Linux

https://www.stickycomics.com/wp-content/uploads/update_for_your_computer.jpg

For fun, in the 90's. Windows was cool still, but what Linux was at the time was just fashinating and I just loved it.

My first Linux PC was a steam deck. The next year I got a laptop for school and thought I might as well install Ubuntu to learn a thing or two. The next year I broke my Ubuntu install and decided to graduate to Arch just because I had the opportunity. That year was 2024 and after November 5th I decided that technofascists and proprietary software could fuck right off because that was one thing about life that I could control at that point. I stopped using windows entirely a few months later.

Back when I was a freshman in college, I had a regular laptop (Sony Vaio) and at the time netbooks were popular and my girlfriend (now wife) had got me one for Christmas.

Win 7 starter was garbage, XP was fine, but not ideal. I ended up trying out Ubuntu netbook remix since it was supposed to be lighter on resources. At the time I was a pre med student and wanted something for knocking out documents, and reading papers with enough battery to get me until I had to go to work. The iPad wasn’t out yet so that wasn’t an option.

I had a ton of fun getting it working, even the Broadcom chip was a fun challenge. Once it was working, I just really liked the look and feel. I preferred the Unix file structure to windows as well as the terminal experience, using bash vs powershell.

I ended up writing a few programs and apps for myself specifically for that netbook, and it quickly became my primary way of interacting with a computer. I eventually ported my Sony over which had the challenge of writing a couple drivers to get some things working with minimal compatibility.

Following this, I switched from pre med to software engineering and eventually graduated with a degree and I have now been working with software and using Linux ever since. Even now, I am the sole Linux system administrator in the company I work for and manage a handful of servers and deployments.

The final straw for me was when windows 11 removed the windows 10 start bar ability to move the start bar to the top of the screen.

I switched to Linux because of Linux gaming. Yes, I am completely serious!

Back in 2015 I had Lenovo laptop with only 2GB of RAM. Windows 7 consumed more than half of that and DotA 2 took over 2 minutes to load the map. The game was laggy. FPS was terrible even on low settings.

On another hand Ubuntu 14.04 consumed only ~350 MB of RAM. DotA on Linux loaded map in seconds. FPS was slightly better, but the game itself didn't feel so laggy anymore.

Linux was (and still is) my only viable solution for gaming on low spec hardware.

I heard that the Playstation 3 would be able to run something called Linux and I wanted to become some kind of Neo😅

Then I went on and off between Windows and Ubuntu until fully switching to Linux around 2020.

Running Fedora with Gnome these last few years.

All schools here teach free software. No other choice for now

I was using windows 2000 and suddenly got dozens of popups in internet explorer. I didn't even use internet explorer, I used Netscape for all of my web browsing. I had dabbled a little with BSD and Linux so I just took the plunge. My local bookstore had a SuSE book with CDs so I bought it and never looked back. I've distro hoped a few times but keep going back to Suse.

My first contact with Linux was via amateur radio. I didn't want to hook my radio up to my main PC in case I wired something wrong, so I got one of those newfangled Raspberry Pis, circa 2013. Raspbian Wheezy was my first distro.

Not long after, my old laptop died and I needed a new one. Bought a Dell, it came with WIndows 8.1. Holy shit what an unusable pile. I hated that OS a lot. And then the laptop outright died. I was going back to school, I needed a PC to do school work on, and I've had flesh wounds I was satisfied with more than Dell's warranty support. It took them pretty much an entire semester of "We'll fix it in three weeks or so, when the one guy who does field repairs in your state will look at it", "it's fixed" it breaks almost instantly, before I finally demanded they replace the entire machine. Which they did, with a different, lesser, model. I am no longer a customer of Dell.

This left me doing all of my school work on a Raspberry Pi 1B, and then a Pi 2, for about 3 months. So I got a bit of a crash course in managing a Linux system.

Once I finally got a working laptop, Windows 8.1 felt more alien to me than Linux Mint did. It would actually have been more work to learn Windows 8.1 than Mint Cinnamon. So I became a full time Linux user.

I started dabbling in around 2000, getting sick of the instability of Windows, and it seeming like the next logical step of geekdom.

I tried a LOT of distros. Mandrake, Connectiva, Red Hat to Fedora Core, Slackware, Debian Woody, Crux, etc etc. I drifted in a Debian-centric circle until I finally landed on Arch. Lost my way for a bit during my IT career, supporting Windows I ended up just using that. But I'm back to Arch now as my daily, Debian for some networking projects, and a bit of Fedora from time to time when I need to spin something up quick.

I used them side by side for nearly two decades, don't really remember what was my first distro or why I needed it, but when I tried Bazzite I finally realized I had absolutely no need for Windows anymore and finally got rid of it.

Copilot.

Therapy

I did not switch to Linux. I simply never did Windows. I use Linux since the old days of Slackware where you really had to compile ones kernel. That was with kernel 0.97.

Windows 7 support ended and windows 8 was wet hot dogshit. I stayed because I liked absolute control and ownership of my hardware and software

My desktop PC ran Windows 10 and didn’t have the magic Windows 11 chip. I tried to do some easy things to get it to recognise my PC as having that chip anyway, but it didn’t work, and I was a bit afraid it’d run like shit with 11 anyway.

So I just decided to try something different and install Linux. First on an old little laptop I had lying around. I tried Mint first, then OpenSUSE - the first because it was supposed to be easy to newcomers, the latter because it’s German (and I liked the way it felt when I tried it on my laptop).

After trying it for a bit, I just decided I’d install it on my desktop as I didn’t want to use Windows 10 without security updates anyway. I’ve now been using OpenSUSE Leap for about half a year, and I’m quite happy.

Windows 95/98 sucked shit. I liked the games, but the kernels were terrible.

I dual booted or ran two machines Linux (RedHat 5.2 to 6.2, wtf was up with 7?), then whatever worked (usually Debian based) for a while. Mostly used Linux alone for years, but used Win7 for a bit. That one was okay, but Microsoft can't build dev tools on their own OS to save their lives.

It's been Linux Mint for a long time now on desktops and Debian/Armbian on servers.

Basically, I've been mainlining Linux since about '97 and it's doing me just fine. Works great for my kids and wife. We're a mostly Linux household. It saves me a ton of headaches. Easy to install, patch, and almost no other maintenance.

After using win 11 for about a year I got tired of that shit. Every version since 98made the settings menu harder and harder to find whatever I was looking for and this is true for everything in that OS. Save a file? 5 clicks at least just to be able to pick WHERE I want it. Wtf.

It was driving me insane. Bazzite, easiest OS for what I use my computer for and not looking back.

During early high school years I heard about this thing called linux and there's something that's ubuntu, and said, why not? downloaded the ISO, installed on my USB with rufus, had panic attacks installing the dual boot myself for the first time, and done. After 2 months I switched to Arch (best thing I did) and ever since I'm deep diving in this Programming-Linux-Cybersecurity rabbit hole that I'm quite enjoying.

Fast forward to now, I'm using LFS and compiling my own kernel. My main desktop is a T440p with 4 OSes installed (maybe adding Plan9 to the mix if it supports my system)

I'm planing to mess more with "my own" distro thing maybe installing a Linux system without GNU: Linux + sinit + sbase + ubase + musl

I switched because Linux is obviously way better in so many ways. No brainer.

I use Windows at work and it's a joke. It's security theater. Microsoft and similar capitalist entities are paid not for actual security but for liability protection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater

Was just generally annoyed at microsoft, but couldn't leave because I play a lot of PC games. Then I found out these days gaming works relatively okay in linux so I switched.

Originally? To play with image AI models when they first came out.

Then I got that taste of freedom and Windows felt icky. Haven’t touched that side of my dual boot for non-work purposes in years. Even for work it’s a last resort.

Similar story to a lot of others here

Around a year ago I got fed up with Microsoft forcefully pushing unwanted and privacy-invading "features" on their users. It scared me to continue using it. I wanted more control and more protection for my privacy. So I decided to install Mint.

I've dabbled with Linux in the past and use it extensively in my job, but hadn't switched significantly to it in the past. One of the biggest blockers being games. I bought a Steam Deck a couple of years ago so I was needing increasingly confident that Linux would work for gaming to some extent. It ended up working very smoothly and I haven't looked back.

I still have my dual boot, partially because I haven't bothered to remove windows fully. At this point there's very little reason for me to not into windows. I've only encountered one game I've wanted to play that didn't work in Linux and that was an old game with mods. I might be able to get it working if I really troubleshooted it, but it's not that important.

Starting of with some history… I have run Microsoft operating systems since MS-DOS 3.22 and Windows 2.11 (not a typo). I was one of the first in our high school to install Windows 3.0 on one of the school lab machines off of floppy disks when it launched. I have been an early adopter on almost all the Windows OS’s and had a powerful enough PC at the time not to be too bothered about Vista even. I work with Microsoft based development (Windows Server and nowadays Azure) so Windows has always been what worked in my career. That hasn’t changed.

That being said, my computing history started off on a Apple IIc, followed by the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amiga later on. I installed Linux the first time on my 486sx with 4MB of RAM using Slackware with a pre 1.0 kernel. Linux never stuck then as I couldn’t run the applications i needed and games I wanted. I came back to Linux every 5 or so years but it never stuck for the same reasons.

This changes about 5 or so years ago. A chain of things happened over time and it started at home.

• I installed Ubuntu 20.04 on an old laptop and it seemed to have what I needed on it. Mainly browsing and so on - no high demands. The web had moved away from client side plugins and the web just worked.
• Windows 10 nagging to install Windows 11 on my HTPC, when the hardware was too old. Ubuntu 20.04 replaced that install, and the software just worked (browser + Kodi)
• Broadcom purchasing VMWare meant moving away from ESXi in my HomeLab - Proxmox turned out to be mature for what I wanted. I now have a 3 node Proxmox cluster.
• A hard drive crash in one of my Synology NAS boxes led me down a rabbit hole resulting in adopting TrueNAS Scale and ZFS.
• Windows 11 was getting on my nerves for the last couple of years at work. Last year I did the research and took the leap to install Ubuntu 24.04 on my new work laptop. A lot of tools I use are open source - they have reached a decent level of maturity. Microsoft tech such as Dotnet, VSCode, PowerShell and Azure CLI just work for what I need. LibreOffice does a good enough job replacing MS Office. A VM with Visual Studio and MS Office fills the gap - I boot the VM a couple of times a week as needed.
• I installed Ubuntu 24.04 on a secondary desktop last year at home to see if it would fill my needs at home amid the launch of Recall. This resulted in me wiping my main gaming rig a couple of months ago, installing Ubuntu 25.04 as main and a smaller partition with Windows to mainly support flight sims (MSFS and X-Plane - an area where software and hardware support is still lacking on Linux).
• The old laptop that started off with Ubuntu back in 2020 is now distro hopping - Fedora, Debian, OpenSUSE and currently running EndeavourOS. They are fun playing around with and familiarizing myself with but haven’t quite been work adopting fully so far.

The end result today is that I have one VM in Proxmox running Windows Server and a dual boot on my gaming rig running Windows 11 LTSC. Everything else is either Linux or FreeBSD.

It took a couple of months to get completely comfortable with the changes in workflow of daily driving Linux as my main OS, but it settled and it feel almost nostalgic to boot into Windows now.

Tried dual booting Ubuntu and XP back around 2006, didn't really see the point because gaming on Windows.

2020 got a Raspberry Pi and set up Retropie which gave me a good intro to Linux. Tried to get away from big tech in 2021 and was dual booting Mint and Windows 10. Ended up spending more time in 10 because gaming.

Got an old laptop from work and it was perfect to throw Mint on because no way it was going to handle gaming. Then I set up a media server, initially with the the Pi and then bought a cheap mini for it - and ran it on Mint. I'm primarily a console gamer now so gaming is far less of a concern for me on PC. Mint everything now.

I could distro hop or at least try something else, and maybe I will at some stage. But I'm too happy with Mint/Cinnamon to bother.

I switched January this year.

1. Windows 10 end of life was on the horizon
2. Programing on windows was a lot of hoops to jump through and i had heard Linux would be better
3. Didn't want windows 11/copilot.

Apple stopped pushing security updates for my MacBook.
Now I can never use anything but Linux.

Because Linux had a choice of desktop environments to try out. What a playground.

My first peek was with Wubi. >2008 ish? Then Knoppix had a live boot. Then all the other live boots followed. Very important easy first step.

I'm now on Plasma, tweaked to suit me.

Saw a screenshot of enlightenment in a magazine and thought it looked cool

Grew up on it. My dad set up a Ubuntu 4.10 PC for my brother and I when we were 3/5 (no internet, obv), and it stuck.

Used Windows for a brief time in highschool to be able to play online with friends.

Went right back to Linux when going to university. Will never change back, both for ideological reasons and because Linux is just better.

Next step: NixOS on a phone

A lot of little things. Privacy, Big Tech surveillance, ads in Start, Onedrive bs, gaming compatibility on Linux.

on my main laptop for whatever reason Windows 11, about twice a year or so, would insist on killing my wifi. Just out right disable it and not even uninstalling and reinstalling drivers would work. It would simply just kill it and pretend it never existed. the ONLY fix was to completely reinstall the OS. so almost like clockwork twice a year I'd have to reinstall the OS. It was also absolutely destroying the battery on my laptop. I would get MAYBE 30min out of it.

So after reading some threads I decided to give Linux a go. I went nuclear winter on it and didn't even bother dual booting, just wiped the computer completely and started with Mint. Stayed on that for a couple weeks until I completely messed up the install by trying to modify cinnemon a bit too much so then I switched to CachyOS and fell in love with it.

Since then I distro hopped a few times and I'm currently using NixOS. As far as the battery issue? I get about 4 hours out of it now instead of 30min.

For me, Microsoft's original sin was removing the Start menu and the Classic and Aero themes in Windows 8. I wanted something better than questionable UxTheme patches that broke with every major update, and it was during that search that I learned there is more to the world than macOS and Windows.

But it was the invasive telemetry and bloatware that finally made me take action. I'm sure the spike in blood pressure and heart rate whenever I had to undo the asinine default settings on every new install and major update was not good for my health. All of the debloat utilities felt like I was just putting lipstick on a pig.

The ability to customize the interface to my heart's content also got me to learn about and appreciate the inner workings of Linux. I now have a couple setups on Chicago95 XFCE and a couple on AeroThemePlasma KDE. Despite how much I like the familiar UI of Windows, I wouldn't ever look back to using Windows itself.

I switched in the Windows 98/ME era, so quite some time ago. I was tired even then of Windows being an unstable mess. BSODs, headaches with DirectX and different versions, etc. I was/am mostly a console gamer so not being able to play games on my computer was less of an issue for me. So I tried then Red Hat linux which I scored some CD images of and never really looked back.

I've always gave Linux a try for a week or so over many years but then crawled back to Windows. First time I've actually found it somewhat viable and I stuck to it for over a month was with Proton release but at that point there were still too many pain points while using it.

Then when Windows started pushing Recall I went to Fedora 38 and it lasted me for almost 6 months before I went back to W11 due to many issues related to just basic use on desktop due to buggy nature of KDE 5 with which I've lost patience.

Starting with Fedora 40 and with GNOME starting supporting VRR I've been on Linux since and had no real desire to go back since. So it seems that for my use case Linux finally got to the point where Windows is not a necessary thing for me, in fact I dread going back whenever I think about it as now there are things I would miss by switching back to Windows.

Also I use Windows 11 at my job and I really hate it, multi-tasking is so much better even with just single monitor on Linux vs Dual monitor on Windows... Also I just really like GNOME, even before I've even tried GNOME I've customized my KDE to be GNOME like before even realizing it. And yes, I've tried KDE 6 but it's not for me. I plan to try Hyprland though as that seems more interesting but I dread moving on from Fedora as it works well for me so I don't really have any need to disto hop.

I'm a developer and the dev tools on Windows sucked and ate my RAM.

Had to create dummy emails, fake info for my 8 year old just so they could have their own kids logon. Despite it being a kids account MS still thought it was fine to show news and photos from Gaza. Spent an hour before nuking win 11. Running Linux mint, just works for us.

Microsoft released Windows Vista, which was absolute dogshit on every PC at the time it was released.

This also just happened to be not long after Ubuntu was released, making it easier than ever to install Linux.

Installed it, quickly found out everything was easier to configure and tinker with in Linux...

Never saw a reason to go back. Used Windows 7 for a little bit, and it was better than Vista, but it still wasn't anywhere near as easy to use as Linux

I just never switched away, my first computer was my dad's old 2001 Sharp laptop running like lubuntu 12.04. I play around with Haiku and various BSDs sometimes, but I always end up with some Linux distribution as my main OS. Right now it's NixOS on my laptop and OpenSUSE on my desktop.

ElementaryOS was my gateway drug cuz it was so pretty, I switched to have an OS that made me happy instead of miserable. Dual booted for a while for gaming until I got an hdr monitor and ended up stuck on my (modded for privacy and performance) windows partition more and more, but followed Wayland’s development religiously until plasma finally launched HDR in beta.

I chose arch (btw) cuz I was tired of running Debian-based distros with custom kernels and I generally just don’t like apt, and I don’t see myself ever really wanting to switch again.
(Other than compulsively reinstalling arch to try whatever new shit catches my eye, that doesn’t count)