Asklemmy

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I use it for its elegance mostly.
I can configure it to only contain and show the stuff I actually need and use.
So it feels like an OS that's for me, while Windows definitely shows someone else designed it with their own motives, which don't align with mine.

You can hack into Windows quite a bit, too. But it's clearly not designed for it to be done by end users.
If you want to change a deeper setting, instead of running a short terminal command with all its options documented right in the man page, you'll have to create a registry key named HFEsghireuHJHFIUEDnfu4835 and assign it the value 3.

I've hopped around quite a bit, but keep coming back to Debian and Arch. Arch is the most elegant distro under the hood IMO, and Debian is the most relaxing.

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!

Initially I was just curious and I've always loved playing with new (to me) tech. Then I began to really appreciate various things about it - not least the high configurability. As I learnt about OSS I began to also appreciate that success of things as well.

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 prefer Linux not for freedom, not for money, not for privacy.

I do it because I'll be fucking damned if hardware I own is going to generate value for some large faceless corporation. It's my computer. I paid for it. I'm not going to install Windows so it can send telemetry and show me ads in order to benefit Microsoft's bottom line.

It's like owning a car and letting Uber use it for free every once in a while. No thanks, not me.

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.

I stuck with Windows for as long as I did because of the widespread compatibility and ease of use, and I still use Windows 10 on one laptop that I've been using for 4 years because I just don't want to go through the pain of switching everything over when I'm likely to just upgrade the hardware before long anyway.
But I did switch over to Mint on my desktop and I've been shocked at how easy it was to switch. I haven't ran into any insurmountable compatibility issues and flat hub makes everything a breeze.
I'm super happy with the frequent updates and The cinnamon user interface is very familiar and easy to adapt to.
That being said, I'll never use a Windows operating system on a new machine or build ever again.
Windows 11 is just trash.
The UI changes alone left a bad taste in my mouth but you can undo most of them with a little bit of work, But you just shouldn't have to.
Then with the addition to advertisements in the taskbar and start menu I'd had enough.
I'm over the top, just fucking DONE with being a commodity and I refuse to use any paid service that serves ads.
Yes, Windows comes with most machines but it's not a free service.
And the option to stay on Windows 10 and continue receiving security updates on for a monthly fee is just short of extortion.
My personal tin foil hat theory is that they purposely made windows 11 trash so that people would support a subscription based Windows service with Windows 10.

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

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.

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

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.

The Linuxes are the bestest IDEs ever. They even let you run mini IDEs (vim, vscode, etc) inside them. Coincidentally, they're also where a lot of server code gets deployed, so they're a a good place to verify fresh coffee.

I'm sure other platforms have caught up, but when I started out, *nix was the most accessible dev platform I could find.

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.

ad and annoyance-free

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 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.

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.

initially i chose Linux because Windows on my laptop was way too sluggish. eventually, me and my family made a definite move to Linux because of the continuous enshittification Windows is going through in the modern days. Linux has become good enough for daily driving and even gaming that it just made no sense sticking to Windows.

i wouldn't say i'm fully out of the "distro hopping" phase just yet, but i'm certainly doing it rarely, once in, like, 3-4 months maybe. currently using Void Linux on my personal laptop.

my favorite distro is Mint. yes, it's a basic-ass choice, but it is the de-facto "just works" distro.

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 mostly just wanted a simple media server at home but also I needed to use Linux and Docker for university work. I've only really used Ubuntu. I'm happy enough with it and have no reason to change for now

Both. I have to use windows at work and I hate it.

I did a little bit of distro hopping: Mint, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Arch, Guix. Now I think I finally arrived at Tumbleweed, no need to hop somewhere else so far.

But I really like the concept behind Guix, it's just not finished enough.

It's free, gratis and it's fun to use and tweak.

I took a couple of in-person Linux courses when I was about 16-17. Teacher gave me a Kubuntu 6.06 CD to try at home.

A short time later I was using Ubuntu 8.04, 9.04, etc. and until last year I was on Ubuntu MATE 14.04 until I made a new MATE 20.04 install and I built a new main PC with MATE 22.04.

I really notice the difference in UI apps between Ubuntu and Debian, which I tried (and failed) to swich to several times already.

I've used and gave support to RHEL in a couple of jobs (graphical and non-grahpical)

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.