Windows post 7 was and remains annoying and getting worse all the time. So I wanted an OS without telemetry and one that I could control the updates on. I also work with Linux a lot at work. I use Alma 9 for a LTS release. Don’t have to mess with it much.
I made the switch at the start of the year out of curiosity. I had worked for QNX as a student and though that I should have had a better understanding of the system, so I started using WSL for all my programming.
Then joined Lemmy in the summer and that increased my interest in trying it out full time. I was also getting increasingly disappointed with Windows pushing updates for Win11 and features like onedrive.
I’ve been super happy with it so far. I’ve gotten way more familiar with my OS and it’s been such a huge shift in perspective for me to be able to shape the way the OS works to my workflow rather than the inverse.
maybe sorta. I did not even realize there was a difference at the command line and was like. ok this uses this. Loved the nextstep workstations. worked at a place that was very unix and liked a lot of it. got very excited with macosx which was pretty much nextstep with a freebsd base and macs were always easier to use. Heard stallman speak and definitely agreed and I began to recognized foss and prefer it. Im still pretty practical though so use zorin os although if I had more time I would play around with qubes os and sourcemage linux.
Debian Unstable is a workable rolling release in my opinion.
It’s not as polished as Arch or Tumbleweed, so sometimes you’ll tell it to update and it’ll try to remove or install a bunch of stuff, or refuse to update a package.
In that case, just wait a day or 3 and try again.
My windows install started corrupting my hard drive every 1-2 weeks. Completely unrecoverable requiring a fresh install. I installed Linux to try to see if it was a hardware issue, and it worked fine without issues. Ending up just sticking to it. Couple years later I built a new PC, and tried windows again. I enjoyed having all my games work again (this was pre-proton so Linux gaming was hit or miss), but really hated the experience of using windows after being free from it for so long. Went back to Linux, and have been here ever since (about 10 years now). And thanks to valve/proton, I no longer feel like I’m giving anything up to use exclusively Linux.
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.
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.
I guess this Emacs orgmode, right ? I read of lots of people being very happy with that.
Yep! It’s a ton of fun, great tool for organizing. I’m not very organized, though, so the timestamp functionality with agenda is a nice way to look back. Not that I ever really do nowadays haha, I just write and write.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I am not a NixOS user but I have tried it a few times and I find it really impressive for some features. Though I feel intimidated by having to learn about more features. But the thing I find impressive so far is how to switch DEs so incredibly easy after a basic NixOS install. For example in case you’re currently running XFCE4 :
Edit the one NixOS configuration file to define the DE you prefer on one line, say GNOME, and add some more packages you want.
Run the build switch command.
Reboot (or logout and restart the relevant Display Manager if needed)
Enter GNOME
Edit the one NixOS configuration file again, remove the GNOME line, and insert a line with KDE Plasma
Run the build switch command.
Reboot
Enter KDE Plasma.
It’s like magic! 🐧
I still intend to show this to a Linux friend one day just for fun and sharing. And with clonezilla or rescuezilla it should be pretty easy and fast to recover from backups, show it to the friend, and then put Arch Linux back from backups.
That sounds amazing, to be honest. One major concern I’ve got is the initial setting up. That same friend of mine (the one who exorcised my system) already has a NixOS system for their NAS, and seeing the config files kinda scared me. However, as far as I’ve understood their explanation, it’s basically a “set-up once and forget about it” affair. It’s still quite a departure from the way I’ve learned to do things though, so it’s still intimidating.
To be honest, maybe I’m just waiting for that friend to be somewhat of an expert in NixOS, so that they can push me into using it, lol!
🙂 Well, you know I’d say you don’t have to sacrifice your daily driver Linux install. I use more than one computer and SBC cause I like to tinker with Linux and BSD. In the country that I live in a reasonable (as in : I only need to browse the Internet and check email and Fediverse, no gaming or 3D rendering or pro photo editing and so on) refurbished laptop with touchscreen can be had for just 75 Euros. I’m thinking about getting another one so that I can omit some clonezilla restore/backup time.
I actually have some plans (no timeline though, it’s basically just a wishlist item as of now) of making my own NAS, so there’s that opportunity. And of course, yeah, getting an old machine is also an option. Who knows, maybe I’d get my hands on another old laptop that could very well be my way to testing Linux distros.
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 ).
Mostly daily drive macOS for work / personal stuff (the ease of windows guis with the underpinnings of “Linux” [bsd]), but I have a home lab running a bunch of Linux stuff, my own infra in digital ocean (Debian), and windows for games. I’m not an os absolutist, they each have their 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 ).
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.
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.
Nice. Learning some more Gentoo Linux is on my wish list, but every time I find the first step too intimidating. Now that they have binaries since (half a year or so ?) I expected an installation to be easier. Maybe I should try it with QEMU or VirtualBox. Hmmm, actually, are there any VPS providers that provide Gentoo as image ?
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.
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