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.

ad and annoyance-free

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.

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.

First experimented when Windows 8 took away Aero Glass and other customizations. Committed when I had to fight with Windows 10’s twice-yearly feature updates that messed with my settings and wasted space with new programs I didn’t ask for. I now keep a separate laptop just to run Windows when I have to.

Distrohopping was mostly confined to my first year using Linux. Deepin (kept crashing) -> UbuntuDDE (went unmaintained) -> Arch Linux -> Debian. Settled on Debian Stable since it just works, I haven’t been using bleeding-edge hardware, and I don’t like things changing around too often (see my Chicago95 rice).

I tried pop in November last year. I’ve since tried nobara, mint and now arch. I hate it because many arch users are so obnoxious but the AUR is invaluable, I think. It’s a bit more work to setup, but with the new arch install script it’s really not so bad. Watch out for the partitioning bug though! You basically have to manually partition your drive currently, because of an off by one error.

It looked different

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 ).

It’s paid off!

Honestly, because Windows is a steaming pile of garbage and using Mac feels like swimming with pool floaties.

I recently started using NixOS as my distro and it has been phenomenal. Saying the learning curve is a little steep is like calling a hurricane a little bit of rain, but once you start to get it, it’s extremely powerful and delivers on the promise of “all of your configuration in one place.” It gives me a lot of peace of mind to know that every time I tweak or fix something, it’s reliably making it into a version controlled and backed up repository. I could throw my laptop out the window, pick up a new one, and have all my applications installed and configured within half an hour.

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.

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.

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 switched probably 2010 or 2011. I think I was on windows 7, but it might have been windows vista and I never got to 7.

At some point I had made a realization that software I downloaded from sourceforge (this website has been terrible for a long while now, but I think it was decent way back) was heavily correlated with not being shitty. After making this observation, I was able to generalize it to open source software tends to be less shitty and I had a year or two of experiences afterwards that reinforced my theory, which led me to try experimenting with linux installs.

I started with dual-booting Fedora, I had no idea what I was doing and didn’t like the user experience as much as windows at first. I did a little bit of distro-hopping to see if there was something more appealing to me, but during that time I discovered the free software movement and that resonated with me a lot more than open source had, so I decided I wasn’t interested in going back to windows. Moved to Trisquel (originally an Ubuntu derivative, and fully-free to the point of being FSF-approved) and grew to love it.

After a couple years, I decided I was curious enough to learn more about how the system works, so I moved to Parabola (fully free Arch derivative) to force myself to learn. I really learned barely anything, but I got very good at getting things working by trial-and-error while reading documentation I don’t fully understand. I haven’t progressed very far beyond that point at all in the years since, but I got too comfortable to make a significant change.

In the past five or so years, I’ve to some degree dropped the free software philosophy in favor of a philosophy that the problem runs much deeper (no hope of a successful free software movement in a capitalist society, and software is not even close to the most beneficial consequence of getting past capitalism), and I’ve moved to legit Arch rather than Parabola.

I’ve basically gone ten years without real issues on arch installs, but I still have no idea what I’m doing, I’m just comfortable with it and don’t want to put any effort into a change. I feel like if anyone from the arch forums or anyone knowledgeable in general took five minutes to look at my pc they’d be like wtf are you doing. It’s whatever, it works well enough for me.

I switched because I was sick of dealing with corporate garbage and abuse at the hands of Microsoft.

It wasn’t the cost, I’ve always activated my Windows installations with gray-market keys bought on eBay for 5-10 dollars. Plus I’ve paid far more for open source software than I ever did for Windows and their proprietary trash.

I had so many problems with Windows over the years. Fighting with drivers, fighting with software installs, fighting with the registry, etc etc.

I also couldn’t stand how bad their spying was getting, how bloated and clunky their software was, and how much adware they were forcing on me.

I finally vowed about 3 years ago that I would never use Windows again for any of my personal computing, no matter what I had to sacrifice.

Turns out, I didn’t have to really sacrifice anything significant, and I gained far more than I lost. I would never go back to Windows now, especially with what is happening with windows 11.

My main computer runs Nobara, because I use it mostly for gaming. I use KDE Plasma as my DE. Both work fantastic, games run fast and smooth, and everything looks so pretty lol.

I use Mint Debian Edition with Cinnamon on my laptop and it’s awesome too. Almost never have any problems with it.

My work allows me to use Linux, so I run Debian with KDE Plasma. It took a bit of work to get everything running smoothly, but I’m enough of a power user that it wasn’t too bad.

My phone runs GrapheneOS, I’m on it right now typing this. Love it also, so glad to be off a corporate version of Android. GrapheneOS is awesome and does everything I need very well.

I’ve used a ton of different distros. Different strokes for different folks. I’ve used Arch, Fedora, Zorin, Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, Alma, and several others. Some were a fad, some I use for my servers, some I use for home lab testing, etc.