, anyways) and doing anything took a while. Yeah, I eventually reinstalled it after some hassle, and after that it was just slow, but then i made the fatal mistake of trying Windows 11 and was like "if this is what I'm eventually ganna have do deal with...no thanks." Tbf, Microsoft was promting it, so i assumed it was an upgrade to Windows 10, not a wannabe chromebook with some baffling "lets fix what isn't broken and works great as is" choices.

Well, thinking about it, there was a third reason i ususally neglect to mention:

3. I had a choice. I like looking at all my available options and choosing what to go with instead of having something chosen for me. I'm a big boy and can make my own choices for myself, thank you (looking right at you there, Bill). As soon as i heard "there's something else besides this or an Apple Product. And it's much better than some people like to give it credit for" i researched a bit on the differences, the requirements, and a good place to start, and well, here I am.

As for what I am, IDK. I'm a happy Linux user, but i also get some people are perfectly happy Windows users (or aren't, but are locked into the ecosystem regardless) and hey, as long as we agree that both OS's have their quirks, you let me keep my penguins, and I'll let ya keep your...erm, Windows (does Windows have a mascot? I doubt it, but you never know)

windows 8 that came with my core i3 laptop. did not jump into the windows10 bandwagon for all the bad things i was hearing about it. gave up when some apps start doing crazy stuff because os is old. mucked around with mint, and distro hopping from usb. mind-blown. now i've acquired a fairly new laptop and dual booted with debian12. has never done a random restart on it for months (due to force-it-down-your-throat-win-update). i still use a win laptop for work and some games, but that will never touch my personal computer. it's fun reading all the comments here. thanks :)

I am interested in tech, and also watched a lot of YouTube videos about different topics. Somehow I realised how much data windows sends. Since I was planning to buy myself a new pc(my old one was a Celsius W370 from 2009 that took 20 minutes to boot windows) I decided to not install Windows on this pc but to install Linux. I went the classic way and chose Mint with cinnamon.

That was about 1.5 years ago.

I wouldn say that I'm somehow obsessed with Linux and there's definitely no way back. I got completely sucked into FOSS. My next phone will be a Google pixel where I will install Graphene OS on. Fuck big tech.

Curiosity. It began while trying to play around with programming, and finding a lot of talk and resources about Linux, and then trying it. 3 broken Debian installations just for messing around, then Ubuntu as a more permanent install, all of this alongside Windows.

Then I began using less and less Windows until I just deleted the Windows partition because I needed more space.

Dark mode back in the day (XP/Vista era). I wanted to theme everything and have cool UI/visual features in a non-shady download-this-third-party-totally-safe-theme-engine-wink-wink way.

OS2/Warp

IBM showed us there could be a superior OS that wasn't Windows or Mac. Been chasing that dragon ever since.

The year was 2002 & I was fed up with windows for various reasons. Connected to the internet looking for a windows alternative & ended up finding slackware. Installed slackware & got it somewhat working. Happily used it for a short while, before moving on to Fedora Core when it was released....

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 tired of Windows, so I tried Linux for a month, then switched to Mac OS for a decade.

When Mac OS started to become iOS, I started leaning towards Linux.

When my MacBook keyboard caps started falling off and Apple told me to replace the entire keyboard, I left them indefinitely.

And now I've been here for a few years. So far, so good.

McAfee Antivirus.
Got so tired of the software slowing down the computer and freaking out over non-virus programs. Also the price to renew was stupid.
No need for AV running 24/7 on Linux.
After using a few different distros over a couple of years I decided to never go back to Windows (and I detest Apple so that will never be an option), and I settled on Kubuntu.
So. Damn. Happy.

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.

The desire to learn something beyond DOS, beyond just BBS', beyond RIME and FIDOnet email, wanting a UNIX like operating system that was like what I had at university, to be able to natively run talk, ytalk, IRC, ICB, Gopher, FTP, and NNTP.

Linux is foss

and gnome looks neat!

I was trying to run a forum in the early 2000s and was pirating Windows Server with IIS to do it, and I discovered this entire other free, legit OS to do what I wanted to do with ease. Back in those days you could install a "LAMP" stack during install which gave you Apache, MySQL, and PHP automatically configured, whereas in IIS I was having to install a seperate PHP interpreter and figure out how to send php scripts to it and back, the whole thing seemed janky.

After that Linux became my go-to for any IT related project, and even more so when I started my electronics hobby due to how you can just make it do any damn thing you want.

In 2020 it became my desktop permanently after Microsoft decided they didn't want their OS running on my perfectly fine computer anymore.

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.

Wanting to make a custom ROM for a phone.

RIP Windows 7

one too many BSOD
this was 2005 ish

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.

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

I used Unix workstations in college. After graduation my choices were MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, or a real OS. Started with Slackware in the mid-1990's.

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.

My OS, shipped with the PC, became slow.

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

Windows XP pissed me off one two many times.

How to dual boot linux mint and windows (ended up accidentally ended up just having mint on my drive).