Linux

My philanthropic beliefs and love of freedom. I was absolutely amazed when I found out about open source and free software. Then I got to it and loved it even more, the community, the UI and DEs, how much you could customize everything and how much choices you had. But mostly it is the philosophical beliefs that makes me love linux. Even if it is not better than some alternatives in some aspects, I willl still stand by it.

I got into Linux because BSD didn't have enough hardware support.

Windows becoming completely hostile towards power users.

I used to LOVE Windows, I even made fun of friends who were using Linux, which I only used on servers because I thought the desktop experience was sub par (and at the time it was, we're talking 10-15 years ago). Then Windows 8 came and I stayed on 7 because the experience was bad. Then 10 came and data collection started getting out of control, so I had to jump through a bunch of hoops just to make it usable and "private enough". Eventually things got so bad around 2019 that I realized that I was spending more time fixing that pile of crap than the average Arch user and I decided to give Linux a serious try.

I was somewhat annoyed by some UI/UX flaws but eventually I got used to it, and with the coming of Linux gaming I started using Windows less and less (it's an AMD system so the Linux experience is excellent), eventually last year I realized that I hadn't booted it in months so I just wiped that drive and started using it for games. I've also gotten a lot more paranoid about privacy and sandboxing proprietary software.

Now with Windows 11 things have gotten so bad that even my students are making fun of it so I don't think I'll be coming back.

PiHole and then Minecraft actually all through CLI.

Imagine my shock once I found out about screen and SSH. I didn't need to walk back and forth between my computer and the server.

I didn't touch a GUI for about 4 years.

I was on a Microsoft systems admin/engineer path for a while and an opportunity opened for a KVM/XEN engineer and I was the one only person in my office to accept the offer. That was back in the RHEL/CentOS 4 days.

After playing around a bit I got hooked and haven't gone back down the MS path since then.

I was being encouraged to learn programming by my brother-in-law, so when I was going through the lessons in the course he bought there was a section on Linux. At first I was thinking on how would I be able to install in a virtual machine but my brother-in-law in all his wisdom said "why don't you dual-boot". After some planning so I don't nuke my hard drive and flashing LMDE as my first distro I installed Linux and did the rest of the course there.

I've distro hopped 3 times since then:

LMDE (3 months) -> Ubuntu LTS (4 months) -> Arch (2 years) -> NixOS (2 weeks)

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

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've told this story on here before, but here it is again: I used to write for a very Windows-centric computer magazine, and after a couple of years I noticed that most of the content I was writing was about how to make Windows behave less like Windows. So I thought I'd give Linux a go, and I haven't looked back since. I've had phases when I tried convincing all my friends to make the switch, but I've realized that it's just not for everyone. I don't think I'm obsessed, I don't customize my desktop much, I just want my system to work smoothly.

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.

It's really great for my work as a software developer. I used it for more than 10 years for work.

My entertainment PC is not Win11 compatible, so I'm trying to switch to Linux with that one too, but it's giving me a lot of grief.

Curiosity. I was a curious tweenager, and I was already a bit of a geek at the time. I read about Linux in computer magazines at the time, and decided to give one of the free CDs a try - with RedHat 5.2 on it. To be honest, wasn't really impressed with it. I especially disliked having to recompile the kernel, which took ages on those Pentium 3s. But it got me exploring other operating systems, and I found QNX, BeOS and NetBSD. I was really impressed with with QNX and BeOS in particular - Linux felt quite clunky and amateurish in comparison. I especially liked the multimedia performance of BeOS, and the lightweightedness, polish and desktop responsiveness of QNX, which featured a real-time microkernel. QNX felt lightyears ahead of it's competition at the time. My first run into it was a free 1.44MB demo floppy that the company mailed me directly, complete with a full developer manual (which was completely wasted on me as a tween, but I still appreciated it and tried to comprehend bits and pieces). I was already into making custom bootable floppy disks at the time, so I was extremely impressed that they managed to fit in a full fledged GUI desktop, complete with a browser that supported Javascript (along with network drivers and a modem dialer) - all on a 1.44MB floppy disk! Till date I've no idea how they managed that. Even the tiniest of Linux WMs are massive in comparison and look fugly (twm), but QNX's Photon microGUI somehow managed to make it good looking and functional. Maybe it was all coded in Assembly, I don't know, but it was, and still remains, very impressive nonetheless.

I digress, but all this started getting me into exploring POSIX systems and distro/OS hopping. It was only when I experienced SuSE that I fell in love with Linux. Finally, I had a polished Linux desktop, with a full-featured settings/control panel (YaST) that made it easy to use even for a tween like me. And that's when I switched to Linux as my main-ish OS, with Windows relegated to gaming duties. However, I didn't fully get rid of Windows until Windows 7. I was actually impressed with the Windows 7 beta releases and was prepared to buy it at release, but... I wasn't expecting that price tag. I was hoping I'd get a student discount, but it wasn't applicable where I lived (or there was some catch, I don't remember exactly). In any case, I couldn't afford it, and I was really disappointed and angry at Microsoft that they were charging so much for it here, compared to the US pricing. And so, on the release day of Windows 7, I formatted my drive and switched to Linux full time, and never looked back.

Curiousity, wouldn't say I'm obsessed but I'd hate to switch Windows now since I'm way more familiar on Linux. And I've satisfied (killed) any curiosity in Windows server and desktop in professional life

I was in 6th grade and wanted to know more about computers. I thought being a computer programmer would be a cool job one day. I'd heard Linux was difficult to install and use and thought hey, that'll help me learn. So I had my parents get me a copy of Mandrake 6. It was perfect because I had the free time to play with it and figure stuff out by making mistakes and fixing them without the pressure of having to do really important work.

I do preach the good word of FOSS, but only to those who are in a position to appreciate the suggestion and benefit from it.

Windows update that ruined 3 months of work.

Windows 8

Always dabbled, but working with Docker has really made me commit to learning it. Also the ease of spinning up linux on cloud systems is a joy.

Originally, it was the price and speed. Then I saw one of Stallman's talks, and my perspective completely changed.

I stay on GNU+Linux now for freedom. People don't usually ask me about it, but if they did I'd probably just explain the basics of software freedom and nudge them to install vanilla Debian or maybe Trisquel if the hardware allows it.

in the fall of 2002 the windows millennium installation on my computer broke, trapping an entire semester's worth of work on the hard drive and i was a starving college student with less than $20 to my name, so i couldn't afford to buy windows xp and didn't know anyone where i could get a pirate copy from.

i bought a mandrake linux cd pack for $8 from circuit city and used google in the computer laboratory to learn how to mount the hard drive, install drivers for ntfs and copy my all my work to a usb drive and i've been using linux ever since. i switch to 100% only linux both professionally and personally sometime around 2010.

Minecraft. I wanted host a dedicated Minecraft server so I rented a VPS and needed a free, lightweight OS. I've been tinkering with Linux ever since.

I love Linux and Windows, I wouldn't trade one for the other.

It was two decades ago, when someone gave us the CDs of Fedora. It was so very different than Windows XP. I came back to Linux when my school library had Ubuntu on their computer. I'm gonna ask someone to gift me Steam Deck upon graduating from college.

Embedded Linux is such a huge part of embedded software in every industry. I've done a bit with build root but mostly Yocto. There is just no replacement for the Linux kernel. If I need to know how the kernel actually handles a platform driver, I can just look up the relevant source. This is just impossible with Windows (IoT or otherwise)

Had an old laptop which ran horribly slow on windows. Put Ubuntu on it without knowing anything about that stuff. Years later, I got interested in computer science and Cybersecurity, made some experiences with Kali Linux. Eventually switched my desktop to Linux mint iirc. My servers tun Debian

That old laptop? I used it for the first months of Cybersecurity lectures, until I bought a new laptop with my first salary. This weekend I put LMDE 6 on it. Debian is home.

Worked as a computer repair tech forever ago. We ended up with tons of spare parts and abandoned computers. I took a few home and looked for things I could use them for. Quickly found Linux and gave it a shot. It was perfect, I didn’t need to spend $100+ for a copy, there were tons of options, and I could do anything with it. Spent the next 20 years using it on every computer except my main desktop because of games. At one point I was 100% Linux and all I played was WoW using WINE. Now I’m back to 100% Linux thanks to steam and proton making a healthy chunk of my library playable.

Any time someone comes to me with an old computer my recommendation is to throw Linux on it and get a few more years of usefulness out of it.

My Mainboard had somesort of error, where Windows wouldnt Work, Linux did tho

Red Hat Linux was the only viable option for me to use on the AlphaStation I'd just bought off of my former employer, and the rest is history.

What caused you to get into it

The year was 2002. I was told about Gentoo Linux by a college. I saw it as a new, shiny toy and immediately wanted to try it out. I realized that it was better than Windows, so I stuck with it. (Not with Gentoo, but with Linux. I still use Gentoo sometimes today, but I also tried out many many other distros throughout the time and I don't use Gentoo exclusively nowadays.)

are you an evangel

Yes, I believe that Linux is far superior to Windows and I tell people about it

are you obsessed?

Absolutely

Probably like most people here, I just got more and more fed up with Windows. I tried Ubuntu a few times in the past, but it never really stuck, and at the time Windows wasn’t quite as bad (I quite liked Windows 7 in all honesty). But as time went on with Win10, it kept moving in a direction I didn’t want and I kept trying to customize it to my liking, and an update would just mess a bunch of stuff up and just make the whole experience worst. Recently it started having issues with my multiple monitors, shutdown and sleep/hibernate were basically broken, Bluetooth would randomly stop working, it was just a lot of aggravation.

I’m only a few weeks into my grand Linux adventure, but I’ve got almost all of the functionality that I need from Windows with none of the frustrations, and it’s way faster on top of that. Right now I can’t see myself going back.

Windows me

Windows 11

My Mac died, at which time I was already a commandline enthusiast, & unable to afford a new Mac.

Job reason, early on my college, realize on my field I would be working on Linux a lot. I installed one on my laptop to get a head start. It was painful, Not being able to use the usual software, did not help that my university don't even use Linux. I had to keep trying to find workarounds.

Im not into it yet.

But the answer is windows.

Privacy and programming communities. I tried to stay at Windows at first, but when I was bith recommended GNU/Linux for privacy and had to use it for programming, I knew I couldn't keep the resistance up.

Three years later and I have 0 regrets. All games I play work, except for, recently, TF2 because of a weird malloc library issue on Arch-based systems. All apps I need just work, and whenever I need something Windows-only I have a VM setup just for that. Developing and managing your system on a Unix-like system is just so much easier.

Cut throat environments!

Windows used to break all the time, Microsoft was evil, that Ubuntu thing showed up.

Less "get in to" and more "all my shit is so old basic things on the internet were not working any more if I left it running XP or 7".

I actually don't know how that happened. It was either a youtube video: when linux met r/unixporn or my privacy & freedom concerns that suddenly appeared in like the span of a week

Curiosity, mostly. And Ubuntu giving away freebies.

Took me a couple years to get out of the "Why change a winning team?" mentality and my baby duck syndrome.

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.

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.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow