Linux

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.

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 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.

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.

I used Linux on my jailbroken Chromebook during school before and I slowly started using more and more of wsl when that came out.

Then one day a windows update which started automatically on my laptop ended up wiping the encryption keys, I lost all my data including a lot of organised financial documents. This happened while I was having trouble with wsl where it would just delete itself on my pc. Then there was the issue of my pc having an English international keyboard which I was unable to remove and windows kept switching me to it every 2 minutes. Which makes programming harder due to how it handles inverted commas. I ended up doing some regedit to remove it, but then all windows system apps stopped working, including settings. And guess what, there was now an update ready which I could not skip because settings won't open. And did I mention my laptop wiped itself again?

I did not have a single issue since I switched about 4 years ago, I never looked back. Not even for gaming, I exclusively use Linux and I am proud of it. And this is saying a lot, because I always mess up my system when doing random experiments for fun, but there is also always a clear way out. (I use arch btw, and rtfm really helps a lot)

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

work requirement, amphetamine-driven endless curiosity of staring at commands and man pages, interest in programming, initial allure of the concept of copyleft

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.

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

Cut throat environments!

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.)

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

Talk of advertisements in the Windows app menu was the last straw for me. I don't use any programs that require Windows so I don't have dual boot or anything - although I do have a KDE theme that mimics Windows 95/8 because that was what I grew up with and I'm super nostalgic for it.

That said, I've always been attracted to "third options". My favorite phone was a Windows Phone, my motorcycle is from a small manufacturer, etc.

I wasn't happy with windows vista's prformance and wanted to try something different. Didn't make the switch permanent for a decade because I needed games in my life but I always ran linux on my laptops when I got them.

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.

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

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.

Windows 11

Im not into it yet.

But the answer is windows.

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.

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

Windows me

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.

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.

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.

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

Windows update that ruined 3 months of work.

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.

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

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.

Curiosity pushed me to try Linux roughly 15 years ago. Today it's simply the best option for me. But I approach it as a user, I don't posses any deep knowledge about how it works.

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.