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.
Being a geek, I have tried many linux distros (I’ve been using Linux since 1998, on and off). Curiosity was what was driving my usage of it.
In the early 2000s, when I used to write for OSNews.com (second only to Slashdot for OS tech news back then), I really didn’t find any distro polished enough to be a daily driver for me. Red Hat was big at the time, but even when ubuntu came around, it was still not as polished as it is today. These days, I’m using Debian-Testing mostly, however I concede that the best distro for newbies (and for me really, I’m too old now to be tinkering) is Linux Mint (flagship version). Mint really is well-thought out for daily usage. It might not have the latest tech innovation in it, or be bold with its choices, but it just works 99% of the time.
As time has gone by, and seen corporations taking everything for themselves (via enshittification), I have stopped using Linux because it was the geeky/cool thing to do, but I started using it because it frees me from all the spyware, and corporation agendas. Back in the 2000s, when I was a news editor for foss matters, I was mostly siding with the BSD license side of things (and mit/apache/ etc). I felt that the GPL was too restrictive, and that we should allow innovation take its course as it wants to. Now, that I’ve lost all my faith in corporations doing the right (smart) thing, I’m now a GPL3/AGPL type of a gal. The more “restrictively open” something can be, the better. Don’t allow anyone to manipulate you, or use you, or take away your data etc.
Excel wouldn’t stop converting sku numbers to date formats. IT guy was excited to share an “easy fix” for that with Open Office…
When I saw his genuine excitement as he described Linux, plus the security it provided I realized, if I ran Linux I’d have the best support in the company. And I did.
I eventually had to move on from Linux at work after 10yrs or so but it’s all I run at home.
All because of Excel and those fucking date codes. Which yes, Open Office solved as advertised.
And yes I know you don’t need Linux for that but it was a long time ago.
It was and still is a few things: Mostly the cool factor. It’s different, does what I tell it (safety be damned lol ).
Security: Mostly sane defaults (like not making the initial user with full admin rights).
In the early days, a major factor was being poorer, constantly rebuilding Frankenstein PCs that would trip Ms activation crap. And with so many used parts, performance was better too.
Well … I first got into contact with OpenSource due to Gratis: OpenOffice, Firefox etc. Combining my knowledge of OpenSource with my tendency to break stuff (Reinstalling Boston for the nth time) led me to Linux which I first tinkered with and soon fully adapted.
I had a short hopping phase where I went from Ubuntu (my starter) via Debian (accidentally tried stable) to Arch.
Stuck with arch on my personal machines now run Ubuntu for my work machine and Debian for Servers.
My favourite distro is the right tool for the job (see above) but I’m pretty happy with Arch
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.
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.
Mostly because windows kept bothering me by breaking or changing something every single dn update so I jumped ship and have been pretty happy. Now windows only gets used for certain things I don’t feel like configuring my normal system for.
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.
First time I switched it was because I had a piece of trash for a computer and making it work with Windows was easier said than done. It was truly amazing how smooth that machine would run Ubuntu while crying to run Windows XP (t’was a long time ago) I knew about Linux before then because my father was an oldschool geek and had messed around with old Linux distros that came on magazine cover discs, so I was somewhat familiar with the idea of Linux. Still had a lot to learn.
Eventually I got myself a “real” computer, and because I’d be using it for gaming and this was before Proton was a thing, I had it run Windows. But good god it was hard to go back. And the first thing that made Windows a pain in the arse to me was something surprisingly simple: This was the Windows 7 days, and Microsoft had yet to figure out what a Dark Theme was. It wasn’t until Windows 10 that one was added, and even then, it took quite a few updates for it to appear across things like the file explorer and such.
Enshittification kept happening and such, but I couldn’t exactly drop windows at the time, I’d spent a fortune on a gaming PC and it was my only games machine. I longed to go back to Linux (even set up dual-boots for some time but didn’t stick with them) but couldn’t justify it vs the loss of most of my library.
Then Proton happened and things were good again. It took me a bit longer to actually take the leap, but when I did, I was so happy.
… Ironically, nowadays I only boot into Windows for work reasons. Specifically Adobe reasons. What a time to be alive that all my games and chat applications and (…) are all on Linux and Windows is basically a quarantined zone for After Effects. Life is good.
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