Linux

curiosity, originally. this was back at the very earliest days of slack and debian, some 30 years ago.

i am not 'obsessed' with linux itself, but i have a definite preference for FOSS over proprietary solutions.

McAfee Antivirus.
Got so tired of the software slowing down the computer and freaking out over non-virus programs. Also the price to renew was stupid.
No need for AV running 24/7 on Linux.
After using a few different distros over a couple of years I decided to never go back to Windows (and I detest Apple so that will never be an option), and I settled on Kubuntu.
So. Damn. Happy.

On an old laptop of mine that has pretty piss poor specs I ended up messing with the regedit on win10. On the only account on the laptop, I lost admin access and couldn't change it back. I tried fixing it using a solution online that required downloading Linux and booting it up on a thumb drive. After that failed and I found out that Best Buy was just suggesting reinstalling win10, I just said "fuck it" and installed Ubuntu, which was what I had on my thumb drive. That was a couple years ago. Since then I have switched to Sparky Linux, even though I rarely use that laptop anymore thanks to my desktop.

I'm definitely not ultra obsessed with it, but I do find it's nice to have.

Curiosity. It began while trying to play around with programming, and finding a lot of talk and resources about Linux, and then trying it. 3 broken Debian installations just for messing around, then Ubuntu as a more permanent install, all of this alongside Windows.

Then I began using less and less Windows until I just deleted the Windows partition because I needed more space.

Two things made me leave. Both having to do with Windows.

1. Microsoft themselves.

2. My Windows install was just...bad. I'm not sure how else to describe a Windows that frequently crashed and just gave up and Blue Screen. Sure, both probably happen to any normal Windows install (well, the 1st thing. If you get the second, yeah that's a problem)--but not at the frequency it happened with mine, I'm sure. Besides that, it was slow for no reason (AFAIA, anyways) and doing anything took a while. Yeah, I eventually reinstalled it after some hassle, and after that it was just slow, but then i made the fatal mistake of trying Windows 11 and was like "if this is what I'm eventually ganna have do deal with...no thanks." Tbf, Microsoft was promting it, so i assumed it was an upgrade to Windows 10, not a wannabe chromebook with some baffling "lets fix what isn't broken and works great as is" choices.

Well, thinking about it, there was a third reason i ususally neglect to mention:

3. I had a choice. I like looking at all my available options and choosing what to go with instead of having something chosen for me. I'm a big boy and can make my own choices for myself, thank you (looking right at you there, Bill). As soon as i heard "there's something else besides this or an Apple Product. And it's much better than some people like to give it credit for" i researched a bit on the differences, the requirements, and a good place to start, and well, here I am.

As for what I am, IDK. I'm a happy Linux user, but i also get some people are perfectly happy Windows users (or aren't, but are locked into the ecosystem regardless) and hey, as long as we agree that both OS's have their quirks, you let me keep my penguins, and I'll let ya keep your...erm, Windows (does Windows have a mascot? I doubt it, but you never know)

Being poor. In college in the 90s, my lead sysadmin couldn't afford Minix for this system we had, so we tried to compile Linux on it. Three days later, we still failed, and gave up, but this was kernel 0.93 or something, so it had a ways to go. But I learned so much from that experience without paying for a university course or something.

Years later, I bought a copy of Red Hat 6 at a Costco. Windows 95/98 was big, I didn't know how to pirate it, so I went back to Linux and it worked great on my "franken-puters" cobbled together from spare parts dumpster diving. Steep learning curve back then, though. Then I brought it to my workplace, went from UNIX admin to Linux admin, and soon I preferred it to Windows. Been my daily driver for decades, now.

Am I an evangel? A little, but I find that "right tool for right job" is a better approach. Linux is great for everything, BUT a comprehensive system like MS Office AND Active Directory simply does not exist in FOSS space yet; everything is cobbled together and a kludge still trying to catch up.

Obsessed? Kinda. I just assembled some ansible scripts to roll my own distro. Why? To see if I could.

I had always used Windows for the longest time. I used a certain cloud service and was impressed with how easy it was to manage services with docker. Fast forward a couple of years and I got a small mini-PC with Windows. I tried to install docker on it but Windows back then had no way of using Docker without virtualizing it with Hyper-V, a Pro feature. I thought let me give this another try. I tried to replicate the same setup with NSSM tools. It kinda worked eventually but it was a dirty hack at best and I did not like this solution.

I thought to myself, why would I pay Microsoft to use a feature I can use for free with Linux and get better performance while at it.

Here we are 7-8 years later.

Dark mode back in the day (XP/Vista era). I wanted to theme everything and have cool UI/visual features in a non-shady download-this-third-party-totally-safe-theme-engine-wink-wink way.

Messing around with a Raspberry Pi was what got me over the threshold of learning enough to utilize Linux primarily, and then eventually exclusively.

Obsessed? No. Persistently interested though.

I communicate Linux as an option when the circumstance are appropriate. It is often not worth getting involved in other people's tech decisions. My mother is now a satisfied Mint user, after she asked me if there was more pleasant and private way to use her computer. It has been great for me, because my providing tech support has gone to basically zero.

Steam Deck. Now I have a Framework running PopOS too.

I was at CompUSA back in the 90s and there was a Red Hat box with a manual in the clearance bin. I think it was Red Hat 4. I took it home and installed it on an old computer. I mainly used it as a server for testing Perl scripts for my own websites but I did use it as a desktop some.

I was a Windows N/T and Novell Netware administrator at the time and the company I worked for needed a "Linux guy". Most people had barely heard of Linux so I became the de facto Linux admin. I ended up managing an Apache server and writing what was really just an API that ran under mod_perl. It returned structured text like modern APIs (JSON wasn't a thing yet).

Now almost 30 years later and I still love Linux. Linux powers my life. I run my own email and web servers. I self-host lots of stuff. I'm not a big fan of desktop Linux but I work on Linux servers all day long. I have no desire to come home and fuck with my workstations.

I was on windows 8 and 10 was out my pccwas old slow i really didnt want a pile of spyware with my os. I asked around and found Linux mint.

I could just do more with it.

I didn’t have a lot of money and went dumpster diving for parts. Changed out a bad capacitor and got a system booting. This was back in Pentium 3 and 4 days. I found a 512MB stick of memory that had some bad areas. Linux was able to map around it with some kernel options at boot. Since I had limited storage I used knoppix and had a print out of the needed kernel options and memory addresses.

Once it was up and running I was able to do anything and everything I wanted. I did built a better system and got gentoo going a year or so later.

Eventually I got gaming mostly working with the project that eventually became crossover. First software I ever purchased too. I started dual booting less.

I bounced back and forth between windows and Linux and when I built a system around 2010 I didn’t even bother configuring it for dual booting.

I haven’t really touched anything windows since around the release of Windows 10 and only used windows 7 for work reasons prior. These days I’m pretty useless with anything on that end.

So I’m an evangelical fan of Linux. I use it everywhere I can and the FOSS philosophy resonates with me. I advocate for it where it makes sense and works. I’ll go out of my way and spend time & money helping people move into it too.

I was trying to run a forum in the early 2000s and was pirating Windows Server with IIS to do it, and I discovered this entire other free, legit OS to do what I wanted to do with ease. Back in those days you could install a "LAMP" stack during install which gave you Apache, MySQL, and PHP automatically configured, whereas in IIS I was having to install a seperate PHP interpreter and figure out how to send php scripts to it and back, the whole thing seemed janky.

After that Linux became my go-to for any IT related project, and even more so when I started my electronics hobby due to how you can just make it do any damn thing you want.

In 2020 it became my desktop permanently after Microsoft decided they didn't want their OS running on my perfectly fine computer anymore.

I ended up replacing windows with Ubuntu. I liked it a lot but I couldn’t use it because I needed to use FL Studio on windows. I started dual booting Linux with windows to get a sense of the terminal. I’m not the most experienced user but I figured out how to get around and I enjoy using Linux. I have tried Arch, Nix, EndeavorOS, ArcoLinux, Manjaro, and Ubuntu Unity. I want to try OpenSUSE since I’ve been reading up on it and it seems to be my end game distro imo.

On the list of reasons over the years.

1. High School friend showed me their install, and how it had these sick spinning cube desktop. Ditched it once I realized I couldn't do anything I wanted on it.

2. In University, the ComSci labs all had networked machines with Ubuntu installed. It was cool, but again outside of coding, I couldn't do anything I wanted on it.

3. 2022, I got a new Laptop, couldn't use Windows 11 without an account (I know of the work arounds). MS has Windows 10 with a EOL in 2025, and Valve is pushing the Steam Deck hard. Gave it a second shot. I now can do everything I want on it without issue. I even made a 1 year retrospective video about it.

I use arch btw /s

Wanting to make a custom ROM for a phone.

My dad gave me a laptop running ubuntu as my first computer many years ago and I have never found any non-linux operating system I really liked. There are some things I love about Haiku, but it just isn't quite good enough to replace Linux for me, at least not yet

I've been using Linux for a long time on various other systems but what caused me to finally ditch Windows completely on my daily driver was:

A nonconsensual Windows Update which caused my bitlocker encryption to become corrupted and I lost everything on that disk.

This unscheduled reformat combined with all the other shady practices on Windows lately cemented my choice.

It's been several months now and I couldn't be happier!

The quality of gaming on Linux has advanced an incredible amount in the last year or so since I've tried it. Most of my games will either run natively or require a few extra clicks to use proton in steam. A few outliers that aren't on steam required Lutris.

On average I find the performance in games is better on Linux, even for non-native games using proton/wine.

Definitely would recommend giving it a shot if you are on the fence. Particularly if you've tried gaming in the past and were disappointed.

OS2/Warp

IBM showed us there could be a superior OS that wasn't Windows or Mac. Been chasing that dragon ever since.

windows 8 that came with my core i3 laptop. did not jump into the windows10 bandwagon for all the bad things i was hearing about it. gave up when some apps start doing crazy stuff because os is old. mucked around with mint, and distro hopping from usb. mind-blown. now i've acquired a fairly new laptop and dual booted with debian12. has never done a random restart on it for months (due to force-it-down-your-throat-win-update). i still use a win laptop for work and some games, but that will never touch my personal computer. it's fun reading all the comments here. thanks :)

It came to me in a dream

I used Unix workstations in college. After graduation my choices were MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, or a real OS. Started with Slackware in the mid-1990's.

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....

Cost

Plex

At the time, Windows was updating and restarting whenever it felt like it which would stop my Plex server from running until I logged back in. Windows and Macs are now just thin clients that allow me to connect to all my Linux servers.

Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, ME, Vista...

Stopped evangelising when I realised people hate evangelists telling them what they should do. Started leading by example instead. Curious people approach you if they want to learn.

Won't be going back to proprietary OSs.

win10 EOL support. Genuinely hate the incorporation of AI into the OS.

Ham Radio, the Raspberry Pi and Windows 8.1.

I first heard about a Raspberry Pi on the 2 meter band, someone mentioned making contacts in Europe with one. Sounded intriguing. I wanted to work digital modes but didn't really want to hook up my laptop to my radio for fear of wiring it wrong, so I bought a Raspberry Pi. Which runs Debian Linux. I learned how to cd and ls and sudo and apt-get.

Then that laptop I was being so precious with suffered a monitor backlight failure. And it was time for a new laptop. This was in 2014, Windows 8.1 was on the shelves at that point.

I was enjoying using the Pi at the time, and decided to try running Linux on my new laptop instead of Windows. And I've been using Linux Mint ever since.

Something felt wrong using Windows. It felt right when I switched to Linux.

I was tired of Windows, so I tried Linux for a month, then switched to Mac OS for a decade.

When Mac OS started to become iOS, I started leaning towards Linux.

When my MacBook keyboard caps started falling off and Apple told me to replace the entire keyboard, I left them indefinitely.

And now I've been here for a few years. So far, so good.

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.

Linux is foss

and gnome looks neat!

I don't really have any one stand out reason. I first introduced myself to Linux in the late 1990s, buying a Red Hat CD and phone book sized manual that at the time cost a lot, especially as I was poor student. I think one of my tutors (I as doing computer studies) said that he ran Linux and I got nerdy and curious. It sadly didn't last long as too much of my other study was based around Windows.

Over time, Iecame to despise corporate monopolies, spying, manipulation, billion dollar advertising budgets, and turning people into products (not just Microsoft, but Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) more and more, so I decided it was time (early 2010s) to give Linux a go again. I'd read people saying it was more usable for gaming than it used to be. Still required giving up some games since Steam Proton wasn't a thing yet but for me, I was making an concious choice to only support gaming that was Linux native (or games that I already owned that worked on WINE).

I distro hopped bit before settling on Mint. Used that for about 2 years and then got a new PC. Wanted to challenge myself more and went with Arch. I have enjoyed the customisation, freedom, privacy and ethically conscious choice ever since.

I wouldn't say I'm obsessed but I certainly try and free other people from the shackles of non-floss software as much as I can.

Afterstep on Red Hat 5.1

Story: I started a new job as a system engineer in December 1998, it was the heyday of Windows 9x and NT 4.0. First day on the job, the guy who was sitting across from my assigned desk was running something strange and insanely cool looking on a giant CRT monitor. I was mesmerized by the spinning window animations, the virtual desktops, the cool icons, the falling snow... I struck up a conversation with him, asked him what kind of system he was running there. He told me he was running Linux and this was the Afterstep window manager. Turns out he was the local sysadmin there as well as a Linux evangelist and someone I got along with instantly.

I had already been curious about Linux and wanted to try it, so he gave me a copy of Red Hat 5.1 to install on my home PC and I started my journey there. 25 years later I still run Linux, the expertise I developed with it has helped me immensely in my career and I'm still friends with my former coworker.

RIP Windows 7

Windows 11 was so buggy that simply plugging in a USB device caused it to crash, I joked about installing Linux then I actually did. I have not looked back since.

ADHD, and Pablo Vazquez from Blender.

I worked with Unix before Windows was a thing. I've worked on windows, saw what a shitshot it was (and still is), and work with Linux instead. I do have Windows PCs at the lab for some renitent software, too, but it is always a step backwards when it comes to data procession.

My OS, shipped with the PC, became slow.

Screenshots of x-plane and other games on the back of the Red hat 5.2 jewel case.

Windows XP pissed me off one two many times.

How to dual boot linux mint and windows (ended up accidentally ended up just having mint on my drive).

Cost and price ..... I could never afford much in terms of tech purchases 20 years ago.

Always collected second hand systems, first learned to find and use cracked windows copies, then when that got too complicated and difficult, found Linux and have never looked back. The amount of money I've saved not to paying for proprietary software, went into buying better hardware that I used to install Linux and OSS software.