Linux

Sourtcut virus

MS Dos 5.0 on my first PC was a bit short on features and I had not enough money for Windows 3.1... I heard that American students were using something called Unix and that their was something close available through mail-order CDs. Yggdrasil CDs were cheap too!

I've always run Linux on my laptops. Now however I've switched on my gaming desktop as well, after W11 started randomly waking from sleep. Haven't had an issue yet. Sure, not everything gaming wise is entirely perfect (though tbh you could almost believe the games were built for Linux) but I figure that if I don't switch why would anyone else do so?

The Odin Project

It was love at first sight when I saw xeyes in a desktop environment with multiple workspaces, then the colorized terminal was a cherry on top. DOS and windows 95 were the other main options at this time around the mid-90s. Needing the boot disk and root disk to bootstrap the system was a real adventure for teenage me. The adventure continues almost 30 years later.

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

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

I got into it when I started university and we started using Linux for a few programming classes. My dad helped me set up a dual boot as he had been a Linux user for a decade at this point, and I had used it for some time as well but had to switch to Windows for MS Office bullshit for school and games.

At this point it was kind of cool to use a different OS but I honestly wasn't much impressed, mainly because of the UI which I later learned was Gnome 3 - Ubuntu had just ditched Unity, but of course I didn't know anything about this yet.

Then I took my first internship where the first thing we did was install Linux on our computers, and the installer they gave us was Ubuntu 16.04 with the Unity desktop - which I LOVED, holy shit it was amazing, so much better than Gnome 3, and miles better than Windows. The first weeks of the internship were basically purely education, among other things an in-depth intro to Linux, command-line tools and such, and I think this was key - not being alone in the process was very important, and I'm not sure if or when I would have made the full switch without this. I started distro hopping in my free time and loved every moment of it.

This was also coincidentally when gaming on Linux really started taking off with Proton etc, so after experimenting with it, I finally ditched Windows completely and made the full switch in I think 2019, about a decade after my first encounter with Linux, and 2 years after I started using it regularly.

I wouldn't consider myself an evangelist by any means, I won't bring the topic up unless asked, but I will recommend taking a look and experimenting in a VM to anyone with an ounce of technical know-how. Furthermore, I think every programmer should be using Linux (yes, literally) unless it's impossible or too painful in their case - which I think is not many cases.

Okay, I ended up typing a novel but fuck it I'm leaving it here because I loved writing this way too much.

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.

Canonical was giving free CDs when I was a teen and it looked cool. Later versions of Unity DE were so good, I liked older Ubuntu so much. Now I run it on older devices to give them some life back

Once Windows got rid of the gorgeous Aero theme starting in Windows 8, plus the shitty UI/UX that Windows got again starting in Windows 8, pushed me to Linux.

My computer's hard drive began to be less-than-reliable. And only Linux can be ran from the USB drive. I have got MX Linux, and save changes, updates etc. by remastering the image.

Godot engine broke with windows on my hardware, Simeone suggested me to try out linux, went with ubuntu 18.10 i think. Have been using linux ever since

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

It was a friend who helped me install ubuntu 8 on my PC in dualboot when I was like 14/15 years old. Was already a computer nerd, though my friend was way more into everything Linux related. I got hooked there, though at that time it was a real pain in the ass to use wifi in ubuntu. I wouldn't call me obsessed, but I really don't like using Windows. I have to for work and I despise it.

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.

programming. It's just a really big IDE.

Sco xenix way back when was required for work. I decided to run it on my desk Then i had to work on sun machine for a few years. So ive really never been a windows person except for games. Once wine then proton atrted letting me game even a little then i got rid of every windows install i had and replaced with linux

I'm a pragmatic programmer. I came to Linux because we were doing server-side stuff, I stayed because bash shell is a blunt tool but command line is incoherent

I've been running Linux in some form since 2012 - I installed Ubuntu 12 on my old laptop and played around with it - was a pain so I dropped it for Windows until like.. 2015? Then I went full into it as I started getting into programming and whatnot.

Back when, after the world didn't end after Y2K got patched and saved it, I was getting tired of Windows and none of my Macs were up-to-date enough to handle my writing workload, I gave Caldera OpenLinux a shot. Ended up compiling everything myself and used that for two years. Had a copy of MetaFrame laying around from a completed project, so I installed it on Windows 2000, and served Office apps over the network so I could use Word in Linux. I've had something running Linux since.

easier Stable Diffusion setup

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 switched to Linux for two reasons:

1. I believe that it's always a good idea to support alternatives.
2. I prefer to use products and services that I actually support.

I do still use Windows occasionally because not everything works or at least has an alternative available but Linux is and will probably always be my primary OS. Even if by some miracle Microsoft, Apple or Google actually start listening to their users and make their OS and business models perfect, I would still use an alternative like Linux as my primary because there would be nothing preventing these companies from reverting their decisions.

Laptop wasn't running smooth anymore. Tried a bunch of stuff in Winxows, nothing helped. Formatted the drive, installed linux, ran buttery smooth for years until some graphics shit died. Did the same to a thinkpad back in 2018 or 19. Still up an running like a champ but the thing went crazy on the original windows it came with (2nd hand. I'm also cheap...)

Mainly this stuff:

https://youtu.be/IT4vDfA_4NI?si=u1V76Mxjq8s6iAFI

I first heard of it in the early 2000s, with my dad talking about replacing our buggy Windows ME with Lindows. Eventually, that computer died without us ever attempting to install it.

In college, I hung out with someone who used linux and thought it looked cool. I successfully dual booted Ubuntu on my PC around 2005 or 2006, but could never get the video drivers working properly (it was stuck at the lowest resolution) and eventually gave up on it.

I started adminning a web forum around 2014 or so, and the previous admin talked me into dual booting Fedora rather than only using Putty. So I started using it intermittently whenever I started working on the forum, though I never really got into GNOME. He also told me about raspberry pis, so I picked up a pi 2 and started tinkering with it.

When my wife moved in (2018), she (a software developer) was working on a project and asked me if I’d heard of raspberry pis, as she was recommended to use one but hadn’t looked into it yet. I pulled my pi 2 out of storage and she fell in love with it, so we started buying loads of pi 3s and zeroes, with me testing out different distros and setups for her while she was working on the project code.

Finally, somewhere around 2018 or 2019 my laptop started running like shit on Windows. I tried out Xubuntu and fell in love with it. It ended up becoming our go-to distro, getting slapped on old desktops she brought home from work and a used laptop I bought for our daughter. So that became the daily driver on my laptop, even as she moved onto Alpine with i3wm.

And now we both have Pinetab 2s, so I think it’s fair to say we’re full on linux nerds at this point. We still have Windows on some of our desktops, though, so we’re more pragmatists than linux proselytizers.

TL;DR: I heard about it young, and that interest grew into dabbling, until I finally got addicted to it.

Early 2000's I took a class in highschool called "What's in the box". A buddy of mine and I would hangout after school just talking and building computers. He showed me Lindows. I specifically remember looking at the clock in the dock, and thinking... "Wow!!! Look how you can customize the clock so much!"

It stuck with me. Shortly there after I dabbled with Suse. Then moved to Ubuntu. By 2005 I was almost exclusively using Linux on all my machine. Had one machine running windows for gaming, but the other machines I had were all Linux.

Kinda just ideological commitment. I sorta just started using Linux right off the bat, the only time I wasn't a Linux user was way back when I was using the family Mac. Linux has gone quite far over the years, in quite a positive way.

Windows kept getting in the way of my productivity (I constantly needed to find workarounds for problems that didn't exist or were much easier to solve on linux, and I couldn't customize the ui to my liking) + it lacked basic things like a tabbed file-manager (before win11) and my hardware was getting slower so I jumped ship.

Pure Data

Moving from Windows XP to Windows 7, i found that Windows 7 sucked, moved to linux and never looked back.

RIP Windows 7