Windows.

I installed Linux and the feeling of freedom and privacy hit me so hard that I immediately began committing crimes, knowing that the FBI could never track me. Piracy, sexual assault, trademark infringement, petty larceny, tax fraud, you name it. I also own several fully automatic firearms even though I live in the state of California, but it doesn't matter. Ever since I removed Windows 10 from my computer and replaced it with Arch Linux, and began using a PinePhone as my daily driver phone, police can't even stop me in traffic. Windows may have a lot of video games, but the benefits of Linux should not be understated.

I was on windows and I was forced to update and then it bricked my computer and I had to reinstall windows except when I did it asked me for a windows license key. I tried everything to recover my license key but wasn't able to.

This was around the time linus texh tips was teasing his upcoming month on linux series so I was like fuck it I'll give it a go. Spent a week on mint and wifi was broken then tried Endeavor, Garuda and fedora and settled on manjaro. Manjaro was amazing to me. Everything worked out of the box and kde plasma looked so clean and I could set it up exactly how I wanted.

Then I watched linus tech tips video on linux and I was like wtf how did he have such a bad experience is he dumb?

I was fucking around with my windows pc.

And then i found out that you can fuck more around in linux, and that was the story of my first ubuntu iso burned on a cd.

I had no clue about anything but was blown away by something "different"

Windows kept doing things I didn't want it to.

The last straw was when I had a 24 hours render running, and Windows decided to update and reboot 1 hour before it was done. I was using the computer at the time, RAM, CPU, and GPU were all at max, the mouse was being moved, I clicked "later" every time the update pop-up appeared, and it still rebooted.

Linux does what I tell it to, and doesn't do what I tell it not to do. I didn't think that was a big ask until Windows.

I joined the Fediverse and it seemed like everyone was using it!

I’m unable to fully convert at the moment, but boot it up every so often to experiment.

Windows Telemetry at first. Then Windows browbeating various products - "Edge please download Firefox" - Edge: "Why, I am better than Firefox" Me:"Do as I say" Edge: "But -blah blah nah" and so on. I know there are ways around it, but if someone can force an update against my will on my machine, it is not my machine. This leads to questions of what else can they do without my permission. Linux is my machine. I control when and how and what. Also customization.

The Foss philosophy and being poor

Windows 10/11 happened.

Microsoft anti-consumer shitfuckery. I've never had any problems with Windows on a technical level. It has its share of annoyances, but so does Linux. But the ever increasing drive to take away control from the user in order to squeeze out the last penny of revenue just got too much.

Windows 95 crashing for the 5th time that day corrupting another high school paper.

I knew nothing about Linux, but bought a red hat 6 cd and installed it. I never dual booted or ever went back.

This was in the day of getting a modem that actually worked on Linux was a PITA as everything had turned into software based winmodems. And it wasn’t like you could just order one online. You had better have hoped Best Buy/circuit city/compusa had something.

I use Linux for about 2 years

Up until February this year, I was still using a 14 year old DDR2 desktop. Windows 10 started to get quite slow and had some annoying crashes (mainly the fault of my goofy old hardware, of course)

I learned about Linux as an alternative through a Linux Tech Tips video about gaming on Linux, and Valve's announcement of the Steam Deck, I was also interested in FOSS apps as alternative to proprietary ones.

Decided to try Linux Mint. With no prior experience with Linux, lack of luck finding good tutorials, and some weird thing happening with my games not launching, I had a very rough start.

But thanks to Mint, suddenly my DDR2 desktop got a lot smoother :D also, all of my drivers worked out of the box, and I got very surprised with Linux's plug-and-play hardware capabilities.

So I decided to learn how to use it, tinkered alot with my system, and broken it alot! It was kind of frustrating, but fun at same time.

And without noticing, I had already learned lots about Linux from a more technical, and then, philosophical point of view.

Now I'm a great fan of Linux and FOSS, and have been helping friends to move to it by giving support with issues I had in the past.

Back in the 90s when I was in uni, it was the only way to have a unix-like development environment for C/C++. I also spent an inordinate amount of time testing linux on exotic hardware, like 386 laptops or older Macs. There weren't many distros back then, but I tried them all: Debian, Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, m86kLinux and even (shudder) Slackware.

It was (and still is) an extremely fun way to tinker around. But I have to say, I'm not complaining that pretty much everything works out of the box nowadays!

Most people want to stick to Windows or MacOS, and that's fine for them if they want to put up with it. Pushing Linux or OSS in general is counter productive IMO and just puts people on the defensive. I'd rather plant a seed here and there. If someone complains about Windows on a kid's laptop, then hey, I got an old laptop for my daughter and put Fedora on it. It was easy to install and maintain, unobstrusive and she can get everything done for school she needs. Or talking about gaming - you know the Steam Deck? You can game without Windows - Linux is a painless, drop-in replacement!

It pains me that a lot of Linux users were pushy elitist neckbeards that spent so much energy defending their distro of choice and Linux in general. The community tends to make Linux appear like some difficult, arcane way of using a computer. "First you must pass the initiation rite and choose the correct distro!" Seriously, fuck that mindset. Just download whatever, install it and enjoy hassle-free computing!

Windows 10. I was happy with Windows 7, got prompted to 'upgrade' to Windows 10... I declined. Next morning, my PC had Windows 10 installed. I got this crazy idea that my PC belonged to me and that I would be the one to decide what OS to use. Hello Linux Mint.

Windows. Windows caused me to get into it.

For me it was all the frustration I had trying to disable Win11 telemetry and other non-essential distruptive things like adds in the start menu.

Switched to Debian with GNOME. I have been super happy ever since. Seamless transition and awesome experience using a OS that is not adversarial.

I'm a cheap bastard.

Free is free

I was learning C/C++ back then and although the nostalgia is strong with this one, Turbo C++ was obviously shit (and Borland quickly killed it later anyway), and while looking around for alternatives I found DJGPP which introduced me to the GNU toolchain and so the jump to Linux to have all of that natively instead of running on DOS was very natural. My very first distro was Redhat Linux 6.2 that I got as a free CD along with a magazine (also got a Corel Linux CD the same way that I was excited about given how their WordPerfect was all the rage back then but I was never able to install it, I don't remember what the issue was) and it looked like this (screenshot from https://everythinglinux.org/redhat62/index.html ):

I thought maybe Minecraft would run faster on it. It didn’t, but it kicked off a learning process.

Windows

Hated Windows. TechTV had a download of day that "works on both Windows and Linux!"

"I don't know what Linux is but it can't be worse that Windows."

I've been on it ever since. That was 20+ years ago.

I honestly don't know how windows works.. I only ever used it for about a year and some change when I was a teenager in the 90s.

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.

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

Started at college in 08. Multiple Debian internal servers, and now daily driving PopOS since 2018.

No ragrets.

I was just a tech-obsessed teenager who thought it seemed cool. Messed around with it but since gaming was a pain in the ass I shelved it and went to Windows. Eventually administering Linux systems became my career.

Windows 11 is hot garbage. I haven’t had anything outright break, but with my hardware my machine should not be as slow as it is. Installed Ubuntu since it’s what I messed around with as a teenager and here we are.

However, now that gaming is even relatively painless in Linux, it’s here to stay on my personal desktop. A couple tools still require a Windows install but 90% of my usage is Linux and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

EDIT: I wouldn’t say I’m an evangel or anything. I don’t preach Linux to people, nor would I want to get my friends and family into it. The last thing I want to do is troubleshoot their botched install because they fucked around with system files and broke something.

I wouldn’t really say I’m obsessed either, it’s an OS. It allows me to actually do the things I want to do, and quickly. I enjoy it but I don’t plan on distro hopping, making low level tweaks, or anything. It just works and lets me work and play games. That’s good enough for me.

Just windows, I had windows 10 installed on my laptop and was constantly fighting with windows update so when the system broke (wouldn't boot) I finally installed Ubuntu. These days I use arch BTW.

End of Windows 7

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 was a broke college student, my pc broke, I had no money for a new one and my roommate gifted me a pc with OpenSUSE installed.
It took me an embarassingly long time to figure out how to install software on it.

Saw what windows 11 was going to be like and figured I should bail and learn Linux before I had to move over. Been just under 2 years on Linux. Don't regret my decision.

Lack of money, I couldn't afford to pay for a Windows license. After discovering how to install Linux more than 25 years ago, I became eager to learn it and never looked back.

I was all in on the Apple Eco System. I had a MacBook Pro, Apple TV, Iphone, Apple Watch etc. Then my 2010 MacBook Pro stopped getting updates because Apple said its hardware couldn't keep up with the new features they were adding.

I loved that thing. I had put extra RAM in it and replaced the Hard Drive with an SSD. Even though Apple said it was 'too old to receive support', it ran like a dream for several more years when I installed Linux on it. It was great for my constant distro hopping. I used it until it died in 2021.

I think it was around 2017 when Apple stopped supporting that generation of MacBook. High Sierra was the last Mac OS version to get native support. At that stage, I already had to use third party apps to do things like set 'night mode' to reduce eye strain at night and control my Apple TV because Apple refused to add these features natively.

Now in late 2023, you couldn't pay me to use an Apple Product. I'm all in on FOSS. I went from an Iphone to a Fairphone. From A MacBook Pro and Apple TV to a Tuxedo Aura 15, Steam Deck and running my own Jellyfin server on an Asus laptop with a headless Ubuntu installation.

I also went from iMessage to Signal, Apple Keychain to Bitwarden, Safari to Firefox etc

I have Fedora installed on my main desktop but I don't use that much these days. My gf has been hinting at getting me Fairbuds XL for Christmas and I honestly can't wait for the day that Linux will be viable instead of Android.

TL;DR Apple's greed drove me to try Linux, and now I'm never going back lol

I needed LaTeX, and in the early 1990s, the Dos version sucked, and Scientific Word on windows 3 was very expensive.

/Oh yeah I'm old

Just curiosity really, it was when I first started learning Java from my father's old textbook. The "Getting your environment setup" had instructions for both Windows, OS X, and Linux/Ubuntu.

Of them all, the instructions for Ubuntu were the simplest (sudo apt-get install openjdk or a similar package), in order to get the Java dev tools installed.

Ended up giving Ubuntu a look in a VM since I hadn't heard of "Linux/Ubuntu" (which was also the first time I used a VM) during the 8.04 days!

Funnily enough I actually put Java down for a bit since I just couldn't get into it. IIRC though, my first project on my GitHub had something to do with Python+GTK. Then eventually I got back into Java when I discovered I could make Minecraft plugins/mods.

Of course I was pretty young at the time, maybe 13 or 14? So I didn't know (or would've cared) about the whole privacy aspect of Linux - that came much later. But ever since then, like many others, I've always maintained that Linux is the best development environment for me.

I got tired of windows breaking its self. Windows XP would get very slow after using it for a while and would need a reinstall to fix it.

i came because of microsoft paranoia, then stayed for the customization

A local hero was saving women from Windows by installing fresh Linux distros on their dated machines. I wanted this superpower.

The constant reinstalling of windows. I actively resisted it because I wasn’t interested in learning something new. My laziness eventually kicked in and it was easier to learn Linux.

NASA.

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.

Resenting Microsoft more than I hated Linux basically. When Windows started pushing malware-like popups and automatically "upgrading" peoples OS without asking I started using Linux as my main OS. At that point I disliked Linux because I had had some bad experiences with attempting to use it in the past, but it was becoming clear it is the lesser of two evils. Over the years it got more tolerable while Windows just got worse. Not an evangelist or obsessed at all, I actually still dislike it, but there's no way I'm going back.