Linux

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.

I was lucky to meet some real operating systems (VMS, Unix) before I got contaminated with Microsoft products. So when I first heard about Linux (some guy in Finland wrote a new kernel and showed it to Prof. Tanenbaum, and when he grows up, he wants it to become a full fledged unix :-)) I knew already what it is.

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.

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.

Im not into it yet.

But the answer is windows.

I wanted to switch to Linux for several years because I was very sick of how Windows did things.

With Valve doing Proton and Windows 11 being a much shittier Windows 10... With rumours of it eventually becoming a FORCED update!... I decided to actually switch to Linux last November.

Haven't regretted it. Haven't used any other OS since.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

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

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

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.

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.

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.

It started as a dislike of Windows 98 for me, extremely unreliable and buggy OS. I didn't switch immediately but that was what got me looking for the alternatives, having fully made the switch around the time of Windows XP. Windows only seems to have got worse since then, stories of advertising, forced updates, etc., I'm glad I never had to deal with that.

The Uni Eng department ran a SunOS email server for students and a SunOS lab for our coding projects. We were taught UNIX in the intro engineering class.
A couple of my friends in the dorm fired up Linux servers (early Debian and RedHat systems), bought domains (3 character .coms!) and setup email servers for our friend groups. It also was a lot faster to do our C/C++ dev there because it wasn't an overloaded machine.
Within a couple of years I had two systems, one Win98 and the other RedHat. From there it has been a winding tale of Linux distros, a stint of OpenBSD fun until SMP boards became common, the occasional Windows machine (back when I gamed more, but after Tribes 2 on Linux), and a short work-related dalliance with OSX (10.1-10.4). For the last decade it's been almost 100% Linux anymore. If there's a tool you need on a given OS, use what you need to, but if it runs on Linux I wouldn't use anything else. I've got a pile of machines for work and home, including servers (Debian), laptops/desktops (Mint), and SoC boards (Raspberry Pi OS, Armbian, etc).
There's just too much control and not a bunch of company-driven shit (See: Ads in your start menu? WTF kind of dystopian universe are you accepting?) with Linux distros.

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

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.

I always liked tinkering with shit. Modding gameboys, custom fw on my phones and psp... It was the next logical step.

Apple.

I uses to be a huge Apple fan pre-2010. Everything worked, was smooth, wasn't Windows, and it was fun trying out the terminal despite it being pretty useless for most things on Mac.

At the new decade is when it felt like Apple was becoming what it is today: a walled garden with priority of mobile devices at the detriment of Macintosh. Started to really look at Linux as an alternative (only tried Ubuntu in a VM around the time of Unity coming out) early 2010s, but didn't make the full leap until around 2013 when I installed Linux Mint and got a Raspberry Pi to begin to mess around with. Now I solely run a mix of Debian and Void on all my machines and I couldn't be happier.

Curiosity, followed by realizing how good it is for development.

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.

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...)?

I tried Linux when I was younger. I decided to try Gentoo on underpowered hardware with zero Linux experience. I credit that uphill battle for teaching me Linux! I used that until I got into dependency hell and switched back to Windows for a while. I needed PowerShell and stuff for my old job, before it went cross-platform. It was fine.

A few years later, I was dual-booting again. Then, Windows 10 began blue-screening randomly. I couldn’t figure out why. Reinstalling didn’t work. So I started using Linux full-time and I’ve never looked back.

Even when I found out that one of my memory sticks had been half-inserted for months, and that’s probably what made Windows crash all the time. How did Linux handle it? Obviously, because it’s better.

win98 was really really awful.

Tiling Window Managers. Now that I've been using them for some years I don't understand how stacking is the standard, it's such a waste of time to manage stuff.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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~~

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.