I was PMing a student project for NASA and the sheer number of tabs and files I had open on my PC killed Windows.
I had a week until the deadline and I’m in a situation where things may or may not save, basic functionality was questionable and I had literally thousands of pages information to format and get out.
Once I turned it in I installed Linux and never looked back.
in the fall of 2002 the windows millennium installation on my computer broke, trapping an entire semester’s worth of work on the hard drive and i was a starving college student with less than $20 to my name, so i couldn’t afford to buy windows xp and didn’t know anyone where i could get a pirate copy from.
i bought a mandrake linux cd pack for $8 from circuit city and used google in the computer laboratory to learn how to mount the hard drive, install drivers for ntfs and copy my all my work to a usb drive and i’ve been using linux ever since. i switch to 100% only linux both professionally and personally sometime around 2010.
Had an old laptop which ran horribly slow on windows. Put Ubuntu on it without knowing anything about that stuff. Years later, I got interested in computer science and Cybersecurity, made some experiences with Kali Linux. Eventually switched my desktop to Linux mint iirc. My servers tun Debian
That old laptop? I used it for the first months of Cybersecurity lectures, until I bought a new laptop with my first salary. This weekend I put LMDE 6 on it. Debian is home.
I am interested in tech, and also watched a lot of YouTube videos about different topics. Somehow I realised how much data windows sends. Since I was planning to buy myself a new pc(my old one was a Celsius W370 from 2009 that took 20 minutes to boot windows) I decided to not install Windows on this pc but to install Linux. I went the classic way and chose Mint with cinnamon.
That was about 1.5 years ago.
I wouldn say that I’m somehow obsessed with Linux and there’s definitely no way back. I got completely sucked into FOSS. My next phone will be a Google pixel where I will install Graphene OS on. Fuck big tech.
Despite being an ECE major, I didn’t really bother doing anything with Linux until two things happened at the same time:
I started having to work in several different build environments that were just easier to set up in Linux
I started running Minecraft servers/doing server modding (starting back in the days of Hey0’s server mod and carrying up through Bukkit).
I wouldn’t call myself an evangelist at all. If you’re doing something that I think will be specifically easier to do in Linux (mostly servers and specific kinds of software development), I’ll point out how… but I find that a lot of people’s advice on “use Linux and X FOSS tool” ends up being akin to giving someone bike shopping advice on which welding torch to use to construct their bicycle frame.
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.
The year was 2002 & I was fed up with windows for various reasons. Connected to the internet looking for a windows alternative & ended up finding slackware. Installed slackware & got it somewhat working. Happily used it for a short while, before moving on to Fedora Core when it was released…
I believe that it’s always a good idea to support alternatives.
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.
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.
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.
Probably like most people here, I just got more and more fed up with Windows. I tried Ubuntu a few times in the past, but it never really stuck, and at the time Windows wasn’t quite as bad (I quite liked Windows 7 in all honesty). But as time went on with Win10, it kept moving in a direction I didn’t want and I kept trying to customize it to my liking, and an update would just mess a bunch of stuff up and just make the whole experience worst. Recently it started having issues with my multiple monitors, shutdown and sleep/hibernate were basically broken, Bluetooth would randomly stop working, it was just a lot of aggravation.
I’m only a few weeks into my grand Linux adventure, but I’ve got almost all of the functionality that I need from Windows with none of the frustrations, and it’s way faster on top of that. Right now I can’t see myself going back.
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