Asklemmy

I began using Linux as my daily driver in 2001. I was 21. I think my story is pretty unique.

I lived in a house with 5 roommates, of which I was the second oldest. The others were 17, 18, 19 and 43. Except for the 43 year old we were basically all friends from Waldorf School (which is a fucking cult disguised as a liberal arts school, don't let anyone tell you otherwise).

There were only two computers in the house. Mine was the only one with an ethernet card. I got a Cable Modem. No one else thought they needed fast internet.

It was a kind of disaster of a living situation... like the 17 year old was an emancipated minor who was stripping using a fake ID, the 18 year old was a stoner who worked at the local bagel shop and sold weed. The 19 year old was a kid who immigrated from Mexico City when his mom married a American and was into a BUNCH of sketchy shit. SUPER nice kid, but his friends were like, in retrospect, obviously a bunch of gangsters.

Before the 43 year old we had two other roommates. The first was a girl who was 20 who we knew from school, but then she left and went to college out of state. The second was a girl our stripper roommate knew who was ALSO a stripper and had an inoperable brain tumor. Poor girl was 19 years old and was told she had 18 months to live. She quit school, became a stripper and dedicated her life to sex, drugs and partying. She was a complete mess and her friends + the gangster guy's friends turned our house into an absurd party flat that got the cops called on us (for noise or trash or sketchy people hanging around) like once or twice a month.

(yes... this IS the story of how I became a Linux user, I'm getting there).

So terminally ill stripper girl just disappeared one day. Never came home, never showed up to work, we never heard from her again. We needed to pay rent and we were all poor young people. Gangster guy has a legit job as a dish washer at a Mexican restaurant and he's like "Hey, this dude who's a server there needs a place to live."

Enter the 43 year old who is a TOTAL creep ball (imagine that). Just to cut straight to the chase, one of the first things he does is start regularly fucking 17 year old stripper girl's 16 (or possibly even 15) year old best friend from middle school, who starts spending the night at our house almost every night (and also ditching school all the time). They don't just fuck in his room, they fuck all over the house and don't clean up. Like I had clean up their used condoms and cum tissues from all over the house.

The other thing 43 year old creep ball does is fucking use my computer to download a shit ton of porn while I'm not around. Here's how we caught him.

Some friends and I are messing with my computer and we notice that... for some goddamn reason... AOL has been installed. Why the FUCK would AOL be there? I have a goddamn cable modem! So my buddy, who's also a computer nerd and is starting to get into Linux himself and I uninstall AOL and it asks if we want to save local files. When we say yes, it dumps... a bunch of AVI files of the hairiest 90s porn you can imagine onto my desktop and all I can think about is this creep ball who's used condoms I'm cleaning up sitting in my chair in my room when I'm not there jerking off.

SO... my buddy and I nuke my OS and install Debian. I leave the house and leave the computer logged in leaving a virtual console running.

Creep ball comes in to watch porn on my computer and is faced with the linux terminal. He typed (I'm not kidding)

• dir
• win
• win.exe
• windows
• start windows
• motherfucker!

That's the 100% true story of how I became a Linux user.

ad and annoyance-free

I don't care about Linux. I care about freedom. It just so happens that the best free software operating systems are built on Linux, so that's what I use.

I use GNU Guix System on my desktop, laptop, and server machines. I use LineageOS on my mobile devices, although sometimes I wish I could use Mobian or even Guix System instead. I do have a Pinephone with Mobian but it's collecting dust and the battery is swollen so I can't use it anyway. I also have a router running OpenWRT.

I used to use Debian until 2019, Trisquel until 2014, and Ubuntu until 2010. When I was something of a kid I played around with a Knoppix live CD, which was my first taste of GNU/Linux.

Being a geek, I have tried many linux distros (I've been using Linux since 1998, on and off). Curiosity was what was driving my usage of it.

In the early 2000s, when I used to write for OSNews.com (second only to Slashdot for OS tech news back then), I really didn't find any distro polished enough to be a daily driver for me. Red Hat was big at the time, but even when ubuntu came around, it was still not as polished as it is today. These days, I'm using Debian-Testing mostly, however I concede that the best distro for newbies (and for me really, I'm too old now to be tinkering) is Linux Mint (flagship version). Mint really is well-thought out for daily usage. It might not have the latest tech innovation in it, or be bold with its choices, but it just works 99% of the time.

As time has gone by, and seen corporations taking everything for themselves (via enshittification), I have stopped using Linux because it was the geeky/cool thing to do, but I started using it because it frees me from all the spyware, and corporation agendas. Back in the 2000s, when I was a news editor for foss matters, I was mostly siding with the BSD license side of things (and mit/apache/ etc). I felt that the GPL was too restrictive, and that we should allow innovation take its course as it wants to. Now, that I've lost all my faith in corporations doing the right (smart) thing, I'm now a GPL3/AGPL type of a gal. The more "restrictively open" something can be, the better. Don't allow anyone to manipulate you, or use you, or take away your data etc.

Excel wouldn't stop converting sku numbers to date formats. IT guy was excited to share an "easy fix" for that with Open Office...

When I saw his genuine excitement as he described Linux, plus the security it provided I realized, if I ran Linux I'd have the best support in the company. And I did.

I eventually had to move on from Linux at work after 10yrs or so but it's all I run at home.

All because of Excel and those fucking date codes. Which yes, Open Office solved as advertised.

And yes I know you don't need Linux for that but it was a long time ago.

It was and still is a few things: Mostly the cool factor. It's different, does what I tell it (safety be damned lol ).

Security: Mostly sane defaults (like not making the initial user with full admin rights).

In the early days, a major factor was being poorer, constantly rebuilding Frankenstein PCs that would trip Ms activation crap. And with so many used parts, performance was better too.

Mostly because windows kept bothering me by breaking or changing something every single dn update so I jumped ship and have been pretty happy. Now windows only gets used for certain things I don't feel like configuring my normal system for.

Basically Intel graphics on windows broke. Hopped to Linux, no such problems here.

Tried (hopped) almost every mainstream distros, some niche ones too. Due to some issues with trackpad, I am forced to use arch based distros. Currently rocking EndeavourOS.

Well ... I first got into contact with OpenSource due to Gratis: OpenOffice, Firefox etc. Combining my knowledge of OpenSource with my tendency to break stuff (Reinstalling Boston for the nth time) led me to Linux which I first tinkered with and soon fully adapted.

I had a short hopping phase where I went from Ubuntu (my starter) via Debian (accidentally tried stable) to Arch.

Stuck with arch on my personal machines now run Ubuntu for my work machine and Debian for Servers.

My favourite distro is the right tool for the job (see above) but I'm pretty happy with Arch

I went into Linux because I saw some coworkers use it. I stayed in it because I fell in love with the ideals (while it also works at least just as well as propietary OSs).

That shows how important it is that you spread the word. Linux does not do advertising. It needs the community. I love that.

I guess in Linux you either go Ubuntu and stay Ubuntu... Or (like me) you hop for a year or so until you find out your place. (Generalisation)

My fav is Arch Linux. Endeavour OS for easier install of Arch Linux. I haven't found anything better for personal computers. For work, the choice is clearly Debian for me, because Debian.

It's how I've always used computers I hate fighting a tool

For the philosophical reasons of free as in freedom and because it's way more cool

I just really, really like shortcuts. It started with vim, then I saw some of primeagen’s videos. Especially the one where he showed his i3/tmux/nvim workflow that I decided to go all-in on trying.

Installed Ubuntu and uninstalled windows, and I’ve been struggling my way through understanding a bit at a time since then. I got a desktop PC after my laptop’s charging port went out on me, installed Debian on it, and am now trying to find the time to work my totally unrelated job, be healthy, and to make some projects to get a job in tech.

I’ve read through the Linux command line by William shotts, but I really want to understand how more things work in a way that feels intuitive. I’ve got a dream writing-tool project I’m super excited to try to build this weekend, but I know I also have to drive a ton of lyft to be able to pay my bills on the 1st.

I’m considering installing arch for the sake of understanding the core elements in an OS, too.

But to answer the question, I love shortcuts. I got into emacs and learned enough to use enough of the agenda features to have a lot of journal entries on it. Shortcuts are so addicting, I was learning vim motions and emacs at the same time and I think I got burnt out trying to figure out how to configure both at the same time.

First time I switched it was because I had a piece of trash for a computer and making it work with Windows was easier said than done. It was truly amazing how smooth that machine would run Ubuntu while crying to run Windows XP (t'was a long time ago) I knew about Linux before then because my father was an oldschool geek and had messed around with old Linux distros that came on magazine cover discs, so I was somewhat familiar with the idea of Linux. Still had a lot to learn.

Eventually I got myself a "real" computer, and because I'd be using it for gaming and this was before Proton was a thing, I had it run Windows. But good god it was hard to go back. And the first thing that made Windows a pain in the arse to me was something surprisingly simple: This was the Windows 7 days, and Microsoft had yet to figure out what a Dark Theme was. It wasn't until Windows 10 that one was added, and even then, it took quite a few updates for it to appear across things like the file explorer and such.

Enshittification kept happening and such, but I couldn't exactly drop windows at the time, I'd spent a fortune on a gaming PC and it was my only games machine. I longed to go back to Linux (even set up dual-boots for some time but didn't stick with them) but couldn't justify it vs the loss of most of my library.

Then Proton happened and things were good again. It took me a bit longer to actually take the leap, but when I did, I was so happy.

... Ironically, nowadays I only boot into Windows for work reasons. Specifically Adobe reasons. What a time to be alive that all my games and chat applications and (...) are all on Linux and Windows is basically a quarantined zone for After Effects. Life is good.

My laptop with windows 10 shit the bed, it would let me type in my pin but get hung up on the spinny loady wheely thing never moving past that. I used a linux liveUSB to rescue my files from the disk, and while I was using it I noticed how my computer did things like "still work." So I switched! Actually had two laptops at the same time I had to switch too, the other would let me log in but was bogged down and barely responsive, ran like a top for years but now I'm upgrading to a framework. The framework can probably run windows but it would've been like $200 more and like, why? I might just run a VM of WatermarkWindows for the few times I need it but really the only thing I need works in wine well enough.

Windows is free for all intents and purposes. At least for most people. So it's about freedom for me.

My favourite distro is Debian. But I wish it had a workable rolling release. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is the closest distro to that ideal.

I am an IT nerd so I use Linux to learn more about the OS and programming. This was the original reason and still is the reason I keep a Linux machine on hand. Current machine is a dual-boot LG Gram running Windows 11 (wanted to keep the original OS so just shrunk it) and Arch Linux. It runs on Arch 90% of the time. Really only boot the windows partition to use it for work.

I think I originally checked it out after watching an LTT video on a gaming distro, because i liked computers and I was pretty good at them. Not sure if I was the problem or the distro but it was pretty bad. Still fell in love.

Now I appreciate the open source aspect, but I still like it because I can do more with it and learn in the process.

I quickly fell partly into the Linux and open source rabbit hole.

So far I have tried small amount of distros on VMs, and the only distros I've run outside of VM and outside of my IT classes I've gone through so far would be Ubuntu on a very crappy laptop, and MX Linux on my current laptop. So far, MX with KDE Plasma 5.x (don't remember the specific version) is my favorite distro.

I first got into Linux because I was a kid with an old hand-me-down laptop that was meant to run Windows 98 but I somehow stuffed Windows XP on there (it had a 4gb HDD and it was filled to the brim, I'm shocked in hindsight that it actually installed). Then I discovered Ubuntu (I think version 6.06?) and installed it, and it ran great! Once I got newer computers I ended up using Windows primarily but usually had a Linux PC kicking around. In college I started dual booting my main machine since Linux proved to be useful for my courses (Computer Science). Then I built a PC and just installed Windows 10 on it, but now that my 7th gen Intel CPU is "too old" to run Windows 11, I said screw it and installed Linux again. Plus I just really like having a bash shell natively, and a proper package manager is really nice.

Honestly, because Windows is a steaming pile of garbage and using Mac feels like swimming with pool floaties.

I recently started using NixOS as my distro and it has been phenomenal. Saying the learning curve is a little steep is like calling a hurricane a little bit of rain, but once you start to get it, it's extremely powerful and delivers on the promise of "all of your configuration in one place." It gives me a lot of peace of mind to know that every time I tweak or fix something, it's reliably making it into a version controlled and backed up repository. I could throw my laptop out the window, pick up a new one, and have all my applications installed and configured within half an hour.

Because compiz. No, seriously.

I got to know Linux back in 2006 in a hackathon-type-of-thing at uni and they gave me a Ubuntu 5.10 CD and my jaw dropped with the cube animation thing.

Ended wiping my hard drive trying to install it, finally could install it, tried XFCE for a time, went back to GNOME, was tired of Ubuntu and tried Gentoo and somehow could install it, with the GNOME3 drama moved to KDE, considered FreeBSD for a moment just to realize pkg/pkgsrc is absolute shit compared to Portage.

Oh and it seems KDE went back with the cube for Plasma 6! Alas it's still masked in Gentoo and who knows when it would be ready, but it's a bit great I'm not the only one for that cube nostalgia.

I switched to Linux full time (I'd gone back and forth for a while) about 10 years ago when my XP laptop died.
I had access to Windows 7 via work, but I didn't like how much telemetry was being sent back to MS...

I made the switch at the start of the year out of curiosity. I had worked for QNX as a student and though that I should have had a better understanding of the system, so I started using WSL for all my programming.

Then joined Lemmy in the summer and that increased my interest in trying it out full time. I was also getting increasingly disappointed with Windows pushing updates for Win11 and features like onedrive.

I've been super happy with it so far. I've gotten way more familiar with my OS and it's been such a huge shift in perspective for me to be able to shape the way the OS works to my workflow rather than the inverse.

I was born into it. I stayed with it for some mix of gratis and libre. I'm not rich or dumb enough to buy an Apple device or Windows licence, and I like having a computer that won't turn on me.

My windows install started corrupting my hard drive every 1-2 weeks. Completely unrecoverable requiring a fresh install. I installed Linux to try to see if it was a hardware issue, and it worked fine without issues. Ending up just sticking to it. Couple years later I built a new PC, and tried windows again. I enjoyed having all my games work again (this was pre-proton so Linux gaming was hit or miss), but really hated the experience of using windows after being free from it for so long. Went back to Linux, and have been here ever since (about 10 years now). And thanks to valve/proton, I no longer feel like I'm giving anything up to use exclusively Linux.

Started using it because I was a nerd, still using it because windows cannot provide anything close to a sway/i3 style of wm.

Also setting up a programming environment is dead easy, just install a package and you can compile your code within 5 minutes of a fresh install.

and also the kernel logs actually make sense and tell me what I need to fix when the system breaks. windows errors are just a goddamn mysterious mess

It was mostly just a skill issue, I don't know how anyone uses developer tools on Windows. Building tool chains on Linux just make sense.

I switched probably 2010 or 2011. I think I was on windows 7, but it might have been windows vista and I never got to 7.

At some point I had made a realization that software I downloaded from sourceforge (this website has been terrible for a long while now, but I think it was decent way back) was heavily correlated with not being shitty. After making this observation, I was able to generalize it to open source software tends to be less shitty and I had a year or two of experiences afterwards that reinforced my theory, which led me to try experimenting with linux installs.

I started with dual-booting Fedora, I had no idea what I was doing and didn't like the user experience as much as windows at first. I did a little bit of distro-hopping to see if there was something more appealing to me, but during that time I discovered the free software movement and that resonated with me a lot more than open source had, so I decided I wasn't interested in going back to windows. Moved to Trisquel (originally an Ubuntu derivative, and fully-free to the point of being FSF-approved) and grew to love it.

After a couple years, I decided I was curious enough to learn more about how the system works, so I moved to Parabola (fully free Arch derivative) to force myself to learn. I really learned barely anything, but I got very good at getting things working by trial-and-error while reading documentation I don't fully understand. I haven't progressed very far beyond that point at all in the years since, but I got too comfortable to make a significant change.

In the past five or so years, I've to some degree dropped the free software philosophy in favor of a philosophy that the problem runs much deeper (no hope of a successful free software movement in a capitalist society, and software is not even close to the most beneficial consequence of getting past capitalism), and I've moved to legit Arch rather than Parabola.

I've basically gone ten years without real issues on arch installs, but I still have no idea what I'm doing, I'm just comfortable with it and don't want to put any effort into a change. I feel like if anyone from the arch forums or anyone knowledgeable in general took five minutes to look at my pc they'd be like wtf are you doing. It's whatever, it works well enough for me.

I wanted to be a hacker as a kid, so I had some experience with Backtrack 5. A prof said if you wanted to be a cowboy coder, do everything in your terminal. That was good advice, I've learned a lot about OS's from that

Your OS is basically a set of drivers that allow you to leverage your hardware, as well as a package manager for managing your software, and a system for managing services (like at startup or by some event trigger)

I'm an advanced user but NixOS has been an excellent OS, it's like all the fun of tuning arch but with less elbow grease. I was a kde neon (ubuntu base + plasma display manager + KDE desktop environment) user before

If I chose it for gratis, I wouldn't have replaced Windows with it.

First experimented when Windows 8 took away Aero Glass and other customizations. Committed when I had to fight with Windows 10's twice-yearly feature updates that messed with my settings and wasted space with new programs I didn't ask for. I now keep a separate laptop just to run Windows when I have to.

Distrohopping was mostly confined to my first year using Linux. Deepin (kept crashing) -> UbuntuDDE (went unmaintained) -> Arch Linux -> Debian. Settled on Debian Stable since it just works, I haven't been using bleeding-edge hardware, and I don't like things changing around too often (see my Chicago95 rice).

I tried Linux in college because it was a hot thing there. Been hooked ever since.

I'm not a distro hopper. I used Debian Testing for many years. Last year I switched to NixOS because it was a compelling value proposition for me. I'm very happy with it!

I like to tinker and learn how things work, and windows ME blue screened on my one time too many, so I picked up Linux in 1998. Redhat box from compusa, if anyone remembers that place.

And that’s when my life changed; using the skills I taught myself i got well paying jobs as a sysadmin and then as software developer and now I’m an “infrastructure engineer” (I write terraform to manage cloud infrastructure and i do other sysadmin stuff ).

It’s paid off!

The freedom is great, and the fact that things don't change out from under me is awesome

I can use a basic or tiling window manager while still running a modern system. Updating Windows or macOS = new "improved" GUI, generally speaking. KDE and Gnome also change, but it's your choice to use/not use them, as it should be!

Started with Red Hat in the kernel 2.0 or 2.2 days, because I picked up a book+install CD at a garage sale.

Slackware on an old laptop got me through undergrad (desktop ran Gentoo, but I didn't use it much).

Switched to Debian after that, with a little Arch in grad school btw (not a huge fan

to each their own).

Running Debian now (desktop, laptop, and SBCs), but my heart belongs to Slackware.

Initially, I chose Linux for it being gratis, but as I've used it more and more, I started to appreciate its freedom. It's really kinda moot though since I first gotten exposed to Linux because I had to. Our uni adopted Linux (some faculties used Linux Mint, others used Ubuntu) for their school computer laboratories after they couldn't pay for their Windows licenses. In a way, I indeed got into Linux because it is gratis.

I started daily-driving Linux when my Win7 desktop broke, and had to use an ancient, hand-me-down, laptop. It can barely run Win7, and so I tried installing Ubuntu on it (funny in hindsight though, I should have used a lightweight Linux distro). Then a friend of mine introduced me to Manjaro. It worked well for quite a while, until the HDD finally croaked (it's had a long life of nearly a decade). I stuck with Manjaro when I got my present desktop, but that same friend of mine who introduced me to Manjaro pushed me to using Arch despite my protests. I would have wanted to switch to Endeavour instead since I was intimidated by pure Arch. But since they offered to do the "installation and set-up process" with me, I relented. (The scare quotes are there because it was not an ordinary installation process: my friend basically exorcised the Manjaro out of my system.)

I have a few distros I would like to try, off the top of my head: EndeavourOS, Fedora Silverblue, and NixOS. However, I don't think I'm a distro hopper. I would prefer that I stay with a distro unless I get pushed off it for one reason or another. Perhaps, if I've got an extra computer to test things out, I might be a bit more adventurous and go distro-hopping using that extra machine.

To date, I've only had a bit of experience with Linux Mint and Ubuntu, and a bit more experience with Manjaro and Arch Linux. I don't think fairly limited experience with those allows me to pick a favorite, but I suppose despite its reputation for being hard to use, I quite like Arch Linux. Its package manager as well its repositories really does it for me. It's changed the way I think about installing programs, as well as updating them.

Currently, I use Arch and Win10 in a dual-boot system. After I've gotten myself an AMD graphics card, I spend my time on my Arch system almost exclusively.