Linux

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

For me, I was a curious and inquisitive 15 year old that wanted to try out something different to Windows. I didn't really have any gripes with Windows at the time, so I tried Ubuntu and it went from there. I mostly remember after that installing Xubuntu on everything because it was just so lightweight and to this day I still love Xfce.

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".

Despite being an ECE major, I didn't really bother doing anything with Linux until two things happened at the same time:

1. I started having to work in several different build environments that were just easier to set up in Linux
2. I started running Minecraft servers/doing server modding (starting back in the days of Hey0's server mod and carrying up through Bukkit).

I wouldn't call myself an evangelist at all. If you're doing something that I think will be specifically easier to do in Linux (mostly servers and specific kinds of software development), I'll point out how... but I find that a lot of people's advice on "use Linux and X FOSS tool" ends up being akin to giving someone bike shopping advice on which welding torch to use to construct their bicycle frame.

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.

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.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

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.

Windows me

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.

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 taught myself some shell scripting and unix commands after being gifted an iMac running 10.3. I then decided I wanted to fully immerse myself, so I dual booted that thing with OpenBSD.

The installer back then was pretty barebones; I used a scientific calculator to set up the partitions. After install I was dropped into a root shell and had to recompile the kernel to apply the latest system patches, then set up my user account, sudo, and bootstrap the package installer.

Getting the latest Firefox meant compiling it from scratch, which took about a week. Setting up flash involved configuring a Linux emulation layer. It worked on most sites, but not others.

I began pining for the binary updates, native flash support, and huge package libraries available in Linux, not to mention the cool wobbly window cube that compiz fusion offered, so I made the jump to Linux.

I've switched distros and even switched to other unix-likes, but in the end Linux won for me.

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.

My boss at the time (I was a writer for a tech magazine) asked me to review FreeBSD. I couldn't get it to install (at all) so someone suggested Linux (Slackware) which was an insane idea at the time around 1995 or 1996. Slackware sort of worked, no sound and I had to do various really annoying things to get it to see my modem (which never really worked). But something about it was interesting and I stuck with it.

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

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.

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

Im not into it yet.

But the answer is windows.

The desire to be alternative and different, and now I can't use Windows for too long

We had to do a presentation on whatever in computer class in the first year of secondary school, and I chose Linux for no apparent reason. I just kinda knew that it existed and thought what the hell.

My 'researching' led me to see what Linux offered, to learn about FOSS, listen to Stallman, and I loved tinkering so I made a dual boot (and thus learned about partitions, boot flags and such) and never looked back. ~~Even when I installed linux on my newly acquired PC a few days ago and found out that since the kernel version 5.13 some motherboards receive failure on all USB 3.0 ports and I have to fuck around with that why can't you just fucking work right away for once~~

The Odin Project

I found an Ubuntu CD room in the trash, searched about it on the Web, which led me to install it on a low-end PC I had

I started using Linux many moons ago when the LAMP stack was common for web development. (Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP). But that was only on servers. It's only in the last couple of years I've switched to seriously using Linux on the Desktop. I finally got fed up of Microsoft writing software as if using their OS meant they owned my machine and they could do what they liked with it. So I've switched. While windows still sits on a partition due to a couple of games, I find I'm going months without needing to touch it. I suspect I'll be rid of windows entirely in the near future.

Tried it out cause of curiosity and the allure of not being subject to a corporation's whims. Discovered package managers, aur, how customizatable the whole experience is and never looked back

I still dual boot Windows for a select couple games that don't run on Linux (anticheat) but I try to use it as little as possible cause it just feels gross.

I was running XP at the time wanting a change. Meanwhile, a neighbor moved from Window ME to Vista and asked for help setting it up. I had never been SO irritated at an OS in my life.

Enter Debian LTS, which I’ve been running ever since.

Got an entry level job as a network engineer at a large ISP that everyone has heard of, six months later I'm taking the RHCA and the rest is history.

I had dual boot with Win10, which I used for almost everything, and Arch, for SSH-able stuff for work and university. One day Windows decided to nuke both the EFI partition and Arch, which made Windows itself unbootable, so I just wiped the entire disk and installed Manjaro. Now I'm a sysadmin and I don't think I could do my job if I had to use Windows.

Back in 1999 I came across a copy of this book. Not a great book, I wouldn't recommend it even if it weren't decades out of date at this point. But it came with a CD-ROM with Red Hat Linux 6.2 which I installed on the family computer and never really looked back. I haven't had a Windows install since 2004ish.

I've never really been an evangelist about it, though. And I would say that I was obsessed at one point but that's waned quite a bit in the last few years. I'm still Linux only but messing about with computers generally quite a lot less.

It all started with my own Minecraft Server and an an offer on V-Servers at my Hoster at the time. Started to learn what SSH is, how to install Java and run my own Minecraft Server. And now I am running my Homelab on Kubernetes and do it for work. Life is funny

I was broke and my hard drive failed. I've heard/read somewhere that Linux can be booted of a live cd, something quite new back in the days(like 15 years ago?). So I made one a used my broken laptop with broken hdd for about 7 months, just from the live session without persisting anything. It was a pain to wait for everything since most things would have to be loaded from the dvd, but it worked!

Windows 11 has a bug that when I'm in file explorer and a drag a file out of the window or drag to the file to list of folder or drives on the left side of file explorer. It will freeze file explorer for about one minute. This only happens once in a while. I was extremely frustrated with windows 11 bugs that I thought to switch back to Arch Linux for real this time and even if I bricked Arch Linux, I would reinstall. There is also that Windows 11 AMD CPU bug where it will start to hitch every once in a while, when I was on my desktop. I have been thinking of going back but I love customizability of Linux and bash.

Windows XP Pro was the last Windows that you could install on as many of your machines as you wanted without contacting M$. When I found that out, I knew that XP would be my last Windows and that I would inevitably switch to Linux. When XP became totally obsolete, I permanently switched over to Linux Mint. I've never gone back to Windows and I have zero reason to ever do so. I promote Linux whenever I can.

Windows 2000 was end of life and XP looked like crap.

I already wanted to switch since i disliked the privacy issues, and then once my laptop got too slow for windows (1 min in a call/video before i got sound), i replaced the hdd with an ssd and installed linux mint, which i still use.

While at university I did a lot of work on the SPARCs and this lead to Unix development as an early career for me. I moved into the windows world after that and I missed Unix so I picked up Linux around 98. I installed it on my work laptop of all things and made everything I needed work. Never looked back since although I run Windows VM for office and testing stuff.

win98 was really really awful.

Ey @linuxguys I might install a desktop distro on a notebook with Nvidia card I no longer really use to get used to it. I sometimes have to work with Debian servers but I have no more than basic knowledge about Linux. Any distro recommendations, regarding desktop use and gaming (if the notebook is supported at all...)?