Linux

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.

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.

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.

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.

programming. It's just a really big IDE.

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!

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

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

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

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

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~~

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 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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

first just messing around with it, then starting selfhosting and then i started to dualboot just for fun, and one day i by mistake nuked my windows installation, so now i'm a full time linux user

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.

Pure Data

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.

Mainly this stuff:

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

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

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.

Used to use Windows 98 SE. First introduced to Mandrake Linux around 2000. Had no Internet, got the install media from a friend of my father. Barely got it working and couldn't read English. Went back to Windows XP. Ubuntu came. Began to use it around 2008 for a few years. Back to windows briefly and then Raspberry Pi was launched. Switched to Linux permanently.

Almost went back in 2013 due to Lightroom, gaming and a few work related medical software.

Began to grasp FOSS maturely in 2014 and switched to alterbative software. When Steam launched Proton there was no turning back.

I was obsessed but it has come and gone. Now I'm a bit of a nuissance to friends sllwly switching them to alternative software. My partner gets the worst treatment. Now she uses hardware security keys, assymetric keys auth etc

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...)