Certain games wouldn’t run in Windows, but ran perfectly fine on Linux. This was the tipping point for me to fully switch to Linux. Gaming never been so smooth and pleasant for me as it is on Linux now. No more random crashes, driver shit, etc.
in high school i saw this xkcd and didn’t understand the joke. next thing you know i’m trying to dual boot ubuntu, writing down error messages so i can look them up on the library computers and download alternative gpu drivers onto a flash drive (we didn’t have internet at home back then and i couldnt drive yet… so debuggging issues usually took multiple days). weirdly, i enjoyed that experience and here i am ~16 years later. i use linux at home and at work :)
Back in the distant past of 2008, a RuneScape player by the name of Icedpizza thought my complaints about driver problems on older hardware would be easily solved by this incredible thing I’d never heard of called Ubuntu. Downloaded 8.04 Hardy Heron and my life has never been the same since.
Interesting how there’s so many answers here, but no mention of the one I came here for (and I thought would be most popular) : ricing.
I got into Linux when I saw screenshots of all the cool desktops people made with KDE, XFCE, and tiling window managers. Even Gnome looked sleek and minimal. After a while I got bored of ricing but I stayed for the ease of use as a developer
Back in the day I was heavily invested in microsofts ecosystem,Until they killed windows phone. At the time it really hurt cause I loved the platform after that I grew resentful if Microsoft. My uncle gave my sister an old laptop and she gave it to me for uni, the thing. Didn’t even run windows 10 right so i tried Ubuntu on it and it worked perfectly. I used that laptop until it died. Then I installed Ubuntu on an external hard drive and booted it on my unis pcs. Then my sister gave me her dell latitude and I installed ubuntu on it and have loved every single second of it
I had been using Linux on servers for years, and finally also decided to give it a shot on the Desktop during the Linux challenge from linustechtips. Went to PopOS first, then Fedora and Debian and am currently on OpenSuse.
work requirement, amphetamine-driven endless curiosity of staring at commands and man pages, interest in programming, initial allure of the concept of copyleft
Back when the world was young, I had to produce a fairly large chunk of documentation which I started to write in MS Word 2.0 (which ran in Windows 3.11 or Windows for Workgroups).
However, at around 100 pages, I started to have trouble with file corruption. So since the company I worked with had contacts with Microsoft, I got in touch with them. “yes that’s a known bug, there’s a new version on this FTP site” (we were in the nascent ISP business).
So I got Word 2.0c. Which promptly crapped all over my document. “Oh, yeah, I guess the bug isn’t fixed then”.
Around the same time, a coworker had been telling me about those guys who were busy writing a Unix from scratch (hah, so silly) and who had, already gotten a usable and stable system (wait, really? cool!). So I grabbed a copy and tested that. It ran fine (it did help that I already knew a bit of Unix). And I did my document there, I don’t remember in what, if it was LaTeX or Applixware (maybe that came later).
Since then, Linux has always been on my desktop, with Windows coming and going on a secondary disk or partition, mostly relegated to the running of games.
I had known what Linux was but I never really was interested in finding out what it was. That was, until, 2021 came around and I became more privacy conscious. Learning more about Open Source software and it’s philosophy, switching completely to FOSS software (besides ROM) on my phone and then slowly looking into Linux. I was fascinated by it, this wholly new world as it seemed to me… ready to explore and learn so much from. Of course, someone who’s used windows most of his life will definitely think of it as a challenge to learn to use Linux and adapt to it. I started supporting and using more and more OSS and loved it, so naturally I also had became a bit more interested in Linux. After I became privacy conscious, I also wanted to get away from Big Tech and I already hated using Windows by that point. That was because I’ve had a low end PC most of my life, I stuck around with Windows 7 until 2019 where it became EOL and I had to switch to Windows 10. It was an awful experience, running windows 10 on older and low end hardware.
Then came 2022, I had a new upgraded system and it was more mid-range than low-end now. I started using Linux in VMs and learnt more and more about it, I tried to switch full time but couldn’t because of a few things that I just cannot live without. Truth be told I’m still using Windows, there’s just one thing holding me back and all other things I’ve either adapted to, learnt or have found an alternative for. I know some people will hurl insults at me for saying I dislike Big Tech but also use Windows and call myself privacy conscious but It is what it is. I use Linux part-time in VMs and I really enjoy it. As soon as that use case is covered, I’ll be making a full switch to Linux.
Apologies if this went a little off-topic haha, couldn’t help myself I’m afraid
The desire to learn something beyond DOS, beyond just BBS’, beyond RIME and FIDOnet email, wanting a UNIX like operating system that was like what I had at university, to be able to natively run talk, ytalk, IRC, ICB, Gopher, FTP, and NNTP.
My interest started in my physics classes. They teach you the basics of Linux since it gets used for simulations and solving other math problems as well. I’m not 100% sure why, but i remember not even finding windows versions of some software that we used. I think it’s connected to supercomputers almost exclusively running Linux, and I had a couple of professors that use them.
I built a computer and didn’t have high speed Internet about 18 years ago. Couldn’t get Windows activated so a friend gave me a (Debian?) CD so I could get something going. Been keeping old machines alive with it ever since.
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