Asklemmy

For me, it was originally just an experiment because oh, I've heard about this thing and I'm curious about it. This was on my school laptop that I had managed to obtain administrator permissions on by cracking the password and installing VirtualBox. It was a Dell Latitude D505 with like 512 megabytes of RAM running Windows XP. The very first distro I booted was Ubuntu 10.10 and Oh dear God was it slow as shit. I knew that it was because of Windows, and so did not judge it for that reason, but judged it based on user interface and ease of use, which I found good enough to play with and continue messing with. Then I had a summer camp thing that I had went to with coding and we had to use a Mac in order to do it and I was used to Linux in the way Ubuntu worked so it wasn't hard for me but for other people it was difficult because of the interface change. That particular place is where I learned about SSH and SCP and started really playing with making web servers on them. And as they say, the rest is history. I've been running Linux 100% for around 5 years now, and just keep a Windows virtual machine around in case it's necessary, which it proves to be very, very rarely.

maybe sorta. I did not even realize there was a difference at the command line and was like. ok this uses this. Loved the nextstep workstations. worked at a place that was very unix and liked a lot of it. got very excited with macosx which was pretty much nextstep with a freebsd base and macs were always easier to use. Heard stallman speak and definitely agreed and I began to recognized foss and prefer it. Im still pretty practical though so use zorin os although if I had more time I would play around with qubes os and sourcemage linux.

I listened to the wan show and kept hearing about the linux challenge that was going to be released and i was excited to see how it goes. A month before those videos came out I ran a normal windows update and it completely fucked my computer. I could recover the files but not the activation key. There was no way I was paying another few $100 so I thought I'd give linux a try. Mint worked perfectly except wifi didn't work but that was fine. Reading about how to do things on linux reignited my passion for computers. It had been so long since using a computer felt new. I loved that everything was configured by a text file and commands could easily adjust settings without having to dig through convoluted control panel. I then distro hopped a few times but now I'm settled on nobara and I enjoy linux because it makes my computer feel like my computer.

Windows post 7 was and remains annoying and getting worse all the time. So I wanted an OS without telemetry and one that I could control the updates on. I also work with Linux a lot at work. I use Alma 9 for a LTS release. Don't have to mess with it much.

Perhaps a different perspective, but I am gearing up to switch at the moment.

While I have previously used Linux (I have been running Debian 12 on my laptop for about a year), I bought windows 11 for my Desktop as I was still under the impression that is was the only real way to play games.

I recently learned about what Proton has done for games on Linux and also noticed how many games are truly playable on Linux now with the ever increasing market share.

Even though I am using NVIDIA hardware, I have looked up the process for installing the NVIDIA drivers on Linux and while not as easy as AMD, it appears to be quite easy anyway (I am an IT graduate so it seems pretty straightforward to me).

It really was only games that was holding me back I think.

Windows, especially lately has been growing more and more and more and more invasive. I feel like in the last 6 weeks I have read tens of articles on how Microsoft is trying to insert ads into the OS, watermark the OS, install AI into the OS, force the use of MS accounts instead of local accounts etc, and it is completely disgusting. At this point given the recent activity, I would not at all be surprised if they started to try to enforce the OS as a "subscription service".

The moment I installed windows 11 I knew it was going to be a poor experience, considering I had to create registry keys and manually relaunch the OOBE with flags in order to use a local account.

For all these reasons (Gaming becoming ever more accessible on linux, and MS consistently making their product less valuable), I will be switching to either Debian 12 on my desktop or Arch in the near future.

It is a disgusting corporate world we find ourselves in right now, but while this is in many ways a bad thing, I have never in my life noticed more people taking notice of that, becoming interested in FOSS, in Linux, in even considering no longer putting up with this kind of thing, and that gives me hope.

I switched because I was sick of dealing with corporate garbage and abuse at the hands of Microsoft.

It wasn't the cost, I've always activated my Windows installations with gray-market keys bought on eBay for 5-10 dollars. Plus I've paid far more for open source software than I ever did for Windows and their proprietary trash.

I had so many problems with Windows over the years. Fighting with drivers, fighting with software installs, fighting with the registry, etc etc.

I also couldn't stand how bad their spying was getting, how bloated and clunky their software was, and how much adware they were forcing on me.

I finally vowed about 3 years ago that I would never use Windows again for any of my personal computing, no matter what I had to sacrifice.

Turns out, I didn't have to really sacrifice anything significant, and I gained far more than I lost. I would never go back to Windows now, especially with what is happening with windows 11.

My main computer runs Nobara, because I use it mostly for gaming. I use KDE Plasma as my DE. Both work fantastic, games run fast and smooth, and everything looks so pretty lol.

I use Mint Debian Edition with Cinnamon on my laptop and it's awesome too. Almost never have any problems with it.

My work allows me to use Linux, so I run Debian with KDE Plasma. It took a bit of work to get everything running smoothly, but I'm enough of a power user that it wasn't too bad.

My phone runs GrapheneOS, I'm on it right now typing this. Love it also, so glad to be off a corporate version of Android. GrapheneOS is awesome and does everything I need very well.

I've used a ton of different distros. Different strokes for different folks. I've used Arch, Fedora, Zorin, Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, Alma, and several others. Some were a fad, some I use for my servers, some I use for home lab testing, etc.