Basically Intel graphics on windows broke. Hopped to Linux, no such problems here.
Tried (hopped) almost every mainstream distros, some niche ones too. Due to some issues with trackpad, I am forced to use arch based distros. Currently rocking EndeavourOS.
For me it was network card and underpowered POS laptop. For light office work and web it is enough computing power with Linux but with Windows it was unusable.
I took a couple of in-person Linux courses when I was about 16-17. Teacher gave me a Kubuntu 6.06 CD to try at home.
A short time later I was using Ubuntu 8.04, 9.04, etc. and until last year I was on Ubuntu MATE 14.04 until I made a new MATE 20.04 install and I built a new main PC with MATE 22.04.
I really notice the difference in UI apps between Ubuntu and Debian, which I tried (and failed) to swich to several times already.
I’ve used and gave support to RHEL in a couple of jobs (graphical and non-grahpical)
Both. I have to use windows at work and I hate it.
I did a little bit of distro hopping: Mint, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Arch, Guix. Now I think I finally arrived at Tumbleweed, no need to hop somewhere else so far.
But I really like the concept behind Guix, it’s just not finished enough.
I mostly just wanted a simple media server at home but also I needed to use Linux and Docker for university work. I’ve only really used Ubuntu. I’m happy enough with it and have no reason to change for now
I tried Linux in college because it was a hot thing there. Been hooked ever since.
I’m not a distro hopper. I used Debian Testing for many years. Last year I switched to NixOS because it was a compelling value proposition for me. I’m very happy with it!
initially i chose Linux because Windows on my laptop was way too sluggish. eventually, me and my family made a definite move to Linux because of the continuous enshittification Windows is going through in the modern days. Linux has become good enough for daily driving and even gaming that it just made no sense sticking to Windows.
i wouldn’t say i’m fully out of the “distro hopping” phase just yet, but i’m certainly doing it rarely, once in, like, 3-4 months maybe. currently using Void Linux on my personal laptop.
my favorite distro is Mint. yes, it’s a basic-ass choice, but it is the de-facto “just works” distro.
I am an IT nerd so I use Linux to learn more about the OS and programming. This was the original reason and still is the reason I keep a Linux machine on hand. Current machine is a dual-boot LG Gram running Windows 11 (wanted to keep the original OS so just shrunk it) and Arch Linux. It runs on Arch 90% of the time. Really only boot the windows partition to use it for work.
I went into Linux because I saw some coworkers use it. I stayed in it because I fell in love with the ideals (while it also works at least just as well as propietary OSs).
That shows how important it is that you spread the word. Linux does not do advertising. It needs the community. I love that.
I guess in Linux you either go Ubuntu and stay Ubuntu… Or (like me) you hop for a year or so until you find out your place. (Generalisation)
My fav is Arch Linux. Endeavour OS for easier install of Arch Linux. I haven’t found anything better for personal computers. For work, the choice is clearly Debian for me, because Debian.
I switched to Linux full time (I'd gone back and forth for a while) about 10 years ago when my XP laptop died.
I had access to Windows 7 via work, but I didn't like how much telemetry was being sent back to MS...
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.
The Linuxes are the bestest IDEs ever. They even let you run mini IDEs (vim, vscode, etc) inside them. Coincidentally, they’re also where a lot of server code gets deployed, so they’re a a good place to verify fresh coffee.
I’m sure other platforms have caught up, but when I started out, *nix was the most accessible dev platform I could find.
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 began using Linux as my daily driver in 2001. I was 21. I think my story is pretty unique.
I lived in a house with 5 roommates, of which I was the second oldest. The others were 17, 18, 19 and 43. Except for the 43 year old we were basically all friends from Waldorf School (which is a fucking cult disguised as a liberal arts school, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise).
There were only two computers in the house. Mine was the only one with an ethernet card. I got a Cable Modem. No one else thought they needed fast internet.
It was a kind of disaster of a living situation… like the 17 year old was an emancipated minor who was stripping using a fake ID, the 18 year old was a stoner who worked at the local bagel shop and sold weed. The 19 year old was a kid who immigrated from Mexico City when his mom married a American and was into a BUNCH of sketchy shit. SUPER nice kid, but his friends were like, in retrospect, obviously a bunch of gangsters.
Before the 43 year old we had two other roommates. The first was a girl who was 20 who we knew from school, but then she left and went to college out of state. The second was a girl our stripper roommate knew who was ALSO a stripper and had an inoperable brain tumor. Poor girl was 19 years old and was told she had 18 months to live. She quit school, became a stripper and dedicated her life to sex, drugs and partying. She was a complete mess and her friends + the gangster guy’s friends turned our house into an absurd party flat that got the cops called on us (for noise or trash or sketchy people hanging around) like once or twice a month.
(yes… this IS the story of how I became a Linux user, I’m getting there).
So terminally ill stripper girl just disappeared one day. Never came home, never showed up to work, we never heard from her again. We needed to pay rent and we were all poor young people. Gangster guy has a legit job as a dish washer at a Mexican restaurant and he’s like “Hey, this dude who’s a server there needs a place to live.”
Enter the 43 year old who is a TOTAL creep ball (imagine that). Just to cut straight to the chase, one of the first things he does is start regularly fucking 17 year old stripper girl’s 16 (or possibly even 15) year old best friend from middle school, who starts spending the night at our house almost every night (and also ditching school all the time). They don’t just fuck in his room, they fuck all over the house and don’t clean up. Like I had clean up their used condoms and cum tissues from all over the house.
The other thing 43 year old creep ball does is fucking use my computer to download a shit ton of porn while I’m not around. Here’s how we caught him.
Some friends and I are messing with my computer and we notice that… for some goddamn reason… AOL has been installed. Why the FUCK would AOL be there? I have a goddamn cable modem! So my buddy, who’s also a computer nerd and is starting to get into Linux himself and I uninstall AOL and it asks if we want to save local files. When we say yes, it dumps… a bunch of AVI files of the hairiest 90s porn you can imagine onto my desktop and all I can think about is this creep ball who’s used condoms I’m cleaning up sitting in my chair in my room when I’m not there jerking off.
SO… my buddy and I nuke my OS and install Debian. I leave the house and leave the computer logged in leaving a virtual console running.
Creep ball comes in to watch porn on my computer and is faced with the linux terminal. He typed (I’m not kidding)
dir
win
win.exe
windows
start windows
motherfucker!
That’s the 100% true story of how I became a Linux user.
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