Linux

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.

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.

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

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.

I was in 6th grade and wanted to know more about computers. I thought being a computer programmer would be a cool job one day. I'd heard Linux was difficult to install and use and thought hey, that'll help me learn. So I had my parents get me a copy of Mandrake 6. It was perfect because I had the free time to play with it and figure stuff out by making mistakes and fixing them without the pressure of having to do really important work.

I do preach the good word of FOSS, but only to those who are in a position to appreciate the suggestion and benefit from it.

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.

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.

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.

Windows 8

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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)

Embedded Linux is such a huge part of embedded software in every industry. I've done a bit with build root but mostly Yocto. There is just no replacement for the Linux kernel. If I need to know how the kernel actually handles a platform driver, I can just look up the relevant source. This is just impossible with Windows (IoT or otherwise)

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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'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.

Windows 7 introducing that optional but pushed telemetry update, when 10 released in 2017. Also 10 shitting itself until a couple years when it stabilised meant Linux must be adopted. WINE also started supporting a lot of stuff, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS was the first true viable mainstream Linux attempt in history.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

win98 was really really awful.

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.

The Odin Project

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...)?

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

Sourtcut virus