Linux

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.

Homework.

College used linux because I did computer science.
Topic: concurrency. College then gave us a programming assignment that required adding a code library, which I had never done before or even heard of, and thus did not understand.
Since this was a library that was platform-specific, they had made one library for linux and one for windows.
Way too late I got the gist of it but still couldn't install the library.
Since the question contained the linux directory structure I was convinced that the windows library was broken and every other college student finished this task in Linux.
Thus I installed Linux.
Ten years later I understood and finished the assignment.

I saw fvwm in a magazine and it had a really cool 3D look to it and I wanted that. I had never seen anything like that. We were very poor and I only had an old computer, a 486, so it was either pirate software (and there was no version of Windows in our language) or use Linux.

I ended up on Red Hat from a magazine and then later Slackware. I liked Window Maker so I stayed on that for two decades. Learning Linux gave me a constructive hobby, introduced me to free software philosophy, and gave me technology skills. We moved to the United States. When I was 15 or 16, I helped a college math professor install hardware on Linux. When he found out that I was dropping out of a very racist high school, he provided support and I ended up graduating from their college. Those Linux skills came in handy and helped start a career.

I have only ever used Windows to upgrade firmware on a laptop or to download an ISO so I could replace Windows. Like everyone else, I was enamoured with macOS back in the 2000's but couldn't afford one and when I finally could, it couldn't do sloppy focus and that was a pet peeve of mine so I just returned it and got a used ThinkPad.

I moved back to Asia. Now I use sway on Debian and get to ride my bicycle to work and my kids grow up better than I did, so life is good.

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

My first experience with Linux was as a kid, when the family PC that was handed down to us breathed its last. Quite a bit of malware was on that machine, and it got left to sit in the garage.

I found Ubuntu and revived the Compaq, although the experience was limited, and me as a 10 year old didn't really know what all could be done with a PC anyway.

Since then, it's been a slow burn. 2022 had me dual booting Linux and Windows, and learning how to migrate everything over.

2025 and Windows 11 recall, AI everywhere, intrusive Big Tech had me pull the trigger and nuke the Windows boot from my machine.

Now I'm here. Enjoying a peaceful time on my hardware just like it used to be when I was a kid. The internet and the computer have the capacity to be wonderful again.

I started a masters program and I was assigned an an office computer with MintOS that contained all the software and data for my research project. Unfortunately, my advisor couldn't remember the password so my first task was breaking into the computer. You'd think being able to externally reset the root password would turn me away from Linux, but the ease and functionality of the terminal shell really made sense to me. Plus now I know how to better secure my Linux systems.

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.

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.

FreeBSD didn’t have working nvidia drivers for amd64 in 2006, so, Linux it was.

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.

I used Linux for a good while 20 something years ago. Mostly for recording music and some gaming (you can say what you want, cube/sauerbraten/openarena/… I had a great time that I look back to fondly).

Then got back on windows around vista all the way to w11 7/8/10 all “ok” OS experiences imo.

11… man, this thing frustrates me so much. Everything you try to do is like getting gaslighted. Updates/reboots whenever it feels like, regardless of what you have going on. (My setup requires a few keystrokes at boot, if not the fan goes nuts)

Coming back to Linux feels like a breath of fresh air. Especially now that installing/using it has become a breeze compared to back then. It does what you ask. Why doesn’t big tech corp get that through its thick skull?

Also, my data is mine.

It was a challenge I wanted to conquer too but also I increasingly felt like I didn't own my computer. The software was increasingly cutting me out of the ability to modify and use it the way I wanted.

I spent a lot of time in Gentoo early on where patching software was an overlay and recompile away and it was great testing early amd64 bugs and pushing the limits with gaim and reverse engineering chat protocols.

I was doing some dual booting then but as i built a career in web development, it became more and more my solo driver. Running the same platform you're developing for is incredibly convenient and Linux runs the web.

Now I can't imagine running windows. Using it and helping people on it is just a miserable experience for me.

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.

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.

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

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

~2007, Compiz wobbly windows and the desktop cube was my gateway via Ubuntu, after a few years shifted over to Debian with XFCE

It’s a long story. But back in the time, when there was a company called Commodore, I used Amiga computers, because I didn’t like Microsoft and MS-DOS. When Commodore went bankrupt and my Amiga started to fade away I was forced to buy a PC. And because I didn’t want to have Windows 95, I bought S.uS.E. Linux and that’s the way I am now. And I’m happy to be Linux user all these years.

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.

My Dad convinced me to try it, as a way to learn more about how computers work (ie without Windows). I installed Ubuntu and didn't like GNOME, but once I saw that all the same programs I used on Windows were still available on Linux, I knew it was worth finding the right distro. I used Linux Mint for awhile because Cinnamon DE was nice, but eventually I needed a more up to date version of something (I can't remember what) so I installed Arch with KDE instead. I've used it ever since.

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.

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)

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.

Went to Linux when I was a teenager, went back to Windows.

My return however is a lot more bittersweet. One of my cats died. The other cat went into mourning. Wanted to keep him company while doing my shit, so I took my old laptop and installed Xubuntu on it. While I was using it I realised that Linux had come a long, long way since I last used it and I could use it as a daily driver. Got a new laptop soon after and installed Mint on it.

Then Windows on my main PC started demanding I update. Realised I couldn't afford to, both software and hardware wise, so I decided to go full Linux. Never looked back. Typing this on my Laptop running Fedora while I try kill time before an interview.

TL;DR: I came back to Linux because I wanted to hang out with my cat while he mourned.

cuz windows sucks major balls and i was sick of it breaking itself (and the spyware)

Back in 2002 it was eye candy.

Compiz compositor. The 3D cube and wobly windows.

And still Linux can be the most beautiful UI of all OSes out there.

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.

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

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

Dark patterns, kajouling, telemetry, settings that reset on upgrades, and the overall feeling that my computer is not truly mine.

My heat was out and I needed a way to warm my apartment so installed Gentoo on my Dell XPS. /s

That was around the time Windows 2000 was coming out and I couldn't afford a copy. I'd been dabbling for a year or two before. That was my first and last dual boot computer. MythTV really sold me on linux.

Built a new computer and Microsoft was pushing thoes full screen win 11 ads. That was the end for me.

About 20 years ago, I wanted to add recording studio capabilities to my gaming PC but I was a broke high schooler, so I installed Ubuntu Studio as a dual boot option alongside Windows XP.

Anyway, I installed Arch on my laptop about 3 years later in college using the Arch Book, which was essentially the same as the wiki's install guide at the time.

I had a dual boot system with Windows and Mac (it was a hackintosh) as my home recording studio Pro Tools/gaming PC for about a decade, then my Windows install had to be wiped due to an issue I had, so I decided to just wipe the whole thing and go single boot with Linux Mint, so now I use Reaper for recording and Steam + Heroic + emulators are meeting all my gaming needs. I use the Xanmod kernel and the kisak-mesa PPA, and since making the switch I've upgraded essentially all of the parts in my PC, which is good because I first built it in 2013

I have older hardware that would not be compatible with windows 11. I've recently started becoming a privacy nerd and thought this would be the perfect time to switch to Linux. I've been running Linux mint for a year and I will never go back, there is no reason to 😁 I wish I had done it sooner

I had been messing with Linux for years and was already dual booting Manjaro for a while when Windows started uninstalling my AMD GPU drivers every 2-3 weeks for a month straight, tried what I could to stop it, but it kept doing it, eventually fed up enough I fully switched over.

Because

• it works (pretty fundamental!),
• popular alternatives are pretty much evil.

So, I know you think the 2nd point is a hyperbole. That truly I'm exaggerating. Well, actually no, I'm not. I genuinely believe that closed source OSes are one of the biggest epistemological trauma Mankind ever experienced. It's right behind fake as an organized political tool. Sure troll farms and political advertising take the cake... but honestly a locked down OS is very very close. Why? Well because it forces people who use a computer to assume the computer is a black box. It's a thing they can use a certain way. That certain way might be good, lucky them, or bad but regardless they must find a way to make their entire life, professional and private, fit within that very small black box. They are trained, day after day, interaction after interaction, as a lifetime of servitude. The personal computer was supposed to be a "bicycle for the mind" but truly, between closed source OS and the "cloud" (someone else computer, for profit) Mankind has been trained to accept and use a computer as they have been told.

This is an absolute disgrace and should never be accepted. This was bad in the 70s... but nowadays everything around you is a computer. Your computer is a computer (duh) but your phone is a computer, your console is a computer, your headphones are tiny computers, your e-bike is a computer, your doorbell is a computer, your printer is a computer, your washing machine is a computer, heck a light bulb or a button on your wall might be computers!

So... when your entire life is surrounded by small black boxes you are taught never to challenge, your life is miserable.

That's why I switched to Linux.

Because windows has become spyware and enough shit works to be worth the hassle. Don't get me wrong, it's still a constant struggle. I have many hobbies, and for some of them it's really annoying to be on Linux. Programming is awesome on Linux, gaming is for the most part fine, music production gets a lot more iffy and some of the photography stuff isn't really cooperating. But I'll just have to endure it, I'm almost one year in and for the most part everything works in some way or another. I only start Windows once in a few months now.

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

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.

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.

I had a not-very-computer-savvy friend with Windows 7 who didn't want to upgrade to 11 but Steam and some other programs stopped working for him, so I tried out Mint as a dual boot option and told myself that I'd switch back to Windows when I needed to.

I ended up never booting to Windows again; everything I needed to run worked just fine in Linux, either natively, or with Wine, or with alternatives that were actually better than what I was using in Windows.

I’ve used it since the 90s, but windows was always my daily driver. Linux always worked, but games could be spotty and there always seemed to be to be the random breakage for no reason.

But that changed a few years ago. Games “just worked”, device support became really good, and if I’m being honest - I became a gnome guy. That interface is very very productive, especially on a laptop with a trackpad.

And then windows just, started sucking. They break machines with every single update, it’s like there’s zero qa anymore. And the little things became more and more annoying - the pop ups “upgrade to 11, try copilot, OneDrive isn’t working omfg let me help you fix that” the “where is that setting moved to now” game, the extra clicks everywhere.

My dual boot setup found a windows drive that was never being used anymore. I didn’t switch, I just stopped using. Eventually I just deleted the partition and use it for extra space and playing around with other OSs.

During this process I distro hopped quite a bit and eventually settled on fedora workstation. It’s been good to me on three PCs.