What first got you into Linux?

[-]

danct12@reddit

Got into Linux because of Compiz. I was so determined to get it working on VirtualBox, which ended up with me learning commands.

In late-2016, I built a new computer, it dualboots Windows 10 (for gaming) and Linux. Used it for a while until the HDD got too slow for Windows (dying HDD) and as a bandaid solution I switched to Linux full time.

After I built a new rig in 2022, I moved Linux over to a new SSD and used it since. All of the games I play works on Proton/Wine.

[-]

sanca739@reddit

Hello. I have been trying to get in touch with you because of a five year old post you made (weird, I know). Please check your chats because no one else replied on the theme. Deeply appreciate it.

[-]

kaycee_codes@reddit

I wanted to get an old computer to work and I had been hearing about people installing an OS on their PC. I just so happened to be watching a person on Youtube channel named InfinitelyGalactic, more than 10 yrs ago. It got me to install Linux mint Mate on an old PC and the next thing-you-know I'm downloading a bunch of free apps thinking this is the coolest shit ever. I was a student and of course, you couldn't have a lot of applications without coming out of pocket while being broke in college.

[-]

xAcid9@reddit

Curiosity.

Over a decade ago I saw an article about Ubuntu Hardy Heron release, I was like wtf is this? So I download, burn it to CD, and install it on my classroom pc.

[-]

the_wandering_nerd@reddit

I was a CS major in college in the late '90s and was evangelized by both Mac cultists and Linux zealots. The Mac cultists won out for a while but I kept toying with Linux over the years and by the mid-2010s I was able to get Linux to do enough of what I wanted to do to have it be the sole OS on my daily driver machines.

[-]

TheWastedKY@reddit

2020, Raspberry Pi. Been all in on Apple for nigh on a decade and was looking for a way to get Airplay onto my record player and found it awesome that I succeeded. My dalience with Linux is still mainly Pi Based but I hope to one day have a secondary laptop as my “private“ computer.

[-]

Odin_ML@reddit

This video from 16 years ago.
I just wanted to customize my Windows desktop... and the options were awful back then. In comparison to Linux, the options for customization are still terribly limited.

What started off with fascinating a young man with pretty colors and animations, turned into a career. Eventually, I found myself playing video games on Linux. Then I found myself fixing things on Windows, using tools from Linux. Then I started getting into the configuration files of Linux... then I started distro hopping... and before I knew it I built my first LFS build. And at some point I transitioned from "Linux Enthusiast" to "Linux Professional", and "Hobby Dev" turned into "Software Engineer".
Now here I am involved with Linux and national defense. Full autodidact. Yet I learned more from the people in the Linux community than from any particular learning course or institution.

You want to learn about engineering? Spend time with engineers.

[-]

Jorge-Veloza@reddit

1998 slackware

[-]

pudim76@reddit

The first time I've ever saw something about linux was in a brazilian youtube channel called "coisa de nerd", they were teaching how to revive an old pc and after some time they installed linux on that old laptop, that wasn't enough to get me into linux but it was my first contact. The real thing that got me into linux was scrolling through youtube a few months ago and i found one of those memes that linux fanboys make, like saying linux is perfect and blablabla, even though i thought this video was really stupid at the time, it made me get atleast some little interest on linux, and made me try it out to see if it was good.

[-]

grahamjones139@reddit

For me it was laziness - I had a computer controlling equipment in a clean room in about 1991. If I used DOS or Windows I would have had to dress up to go into the clean room to do anything to it. Using Linux (Slackware I think) meant I could monitor and modify it from the comfort of my desk. Now it is just so much easier to write software on Linux than Windows.

[-]

bobsmith010@reddit

spring 2012 CompSci 102 into to operating systems.

has a madman professor who gave no shits about the syllabus and said "here are the things that will be on the test. Write some reports about the first 5 chapters of the textbook. Oh Smith you used the users setting in windows to send system message to me you pass go spend the rest of the semester in the lab working on hardware.

In his lab we did repair work for the students, basically just at cost of parts. and even half those where salvaged from other machines. it became a crash course in Glairy's utilities, ninite.com, and fast back up and wipes of hard drives, followed by "accidently" using a lab key to upgrade a win7 home system to win7 pro or ultimate if the system was part of the CompSci track.

[-]

cilelen@reddit

I got into a fight with Microsoft. I felt that the fact the letters for my xp license key on the back of my pc fading didn't justify buying a whole new license. Microsoft disagreed. I told them I'd never buy one of their products again. They thought I was joking. Fuck Microsoft.

[-]

neuron-doctored@reddit

Damn. That's so shallow. I loathe Bill Gates 'cause he struck me as a sort of MK Ultra Ted Kazinki whack job, and the introduction I was offered was maybe through some coke dealing human trafficing wanna be pimp bozo that knew Billy from the days when their after hour meets were at Seattle strip clubs. And I'm old; real Unix: not that toy os. Start a poll: is Bill Gates the most famous client of Jeff Epstein?

[-]

kjodle@reddit

I saw a t-shirt once that said "Muck Ficrosoft" and I just nodded my head. That may be my next band's name.

[-]

demunted@reddit

Well there was a guy Mike Rowe that had a software company called Mike Rowe Soft. Microsoft sued him.

[-]

Black_Rose_Angel@reddit

🤣💕

[-]

_Second_2_2@reddit

XD

[-]

kneziTheRedditor@reddit

I get you, I myself get into many fights like that too, but I never feel victorious afterwards, more like I wasted time for nothing. I much rather choose things for being good, not for hating the opponent. It makes your life having good vibes :D.

[-]

nas2k21@reddit

I have the key, I'm told I've used it to many times, I guess you're not allowed to reuse the product you own when you build a new PC

[-]

LouisCapertoncNjL@reddit

Microsoft sucks man. Always forcing me to update

[-]

CompetitionSquare240@reddit

Damn you really showed them

[-]

cilelen@reddit

Not really they're like 4 times larger now and my entire livelihood is centered around supporting thousands of windows devices. But every year the percentage of devices using windows drops a little and I feel a small victory.

[-]

webguynd@reddit

I feel you. Despite being all in on Linux since I was little (started on Red Hat running on a hand me down Gateway Pentium II machine) my career never led me into Linux land for work. My livelihood is basically all in on Microsoft & Azure (although I do at least have some Linux running in Azure).

But hey, it pays the bills and I still don't have to touch their products at home.

[-]

ajprunty01@reddit

My whole warehouse at work is Xubuntu. Not my favorite or even my top five but better than paying Microfuck

[-]

kaddkaka@reddit

Wait! Is Microsoft a double description of someone's penis?

[-]

ajprunty01@reddit

I've always loved this joke. And when someone says bill gates was describing himself when he named his company

[-]

smpreston162@reddit

Made me jump bothe feet... windows 11. The start was ads in the start menu which started with win 8 - 11

[-]

Fit-Key-8352@reddit

Label fading warrants new license purchase? Now that's a new one :). BTW, why would you be joking? I practically had a career without really touching windows (Linux, AIX, BSD). I work with Azure now but realistically it could be any cloud providing managed kubernetes...

[-]

Davanen@reddit

My Casper Nirvana Notebook laptop (250Gb storage, 8gig ram, Nvidia 980 and Intel İ5 4th gen) is kinda slow with Win10 and so i just did a quick search about distros and picked Nobara beacuse it's based on Fedora and it is pre-modified to have things i want so i just flashed the ISO into my USB and erased Win10. Now though after using it nearly for a year my screen went black. The PC is on but the screen is just black

[-]

Laughingatyou1000@reddit

boredom during a writing project. I installed ubuntu.

[-]

muffinman8679@reddit

I wanted to get into the ISP game...and to do that using microsoft would have costed thousands of dollars in addition to the per seat liscences......you could do it for free using linux, But it sure wasn't easy.........

[-]

cblegare@reddit

I was playing with a dual boot for fun around 2008. I was using mostly Windows Vista at that time.

Some friends where reinstalling diablo 2 and Windows could not read my damaged CDs, Linux could.

A week later, when working on my D&D scenario on windows, Word corrupted its own file. I used OpenOffice on my Linux partition to salvage the content, but all hyperlinks and automatic table of content and stuff were lost. 10s of hours lost.

This was enough. I wiped the whole drive, installed Kubuntu 8.04 and never looked back. I did some distro hopping though.

[-]

Hornman84@reddit

Microsoft CoPilot

[-]

DaDirtTheOfficial@reddit

Crowdstrike problem and windows 10 being shut down I 2025 made me consider. Now my 1st os was Cutefish OS based on Debian 12. And now I'm happy with linux arch

[-]

FleabagWithoutHumor@reddit

I wanted to try out Windows 10 and it was a nightmare. I reinstalled windows over and over again because I want my system to be perfect, but there is always something going wrong after a certain amount of time. So I switched.

[-]

chrootxvx@reddit

Don’t like being spied on. Don’t like not knowing exactly what’s running on my hardware. Don’t like bloatware, adware verging on malware. Don’t like Microsoft. Like open-source. Like building my OS exactly as I want and need it nothing more or less.

…still run windows on my gayming pc. For now. The future is uncertain.

[-]

UpsetExam7884@reddit

the gaming PC shall be converted

[-]

vavakado@reddit

I decided to try it on my laptop to see if it gets me longer battery life. That was ~1.7 years ago and now I am dailydriving it both on my PC and laptop

[-]

Eccys@reddit

I saw someone who looked funny have "I use arch btw" in their about me. I replaced windows, which I've used since 2019 with arch linux, in 2023, making it my first & fav linux distribution, after backing up my important files, knowing absolutely nothing about linux. NOT even the "ls" command!

And today I still use arch 💝

[-]

SaltyMaybe7887@reddit (OP)

Nice, I use CachyOS which is based on Arch.

[-]

Pure-Willingness-697@reddit

Got into home servers, had a windows server for a while, Knew that Linux was an option as it didn't require money for it. when the server got corrupt, i switched over to proxmox to host it. couldn't use windows as i only had an active copy on the motherboard in the server. I switched to Ubuntu server and joined reddit subs for help. eventually found this cool looking de called hyprland and since i was board, I installed arch Linux and hyprland bc why not

[-]

jubjubrsx@reddit

Windows 11

[-]

aminerwx@reddit

Tired of Microsoft clown fiesta

[-]

CMDR_empr0r@reddit

I got into Linux around when windows 7 was still kicking. I had a cheap laptop that would barely run Minecraft or RuneScape. No matter what tweaks I made to the laptop it wouldn't improve performance. When my uncle told me about Ubuntu I switched that day and tested RuneScape and it ran like a dream.

[-]

implicitDeny2020@reddit

Trying to use windows ME.. I then found Red Hat and subsequently Fedora Core

[-]

MechanicalTurkish@reddit

I still have my Red Hat Linux 6 CDs somewhere. Not to be confused with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The former came out in 1999, the latter in 2010.

[-]

frankev@reddit

Along a similar vein, I had picked up a retail-packaged Red Hat 5.1 or 5.2 box in 1998—at a Best Buy no less—and ran it on some auxiliary laptop PC at work.

It was amazing to me at the time, for I could leverage my traditional Unix skills acquired as an undergrad on a small, portable platform. From 1998 to 2020, I always had a Linux box at work, let alone whatever I was running in my lab at home.

Nowadays, I don't have a dedicated desk and am stuck with a company-issued Windows 11 laptop. But my team and I manage several dozen physical and virtual servers running some flavor of Linux.

At home, I have machines running BunsenLabs Linux, Debian, and Ubuntu as well as MacOS, OpenBSD, and Windows 10. And I have one Windows 11 virtual machine available on my main Ubuntu laptop. Good times!

[-]

Shining_prox@reddit

First distro for me too, came with a journal, had to mess with FIPS for resuze partitions, had to buy a serial modem to connect to the internet

[-]

MechanicalTurkish@reddit

My first was Slackware. I bought a "Slackware UNLEASHED" book that came with a CD. I never did get X to work heh

[-]

Necessary_Context780@reddit

ME is for MEstake. I'm positive Linux saw a spike in new users that year

[-]

raylinth@reddit

Ctrl f + "Windows ME". Upvote

[-]

winston_beck@reddit

Got bored with WinXP one day and tried Ubuntu on my machine - most of the hardware had to be somehow enabled through terminal - that was a shocker :) After I managed, with all the internet research, to get all the things working, I got a jolly roger wallpaper on that laptop :D That was 2008 and Toshiba Sattelite lappy.

[-]

sleepy-gothy@reddit

Honestly the awareness of starting to no longer be in my private space on the internet. I prefer to tend to environments where people put sweat, effort and skills for a great clean and safe ecosystem like Linux.

[-]

dogteam1911@reddit

PPP protocol. I was able to have my own personal unix machine at home and on the Internet. That and i played on a lot of MUDs.

[-]

e-dosta@reddit

The complete, utter uselessness of Windows

[-]

jack123451@reddit

Vista

[-]

WalrusFromSpace@reddit

I broke my laptop and my only other computer was a (old) desktop with Gentoo installed.

Once I got my replacement computer I just installed Gentoo to it since I couldn't be bothered getting a Windows license.

[-]

colt2x@reddit

I was not comfortable with Windows instability in 90's and early 2000's, and i had always old HW, no money for new and powerful stuff. So i moved to OS's, which is more stable, does not dig into your data, and does not need expensive hardware.

[-]

Whomstevest@reddit

My laptop was too slow for windows

[-]

Zeti_Zero@reddit

In junior high school and then in high school I participated in algoritmic competition "olympiad of informatics" and many people from that comunity was uning linux also linux was used in 2 stage of that competition. At the beginning of high school I decided to install linux on my computer and it was Ubuntu 16.04 if I remember correctly.

[-]

sarnobat@reddit

Career. I resisted it throughout college but gave in as a software developer in my first job

[-]

nas2k21@reddit

A very specific niche driver I needed was only useable on a couple specific Linux distros

[-]

KushMaster420Weed@reddit

Makes any computer noticeably faster. Less bloated.

[-]

SilentObserver22@reddit

I was around 12 or 13 and it was something other than Windows that might run on my then old Pentium 3 that ran XP, but definitely wouldn’t run Vista. I’ve been playing with Linux on and off since. Been running Linux full time for about three years now, one of those years being my current Arch install.

I also messed around with ReactOS. At the time they had a roadmap that showed a usable beta wasn’t far off. As we can see that never happened.

[-]

rtk94@reddit

Around 2008 or 2009 I had my first laptop in 8th/9th grade and was teaching myself some HTML and AppleScript. I came across an Instructables tutorial on making an old and slow PC into a LAMP server with Ubuntu. That basically lit the fire under my ass that led to my obsession with technology and programming. It's probably that author's fault that I'm a web developer today 😂

[-]

dbophxlip@reddit

I could no longer activate my copy of vista, my xp CDs were no longer readable. No money to shell out for windows 7 or a new PC. Stated off with a fedora live CD, and I never looked back. Even years later, finally got a setup that supported windows 10 and came with a key, I still used Linux as my primary os, and only booted windows if I needed to do something I was not able to in Linux.

[-]

StructureFew7451@reddit

My first Linux distribution was Arch Linux. I really liked the design of GNOME—the rounded edges, the blur effects, and the overall concept of Linux itself. But after buying a MacBook, I honestly didn't find anything beautiful in GNOME anymore, and now I think it's just an unsuccessful copy of Aqua. However, I have to admit that it's quite decent, though not perfect. Currently, I'm using Debian with Xfce on my OLD laptop, which serves as a home FTP server

[-]

Maykey@reddit

Ubuntu were shipping free CDs back when the main way to enter internet was was dialup modem (I still remember kppp)

[-]

Dependent-Analyst509@reddit

i started using linux cause i was interested in hacking and my first linux experience was kali even though my friend kept suggesting me to use Ubuntu or Mint first but I was A KOOL HECKER.(my first experience was not great and again switched back to windows.)

[-]

rusty-apple@reddit

I got a message in the dream by Linus Torvalds

He was on Ted show and I was the interviewer

[-]

zzApotheosis@reddit

Learning that it was completely free to use is what got me interested. I thought that there was absolutely no way that there exists a fully featured operating system that can do pretty much everything that Windows and macOS can do, but for free. I tinkered, tinkered again, and tinkered some more and 11 years later I now work as a software engineer in Linux environments. I find it interesting that I didn't learn anything about Linux as part of my undergraduate studies, but that's what my career ended up becoming anyway.

[-]

Thebanday1@reddit

Hacking!

[-]

jet_heller@reddit

Windows 3.1

[-]

NecroAssssin@reddit

Same

[-]

terra257@reddit

I first heard about when I got into modding the original Xbox back in 2006, I was 12 years old lol. Slowly after trying different distros/live cds I installed Ubuntu then gradually switched over to Debian. I’m now using arch on my desktop and using windows on a laptop for gaming stuff. Pretty happy to be where I’m at, I’ve fucked up and reinstalled multiple times, been on forums asking the obvious questions and getting “RTFM” as an answer.

[-]

TheLastTreeOctopus@reddit

Getting a netbook as my first laptop and wanting to change my desktop background, which I couldn't do on Windows 7 Starter.

[-]

dek018@reddit

I used linux for the very first time 13 years ago because my college professor of operating systems wanted us to create little programs in C that would control how some processes work (plus all of his class was based mostly on how UNIX operating systems worked)...

After college I tried linux mint for my desktop just out of curiosity and I really loved it, it was light and flashy, but I had it on a dual booted system and I usually didn't touch it, I did most of my stuff in Windows (mostly video games and programming IDEs like Visual Studio), also back then Mint had something very weird (or that's what I believed at least): you had to reinstall the whole operating system every time you upgraded, it kinda turned me off from Mint and from Linux in general.

About 3 years ago I started using Linux Mint as my main operating system and only used Windows for gaming, but Mint was much faster and better for mostly everything else...

When I discovered Proton like a year and a half ago, I slowly started to ditch Windows and used Linux for 99% of mt activities, only used Windows for games that wouldn't work on Linux (although, over time I made every single non-online game to work in Linux)!

The only reason I had windows at that point was because of VR games, but when I heard that Windows would discontinue WMR and Linux started to give support to it, I tried Arch for the first time and saw some things working with VR, it was some hope!

Then I switched to Nobara and VR worked mostly the same than in Arch, and then I finally got rid of Windows, as well as of mint, and so far I've been content with Nobara in the past 4 months or so..

[-]

Car-loss93@reddit

Around 2003, my elementary school teacher mentioned the Linux operating system, explaining that it was possible to try it out and even order an installation CD from their website, which they would send by mail for free. This was particularly great because, at that time, we had very slow dial-up internet, so downloading was out of the question. Every year from then on, I ordered the latest version (as long as that option was available). Later, in high school, we worked with Debian, and today, I use Linux Mint.

[-]

josegarrao@reddit

After I experienced the multitude of Desktop Environments, the system flexibilty, the thrill of changing system files to your needs, the vast documenteion of almost every aspect of it, the transparency of open source. Windows sucks.

[-]

Rogue-Think-72@reddit

The nightmare called "Windows Installation". When Windows 10 came out I told myself "Aw hell no" and haven't looked back since.

[-]

sucopessego@reddit

Me too, cause of render time

[-]

eighthourblink@reddit

Late to the discussion, but working at a local MSP, we had several dedicated VoIP server running Asterisk with Freepbx on top of it ,running the clients phone system. Working with Asterisk showed me a glimpse of Linux and i was hooked. Nowadays i run everything at home on Linux and currently studying for my Linux+

[-]

zquzra@reddit

I watched a movie called Hackers back in the 90s (HACK THE WORLD!). I was quite impressed by it and immediately wanted to be a hacker. How to do it? I started looking around for tutorials and how-tos about being a hacker and stumbled across a website full of GIFs of rotating skulls spitting flames and references to Matrix that said to install FreeBSD and read its source code. I needed to learn TCP/IP and assembly too. I even managed to install FreeBSD, but I couldn't get my softmodem to work. Looking more on the Internet I discovered something called "NDISwrapper" that allowed using Windows 2000/XP drivers on Linux. I had already read about Linux a few times but I was just a teenager and there were people who told me to stick with FreeBSD because it was the system for "real hackers". But I wanted to access the Internet, dammit! So I installed Slackware and it all started.

[-]

Hyperverbal777@reddit

Berkeley was over the hill with BSD and I wasn't any alt OS other than Solaris, I went with Slackware from Walnut Creek CDRom

[-]

sannf_@reddit

I attended a summer camp for a cybersecurity competition my high school was doing. The instructor was using Linux, so I asked him about it afterwards and I've never looked back.

[-]

QuickSilver010@reddit

A screen recording of kde plasma deskop on godot discord server help channel.

[-]

johndotold@reddit

Back before time in a virus no one could conquer ..

I left Microsoft for an open source os. Loved the cost as well as the boot time and the family of support that I found.

If you can't find the ap you need, write one yourself.

[-]

Frequent_Sleep5746@reddit

I bought a thinkpad, and, when in rome... wear high thighs or something idk I'm not italian

[-]

uphucwits@reddit

1994 working in a microscopy lab and we had some code written in Fortran. Problem was we had to Telnet into the main frame. Sys admin said I could use Linux. I pulled down red hat off of sunsite.edu and installed from floppy disk and was able to run the Fortran code on our new trusty red hat Linux box with fvwm.

Then I loved it so much I installed it on my home pc and learned how to write my own ppp script to connect to my usb robotics serial port modem to connect to our modem in the lab and then onto the university network.

[-]

BecomingButterfly@reddit

2007, wanted to revive an old laptop I came into and the windows key was gone. NO WAY I've was going to PAY for windows that came with this machine, so I tried it out on s friends recommendation, never looked back.

[-]

Remarkable-NPC@reddit

i have many problems with linux and is not perfect at all but best one out there at least

windows come with missing DLL in clean installation if you do heath check there no way i trust this OS for my computer

[-]

DictatorKnucklehead@reddit

Kind of silly, but nightmares. I remember first seeing the desktop background for Kali Linux on some meme and heard that's what hackers used. Afterwards, at least once a week, I would have nightmares that someone would remote into my PC and change it to Kali and steal all my information.

Got bad and frequent enough that I started reading and even took a class on Linux to demystify it. No more nightmares, I have a few VMs for experimenting, and a Redcore laptop. Also, in my nightmares, I started unplugging the Ethernet if I ever get a whiff of a hacker lmso

[-]

PolentaColda@reddit

I started for fun, virtual machine zorin OS, and then second pc... I started using only the second pc and installed it on mine at 13, after a while I removed it and went back to Windows, then I tried again, failure number 2. In the meantime I maintained an Ubuntu server for files, photos, music and Virtual machines. Then I installed zorin the third time. After a while I wanted to change and switched to Debian, and then ended up on arch Linux.I love arch Linux and debian, and when a new zorin comes out I keep trying it

[-]

12_nick_12@reddit

My friend mentioned the *arr stack and ZFS. Started with 2 drives, eventually ended up at 36. Now I'm back down to 8.

[-]

witherwine@reddit

Free

[-]

Kreesto_1966@reddit

Dissatisfied with Windows, bored with MacOS, and a ton of free time on my hands due to Covid.

[-]

CreepySmiley42@reddit

honestly... just the better aesthetics and the fact that you can customise EVERYTHING.

[-]

manemjeff42069@reddit

Windows 10 being abysmal

[-]

rubberducko@reddit

Worked in the IT Dept of the library over 20 years ago where I was first introduced to Suse and Slackware. Fiddled a little with Debian and BSD as well. Debian mainly the last 15 years, but I have done some arch and Nixos just to see and learn.

[-]

master_prizefighter@reddit

In College I remember installing Red Hat and a Mac Server called Novell, and both were painless compared to Windows.

At home I remember trying Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and the amount of freedom and speed sold me on trying Linux on a more rotated basis. Then a few years ago I remember using Linux to solve a Windows issue. I'll provide the short version:

A friend of mine sails the high seas, and sometimes when Windows decides to update his PC, the update for the county he's using downloads and not for the US (some updates are region specific). Well, his system wouldn't boot correctly. So I installed Linux and was able to login and browse the net easily so I knew there were no known hardware issues. So I tried Windows again, and this time Windows offered to do a system restore back a few days before the update. This time the VPN was turned off and he got the update needed for his system. The local shop wanted to charge $100+, all I wanted was Taco Bell.

[-]

DorchioDiNerdi@reddit

"Mac Server called Novell"? Are you sure it wasn't Novell NetWare, the network operating system?

[-]

master_prizefighter@reddit

Might have been Novell NetWare but it's been so long ago. Either way I remember the installation being far easier than Windows and I learned there's other options outside Windows.

[-]

DorchioDiNerdi@reddit

"Mac Server called Novell"? Are you sure it wasn't Novell NetWare, the network operating system?

[-]

SpreadingRumors@reddit

2004, i worked for an International three-letter company. We ran about 1,500 AIX servers for a tonne of client companies. One day a server's security scan came in from a "RHEL" machine instead of "AIX". Thought to myself huh, okay? A couple weeks later there were five "RHEL" machines. A few days later there was about 20 "RHEL" machines.
I saw this as a trend. I started digging to learn what this "RHEL" was all about. I fell down the Red Hat / Fedora rabbit hole. Bought a cheap desktop from globalcomputer.com to install Fedora at home and learn the differences from AIX.
Nowadays Fedora XFCE is my daily driver, and i occasionally boot over to Win10 for gaming.

[-]

Material_Will_1822@reddit

"Where does my fucking ram go??" was the first question, followed by "Why do I get blue&black screen errors"
Then I found myself in Pop!OS.

[-]

Diligent-Thing-1944@reddit

24 years ago when I laid my eyes on second hand pcquest magazine with red hat Linux 6.2 .

But I am a hopeless Debian guy now.

[-]

lshadowy@reddit

my potato laptop

[-]

SaltyMaybe7887@reddit (OP)

I have an old ThinkPad T420 that I revived with Linux and it ran so much better. Unfortunately, I had to get a newer laptop due to its abysmal battery life but it's amazing how a machine that's almost unusable on Windows runs so well on Linux.

[-]

lshadowy@reddit

i feel you, i also face the same problem with battery life, can run about only 30 mins with battery, but still useable for normal use like browsing, text esiting and stuff. so i am happy with linux.

[-]

sac_delta_throwaway@reddit

A dial up BBS I sysop'd in the early 90s wanted to add a MUD to the games menu, but the MUD was only playable via telnet, and I used Red Hat to be a middle man between Windows BBS software and different Windows MUD software.

Technically, people could dial in to the BBS, and then telnet from the BBS tools menu to the IP address of the MUD server, but that seemed inconvenient, so I stuck a RedHat box in the middle to do nothing other than look at the username of who was logged in to the BBS on that channel, and then telnet them over to the MUD with a blank password, and authentication on the MUD was reconfigured to just trust "if user joeblow is trying to log in, and they're trying to log in from IP address of the BBS, just trust them and let them in without a password"

[-]

PercussiveKneecap42@reddit

What first got you into Linux?

A minecraft server.

And lately, with my desktop, Windows was the reason I currently run Linux. The shit M$ pulls for Windows 11, nah, I'm not in for that shit.

[-]

SaltyMaybe7887@reddit (OP)

And lately, with my desktop, Windows was the reason I currently run Linux. The shit M$ pulls for Windows 11, nah, I'm not in for that shit.

I was already annoyed with the telemetry Windows 10 tries to get you to agree to during the installation. When I heard about ads in the start menu, the Recall feature, and other issues with Windows 11 I was glad I had already switched. Right now I still have Windows 10 for one game, but once it's no longer supported I'm ditching Windows entirely.

[-]

PercussiveKneecap42@reddit

I had that same issue. The issue where M$ wants all your data, wants to sell you everything and generally decides for you what is best for you to use (like that pesky Edge shite). I'm done with that nagging.

I tried this a few years ago, but quickly switched back to Windows, because I was kinda rusted stuck in the Windows Ecosystem. Now, I'm fond of my Linux running machine and I don't want to go back.

[-]

NimrodvanHall@reddit

I fully left windows behind when I got advertisements in the search menu.

For work I only use Linux, privately Linux and Mac.

[-]

FishyFoundation@reddit

I do some web development in my free time, dev experience using windows is just terrible so Linux felt like the natural choice. First I had a dual boot setup but ended up never needing to boot in to windows, now I prefer Linux over windows in any task except gaming. I have a Mac from work and tbh I feel like the user experience is the worst on it. (Compared to Ubuntu and win10)

[-]

SaltyMaybe7887@reddit (OP)

I started learning programming after I had switched to Linux. I can't imagine how annoying it would be if I was still using Windows.

[-]

FishyFoundation@reddit

Programming on windows is a bit of a hack and eventually you end up using WSL (windows subsystem Linux) anyways. But then you have to deal with all the bugs in WSL some of them as old as WSL it self as WSL seems to be an afterthought and does not receive the support it clearly needs. So yeah... Can't recommend

[-]

SaltyMaybe7887@reddit (OP)

Out of curiosity I tried the WSL. Let's just say it was not a good experience. I had issues moving files to and from the WSL due to file encodings, among other issues. I'd rather have one operating system that's good at everything than have to use an operating system inside an operating system.

[-]

Snpsh0t@reddit

I thought it was cool. The idea of a 3rd option was fun and the fact that I could customize my experience was fun. Still use a MacBook Pro for my business but my desktop computer is a Linux machine.

[-]

opuhossain@reddit

I was just curious.

[-]

liptoniceicebaby@reddit

I bought a laptop in 2018. Top of the line i7 7700HQ, 32GB RAM, NVME drive. 3 years later, windows 11 is released and my laptop is not supported...

I didn't wanna wait for windows 10 support to end. So i switch to linux last year. No regrets. Never looking back. And my laptop will probably run linux smoothly longer than its lifespan.

Funny to see how alot of linux users have a shared hatred for microsoft :-)

[-]

SaltyMaybe7887@reddit (OP)

Unfortunately, a lot of people would rather spend hundreds of dollars on a new machine than use a different operating system. My dad used Linux Mint for over a year but switched back to Windows, mainly for Photoshop. He's buying a much more powerful CPU and motherboard than he needs just to be able to use Windows 11.

[-]

_Second_2_2@reddit

me was from rpi but now using elementary as my main os

[-]

BlackFuffey@reddit

Windows being the laggiest it can possibly be, so I had to improvise. I was learning programming at the time so I thought why not try Linux, and here I am, ditched dual boot 1 year ago

[-]

SaltyMaybe7887@reddit (OP)

I was also frustrated with how slow Windows was, even on my medium- to high-end machine. Now I only dual boot Windows to play Valorant with my friend.

[-]

DaemonSlayer_503@reddit

Started my first job in IT and a senior dev in my first department argued with another why windows is shit and the rest is hirstory

[-]

RandomFerrariParty@reddit

It must have been the early 2000s, what got me into it was really just exploring and tinkering with operating systems. I had access to my first hime pc in 1997, then after getting comfortable with that and moving onto my first custom gaming pc, I viewed it as inevitable that one would stumble their way into a gnu linux distro. Sabayon was one of them, mint, ubuntu, kubuntu, debian, fedora was probably my favorite at that time. I started using clonezilla soon after to do image backups and used live cd's/usb's for troubleshooting and playing around. I had some dual boot systems at one time.

[-]

c64z86@reddit

My friend, who introduced me to Ubuntu and Linux. Before that I had never even heard of it.

[-]

SilentLennie@reddit

I thought it might work better than Windows 95/98 and I enjoyed learning the technical details.

[-]

Obvious-Bag-4377@reddit

Internet explorer.

[-]

aarnaegg@reddit

Windows 11 Recall

[-]

SuperGrade13@reddit

Microsoft got me into Linux. As time progressed, I found that I was allowed to do less and less with MY computer while running windows. The OS became more and more intrusive.

[-]

Unairworthy@reddit

Ruby on Rails got me on Ubuntu. But Haskell got me on Arch btw.

[-]

gestur1976@reddit

I started using Debian 1.3.1 in 1997.

I was tired of buffer underruns every time I moved the mouse when I was recording a CD in W95.

Burning CDs in Linux using mkisofs | cdrecord - never gave more buffer underruns.

Sadly Jörg Schilling, the developer of cdrecord passed away recently. RIP

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6rg_Schilling

[-]

oshunluvr@reddit

Windows Viruses

[-]

sabb1rahm3d@reddit

I was bored with the monotonous look of windows OS and always tried to customize its look by installing numerous themes.

Then somehow i came across linux. After installing on my pc i immediately fell in love of it. It gave me a totally new desktop ambience in terms of look and feel. Henceforth i am always hooked to it.

[-]

EtherealN@reddit

Windows 98 was prone to BSOD, and an annoying resource hog, so I set up my school laptop to dualboot MS-DOS 6.22 (for games) and SuSE Linux for writing and browsing.

[-]

dankcuddlybear-v2-0@reddit

Got my first Raspberry Pi when I was about 12 and started learning about Linux. Few years later I'm daily driving Arch.

[-]

Informal_Bunch_2737@reddit

A decade or so I saw an advert for Ubuntu that offered a free copy of it. I signed up for it and promptly forgot about it. I was extremely surprised when a disc arrived a couple months later. I installed it and tried it but at the time our internet was horribly expensive and slow, so it wasnt really feasible.

Fast forward to this year... I have an old HP probook and the HDD fails, but the bios is also locked out so I cant install a new HDD and it should be thrown away. Solution? Run Linux off a USB. I've now upgraded to an external HDD though.

[-]

035lmao@reddit

Updated windows and it commit suicide :/ I can’t trust an OS again whose updates are that unstable

[-]

jagardaniel@reddit

A friend suggested to install Linux (Debian) on an old computer so I could be "available" on IRC 24/7 with screen and irssi. So I didn't have to pay for a bouncer service, endpoint.nu if I remember correctly.

[-]

ryctus-grynne@reddit

Curiosity at first. Around 20 years ago I tried installing RedHat, but I was still using a machine with 32mb RAM which was insufficient to run the OS. Over the next few years I played around with OpenSuse, Ubuntu and others, but never stuck with anything. When support for XP came to an end I made the leap to Manjaro and later traded up to Arch, which I used for years. Unfortunately Windows is still essential for some purposes and that's what I'm using just now.

[-]

DueCaramel7770@reddit

I had an old PC and wanted to try a different operating system. I heard some flavors could be run from a USB and I thought that was so cool at the time. I was hooked when I learned how to navigate using the CLI and use apt and pacman and such to install apps. Learning to write programs was so much better on Linux, it was so much faster than on windows for some reason. I loved the simplicity and the lack of bloatware and installed malware/annoying software.

[-]

FeetPicsNull@reddit

Redhat 1.0 released and my dad brought me home all the disks. I wanted to be a hax0r so 14yr old me was very excited to type in black boxes again.

[-]

darth_chewbacca@reddit

The ability to read the code and learn.

[-]

nPrevail@reddit

It first started with playing around with open source programs. I was using Windows 10, I was trying to find sustainable and alternative programs that I could continue to use for many years. I had built a concept of what I needed to certain things, but I knew that most of the things I was doing was on illegitimate software. So open source tools appeal to me first.

I then try Ubuntu studios, and I didn't like it. I then tried fedora, and I stayed on that for my first couple of years. Through fedora, I was able to experiment with various open source programs, learning how easily the packaged they are for Linux. I soon learned how to write bash scripts, and started scripting all the programs that I wanted to install, and slowly tried to replicate the system to other computers.

I appreciate it how to replicate systems, and how easy it was to run it on the simple scripts. With just a few commands, I'm able to make any other device like my own. Although this is possible on Windows through cloning software, it was still a pain to maintain other devices when you had to rebuild a system, or update it with new software from a newer system.

Less than 2 years ago, I learned about NixOS, and became determined to learn it as it aligned with my values with replication. It was even better than bash scripts since it was also able to configure system files and hardware.

[-]

Ok_Antelope_1953@reddit

free ubuntu cds. i got 3 each of ubuntu, kubuntu, xubuntu, and edubuntu 7.04 cds. i didn't understand a single thing and was super elated.

[-]

tomscharbach@reddit

I didn't start using Linux until after I retired in 2005. A friend, also retired, had been set up with a Ubuntu homebrew by his Linux enthusiast son, who lived 800 miles away and could not provide hands-on support.

My friend was retired from a university environment, using Windows locked down by IT staff. Needless to say, he was clueless and kept asking me for help under the "You know about computers, don't you?" rubric. Knowing Unix, I installed Ubuntu on a spare computer and learned enough to become my friend's helpdesk.

I came to like using Ubuntu and have been using Linux, in parallel with Windows, for close to two decades now.

As luck would have it, my friend bought a Windows desktop within a year.

[-]

szgr16@reddit

What a beautiful story : )

[-]

areallyseriousman@reddit

Hacking my school issued Chromebook.

[-]

shinra528@reddit

Don’t do that. It’s a crime. It’s not your property. It’s the school’s.

[-]

Lord_AyWar@reddit

Windows Vista.

[-]

miguel04685@reddit

High RAM and CPU usage with Windows

[-]

british-raj9@reddit

It was the challenge to make my daily driver personal laptop run Linux. It's been a good experiment.

I've found Fedora and Gnome to be my favorite distro and desktop. But I did install Mint with Gnome too as an alternate disto on Grub.

[-]

lproven@reddit

It was something like SCO Xenix but it didn't cost £1800.

[-]

OddbitTwiddler@reddit

SunOS. More like Unix than Linux though.

[-]

maticheksezheni@reddit

Boredom

[-]

wkoell@reddit

Pretty same motivation from 1994: played Doom on same hardware, Slackware 3, I think.

[-]

Ok-Interaction-7812@reddit

Other students, back in 1994, when kernel was 1.1.51 :)

[-]

AnAlligatorPear@reddit

Microsoft stopped supporting their own devices when Windows 11 came out. I own a Surface Pro 4, and then Windows 11 dropped supported for TPM 1.1. Windows 10 was also performing poorly as well even though I barely installed anything on it. I learned that there was a grassroots community porting drivers upstream to make the Surface Pro devices compatible with Linux. So I followed the github and installed Ubuntu 20.04 on the SP4 in 2020 as a pandemic project. It was so smooth and so configurable, and I learned so much about OS's and the terminal that I never looked back. I still don't have a single Windows install on any of my devices.

[-]

TackyGaming6@reddit

i wanted to game, microhard sucked, i wanted to do cybersec microfuck gave me paid tools and and tracking

Fuck Dicksoft, i started using archlinux btw and never looked back (the learning curve was steep but my desire was more)

[-]

nateify@reddit

A lot of answers with specific Windows versions.

Mine was Vista, on a notebook with 1GB of RAM in 2007. I went to Xubuntu at the time.

[-]

BigJohnManSFB2@reddit

After the 6th time of installing Windows XP due to the fact that malware was on the rise. I had gotten really good at removing Malware, Viruses, etc. however, I wanted a system that simply didn't have those issues. Someone mentioned Redhat Linux, which was at version 6 at the time. I dropped Windows for Redhat, which looked VERY similar to a mix of Win98 & WinXP. I ran into a few issues with getting my printer to work & my NVidia Graphics card. I went to college and found how to configure X11 to get my video card to work & CUPS to get the printer working. There was a good sized learning curve back in 2001. I switched from Redhat to Mandrake / Mandriva, and a friend showed me how to run a website off of my personal computer. I got to use my HTML coding skills from the good Ol' days of GeoCities again. I started figuring out PHP coding for creating a form in my website & having it email me the info a user put into the form. Since 2000, I have always had a Linux PC in my house that I either used as a daily or setup a remote control system. I use Linux heavily in my house as a server now a days.

[-]

Heclalava@reddit

Dealing with Linux on servers daily for work I took the plunge and installed Linux mint as my daily driver to improve my Linux skills. That was about 3 years ago, never went back to Windows.

[-]

nomasteryoda@reddit

It was 25 years ago... I had to manage remote Linus server for work and realized Linux might be better for the desktop. Sure it was for my family... and I never went back to the Evil OS.

[-]

ITXEnjoyer@reddit

Not sure if this is cringe or not but…

Years and years ago (over 20!??!) I remember seeing a book in WH Smith (UK Bookstore) called “Red Hat Linux for dummies”.

I believe it came with Red Hat 6.2 on 2 cd roms and since then I’ve been running a form of Linux alongside Windows ever since that day.

Back then it amazed me how all that was on offer with RH 6.2 was essentially free to the end user vs the old ways of buying Windows licences that I was only familiar with.

I remember when Ubuntu first came along and changed everything back then for me making it a possibility to do most of what I needed in Linux. I later fell in love with Debian after that and still have homelab systems that run Debian now.

Finally Valve with Proton/steam deck completely changed the game with my old dependence on Windows.

Currently enjoying Pop_OS! and Bazzite on my desktop and gaming pcs. It’s been quite a journey from first seeing that little yellow book in a uk book store to what I have now.

So much has changed for the better over the years that’s for sure.

[-]

SuAlfons@reddit

Myroom mate and later BIL read about it and one day in 1996ish came home with a set (12 or so) of CD ROMs to install SuSe Linux onto his machine which already had DOS and OS/2 on it.

[-]

Mrcalcove1998@reddit

Pure curiosity. I saw a YouTube thumbnail about installing Linux mint, and I followed along. I wanted to know what Linux was, as I just heard about it, but never knew what it it did.

[-]

plethoraofprojects@reddit

2001 or so. A friend was running RH on a machine and he told me about it. A few years later I tried Suse and been hooked ever since. I will say I’ve been using Fedora for the longest though.

[-]

DopeSignature5762@reddit

Friends switched to linux and in a while started to tease windows, used to have fun debates on linux vs windows.

Eventually I switched to linux and am happy about that.

But I still wonder how people use linux, do they use the CLI for each and every task?

Lately I got in love with linux and want to use it to it's core. Suggest me some cool experiments !

[-]

daddyd@reddit

msdos was eol, windows 95 was sooo bad. some guy at college talked about linux and that it was free. i though it must be bad for it to be free, installed it, was blown away, two years later i was linux only.

[-]

Razor-111@reddit

Same for better performance on linux plus the ram usage is ridiculous on windows.

[-]

Itchy_Character_3724@reddit

I was given an old eMachine laptop as my first computer. Windows on it was riddled with malware. A friend's Dad gave me a CD with Ubuntu 9.10 and I fell in love with Linux. I ran Linux along side Windows so I could still game. I fully dropped Windows after seeing ehat has been going on with Windows 11. Been running Linux Mint ever since.

[-]

AverageMan282@reddit

What got me into Linux was a) my local IT guy, and b) trying to save my thousands of photos onto my PC from three iOS devices.

You cannot transfer photos from iOS to Windows due to unsupported and generally shit software design decisions. The Windows and Apple development teams are a pack of idiots.

In Linux, userspace devs see the issue in two parts:

a) read the file system

b) write the file system

From there, you can use any tool: restic, rsync, cp, mv. Anything that makes the Copy syscall. Which, believe it or not, is literally any backup software on Linux. The copy syscall is a hop, skip and a jump away from most APIs in libraries like glibc.

This is why Linux is superior. It atomises the problem and employs tens of experts who appoint themselves as specialists in that atomic problem. The code gets written, reviewed (via git), and pushed, the binary gets built and the package gets shipped. Job well done. End of story.

[-]

Curio_Fragment_0001@reddit

Microsoft being shady AF as per usual. They've been slowly ticking me off through incrementally overstepping their bounds...

Examples: Forcing you to create an email account or tie an email account to a system when you set it up. CONSTANTLY trying to force you into using OneDrive and occasionally overriding your preferences on its use. Slowly turning EVERYTHING into a fucking subscription service. Randomly connecting various services to the internet that have no good reason to be. Completely ignoring any privacy requests and constantly recording shit behind the scenes by default.

Ultimately the straw that broke the camels back was copilot+recall. I seriously cannot believe that someone up the chain thought that was a good idea and went through with it. I don't really care if they backpedaled. The damage is done and I am done with Microsoft. Don't even get me started on Apple...

[-]

Rullino@reddit

Was your experience with Linux good, I've heard some people claim that Linux users hate Linux and go back to Windows or with MacOS, i haven't seen many people do that, it would interesting to hear that from someone who knows more about Linux compared to those who think you need to learn C just to setup your Linux distro.

[-]

Curio_Fragment_0001@reddit

I would definitely like to clarify that I am a novice and learning as I go. It was a little rocky at first because i jumped into the deep end with Qubes OS and later went to Fedora, which I am still using. I've been using Fedora for about three months now.

I think the only major complaint I have atm is wanting to use software from your previous windows system on Linux, only to find it isn't supported there. That being said, it's very easy to find an equivalent that is just as good and quite often free. I already enjoy programming and diving into systems so the learning curve isn't as bad for me.

I am more concerned with trying to get my parents and grandparents off of windows and onto a Linux distro. They aren't as technically inclined and would probably have a nervous breakdown if they had to do anything in a terminal.

I was thinking about making a simple GUI for them to use some ITSEC tools like clamav, rkhunter, and fail2ban, but apparently GUIs are a dirty word in the Linux community. Not to mention the general Linux community thinks antivirus tools are completely useless. I'm also trying to find a good VPN for them and help them understand why they are useful.

Ultimately, I think the Internet is just becoming an increasingly hostile place and unless you are willing to pour a ton of time into securing yourself and your data, you'll be pwned. Even if you do everything right, some group with a ton of extra time on their hands will find some weird exploit and steal all your stuff anywho.

[-]

Tinolmfy@reddit

I grew up with it ig

[-]

Loki_029@reddit

Back in 2009, when I was in college, I still remember registering on the Ubuntu website and receiving a free CD. It was pretty cool to receive a parcel from a different country. That's what got me into Linux.

[-]

Goghor@reddit

My brother who owns a computer store introduced SuSE Linux to me in 2000. And then few years later I began using Ubuntu back in the day when Canonical would send me a physical Ubuntu CDs.

[-]

BestRetroGames@reddit

Windows 10/11 got me into Linux.. true story.

[-]

beef623@reddit

A free Ubuntu live cd. I hate Ubuntu now, but it was a good way to try it out without needing an extra computer back then.

[-]

Ypovoskos@reddit

Blender and later Mypaint which for some reason is not working on windows, after the emulators i spend 95% of my time on linux when i am on my laptop, also i don't have to worry about viruses is a bonus

[-]

hilbertglm@reddit

I worked with Unix when I was an undergrad in the late 1970s. I started professionally as a mainframe systems programmer, but played with Atari and IBM/Microsoft PCs in the early 80s. When IBM and Microsoft released OS/2, that was what got me excited about small systems.

After one of Bill Gates' direct reports lied to my face about the future of OS/2 over dinner, I was soured on Microsoft. By that time, my career had shifted from S/390 mainframes to the various Unixes at the time (DG-UX, HP-UX, AIX. etc.) that I was administering. When IBM dropped the ball on OS/2, I did a small amount of programming on Windows NT (first introduced to me under non-disclosure as OS/2 NT), but when Linux started taking off, that was a great fit for me. I think it was around 1999 that I switched.

[-]

GurRepresentative370@reddit

Constant WHEA 18 errors from my Ryzen 5600X and 6950XT combo. After a year and a half of various troubleshooting steps and multiple RMAs I jumped on the Fedora boat and been living beautifully since with no issues lol.

[-]

Rullino@reddit

It's great to see that there are Linux users who have a high-end PC, a few years ago I thought Linux was mostly for low-end and midrange hardware since Gaming wasn't as popular as today with the Steam Deck.

[-]

CompetitionSquare240@reddit

PSP homebrew. I was like 9 years old somehow installing custom apps and installed Windows Vista on my PSP which I later learnt was some reskined Linux distro.

Still I learnt to use it. I felt like the coolest kid in town having an entire computer in my pocket, looking down at all the simpletons living in the past never to have a clue of my genius

[-]

juipeltje@reddit

I actually didn't know you could install linux on a psp, that's awesome

[-]

TehPeanutButter@reddit

http://web.archive.org/web/20080906182900/http://jacksonm88.googlepages.com/linuxonpsp.htm

[-]

BigHeadTonyT@reddit

Windows was shit in every way. I tried running Litestep, it wasn't great, kinda hacky. MS decisions regarding any change is legendary (and bad). Piling shit on shit, it starts to stink real bad. I would say NT 4 or Win2000 was the pinnacle of Windows. Not unstable like everything before that and not filled with crap no one wants, like every OS version after.

But I also did not know how to install Linux. I tried many times, prepared floppy disk for it, never managed to get it to boot. I had to wait 10 years before it got easier to install. I was too dumb to figure it out. I had Red Hat on 6 disks or something, couldn't get it installed. Tried to find books on how to do it, didn't find any relevant ones in the library. Just some more advanced Red Hat books.

[-]

Far-Curve-9684@reddit

Ram usage on windows 🤧🤧

[-]

onlyappearcrazy@reddit

Saw what Windows 11 looked like, and didn't like it's 'intrusive' features. Decided to get serious about Linux as a dual boot. Been running Linux Mint since along side Windows 10. Have an 10 year old electronic schematic sw I need to run under Linux, but am working on that.

[-]

Moo-Crumpus@reddit

From the very beginning I was busy with Sinclair ZX Spectrum, followed by GEM, OS/2, BeOS and Linux in parallel. All the time. The Windows versions were a joke in comparison over the years. Linux is what's still running.

[-]

Rullino@reddit

I've learned about Linux because I wanted to learn about operative systems and how they're structured, just like with Windows, MacOS and many others.

[-]

DFS_0019287@reddit

My $DAYJOB was on SunOS (and then Solaris) on Sun machines; I wanted a similar environment at home. This was \~1994.

[-]

ConfectionMobile589@reddit

One of my first college courses was a Linux class where we had to choose and install a distro, and I really liked the idea of not having to pay for a Windows license. This was back in 2002 and I've been a Linux user ever since.

[-]

Help_Stuck_In_Here@reddit

This is why Microsoft usually showers IT students in free licenses.

[-]

SaltedPaint@reddit

lol in 2001 I bought my first version of FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE from staples and hadn't been disappointed since then. Continued to run Slackware since midish '94 for a few more years (hats off to Patrick Volkerding for a great time) in which still run it on a VM atop FreeBSD-STABLE and/also MacOS virtualbox and Debian. Also running Slackware on SmartOS or in other words SunOS along with FreeBSD machines of various versions.

[-]

v0id_walk3r@reddit

I got in because I was curious and after a while... windows did not cut it anymore. Nowadays its even easier as microsoft is sniffing glue and the decision they make must antagonize even the most ardent of fans.

[-]

michaelpaoli@reddit

What first got you into Linux?

I got tired of being nickeled and dimed (well, more like a hundred to about six hundred bucks or more) with commercial UNIX, and I wanted Open Source. So, I moved from UNIX to Linux in 1998.

[-]

Conscious-Rule-6419@reddit

I wanted to be unique from the others

[-]

MixtureOfAmateurs@reddit

Y'all are all so old. When I was a wee lad my dad installed Ubuntu 18.04 or something on an old laptop and said "boy, you should learn about this" and I did. Going to Uni next year where I can finally fully convert, school right now has no Linux network auth program

[-]

mvogelpi@reddit

Wobbling windows.

[-]

carvakatavacchedaka@reddit

Windows Vista. I bought a new laptop with it pre installed and within 2 months it took ten minutes plus to start up and froze every other session. After trying everything to fix it, I switched to Ubuntu and I've never looked back since.

[-]

BitCortex@reddit

I worked exclusively on Unix for about a decade during the workstation era. On day 1 at my first software job, they sat me down in front a Sun 3/50 running BSD-based SunOS 4.x. That unadorned little pizza box blew my mind.

In terms of hardware, the 3/50 was a Mac II without the fancy color graphics. I'd used a Mac II quite a bit at a friend's house, but that low-end, monochrome Sun machine seemed about a dozen times more powerful, and it was all thanks to the OS. Unix showed me what a real OS could do.

I couldn't afford a workstation, so I desperately wanted a Unix for my PC. Soon after Intel released the 386, a bunch of fly-by-night companies popped up to offer vanilla SVR4 distros, and I bought one. As cool as it was to run real Unix on my PC, it was a disappointment. The distro I'd bought was buggy and poorly optimized – and at around $500 a pop, hopping SVR4 distros was not an option.

Then, out of nowhere, along comes Linux – cost-free, rock-solid, full-featured, and running like a bat out of hell on cheap PCs. It was a dream come true. I was onboard before the kernel hit 1.0.

30 years later, I still love Linux and use it daily, but unlike many here, I think NT-based Windows is also a great OS.

[-]

zagafr@reddit

my friend started using arch linux when there wasn’t a install script! and then I watched an ltt video then switched to linux mint! then 2023 nixos! nixos is now my main desktop!

[-]

DaylightAdmin@reddit

I hated the many drive letters because I had 8 IDE Drives installed, so I installed my first Linux Server. It also could share the internet to more than one device, so that was an added bonus.

And no I did not start with mdadm, my first "storage"-System was done with aufs. ZFS was not available back than and btrfs didn't even exist. Also ext4 was not recommended or not available on my first install.

That "hobby" made it possible to get the job that I now have.

[-]

sylarBo@reddit

Raspberry Pi projects

[-]

marcsitkin@reddit

Desktop Linux because I changed from Adobe Lightroom to darktable. I was very frustrated to all the CC login and verification and ads on Photoshop.

[-]

centosdude@reddit

My work at the university around the year 2000 got me interested. I had to support Solaris and Windows and then we added Red Hat Linux to the mix.

[-]

qd7sa@reddit

Windows.

[-]

hazyPixels@reddit

Back around 1990 I was programming hp-ux and BSD 4.2 for work. I played around with Minux a bit in my spare time. Then some dude in Finland wrote a kernel and posted an OS based on 2 floppy images on Usenet around 1991 and I tried it out and was impressed that it actually had memory management (which Minux lacked). I kept my eyes on it for a couple years then I convinced a group of fellow engineers at work to build some in-house applications with it. It all worked out pretty well and I've been using and cross-developing on it ever since.

[-]

imselfinnit@reddit

Oh wow, a genuine grey beard. I touch your foot sir.

[-]

Quazye@reddit

Honestly, I just like exploring alternatives and trying to make things semi-operational. Courisity is my driver and learning new stuff is my motivation

[-]

Kazer67@reddit

Bullying mostly, 1 or 2 decades ago when I was playing Tremulous and had issue with Windows where the answer I got often is to install Ubuntu, so I tried it.

Then it was back and forth for multiple years until finally, thanks to Valve and the community, I was able to fully and completely switch to Linux in 2018.

[-]

bobj33@reddit

In 1991 I used commercial Unix workstations (IBM AIX and SunOS) and wanted that at home. I didn't have a PC but I first heard about Linux in 1993 and saved all my money that summer. I bought a new PC for my sophomore year in college. I installed Linux in fall 1994 and I've been running it ever since.

[-]

Embarrassed-Tip-8941@reddit

LAMP

[-]

Ok-Lunch-2991@reddit

Peformance. Windows 10 sucks on sub-400 devices and i wanted my old lappy to be usable so i installed mint. And after some distro hopping i came to arch. Now i need to install it on my main machine.

[-]

salmonmilks@reddit

Well I'm getting into Linux the moment I buy a PC. I've seen developers use Linux and thought maybe I should try it out too

[-]

jonr@reddit

Windows 8

[-]

_schlonk_@reddit

I'm so thankful to Microsoft that they pushed me in the right direction with their bs

[-]

Physical_Chair_8872@reddit

Its free.

and its minimal and simple

[-]

smitty-2@reddit

I saw a copy of Red Hat on a shelf back when software was purchased and not downloaded. I can't recall the store and likely out of frustration with Win95. That was a painful time.

[-]

Hacksterix-01@reddit

2 events:

I 've lost a whole week of programming. ( Rising of anger )

My pc died. I had just enough money to buy a new CU with a minimum config. The very new MS millennium installed on it. It was not able to run my IDE correctly. ( Fixed my decision)

So I bought a magazine with a brand new fedora CDROM.

I erased windows and installed the minimum system.

As the computer was a very small config, I installed Window Maker, adopter Emacs as an IDE, and I could start to work again.

I restarted from scratch and improved my skills with the OS that has helped me the most and I almost never quit. ( I had two Mac, and since last year I kept a windows for windows forensics purposes) It was in 2002 or 2003.

[-]

Sharkuel@reddit

I first dabbled with Linux in 2012, when I installed Ubuntu Studio on an old computer. It was serviceable, but at the time I was really green in terms of content creation and audio recording, and eventually gave up.

Then in 2020 I installed ZorinOS on a secondary partition while I was running Windows 10, as I was testing the waters again to make a Linux Audio and Video Production Workstation, and used Windows for gaming, essentially. At the time I worked for Microsoft, and I knew ahead of time that they would release the "Next Windows", and eventually Windows 11 was released on October 2021, and given that I tested developer releases, with the taskbar that didn't work as intended, I was not convinced.

Eventually, in December, I was on my Windows 10 partition and got an update notification, standard stuff ya know, security features, and all that. Decided to update, turn of the machine, and reboot into my Fedora partition, but to my surprise, it didn't boot, as there was no bootloader. Rebooted again into Windows, and low and behold, Windows 11 Welcome page pops up. I was extremely frustrated with M$, as they masked a full OS update as a casual security update, and since that wasn't enough, it literally wipped GRUB, and took over the boot partition.

At the time I didn't know that I could simply boot up a live USB and renisntall GRUB so I installed Fedora after finding PatrickL's COPR repos, and deleted the Windows Partition. Never looked back.

Nowadays I only have a VM running Windows 10, in case I need to install an application under WINE that I can then simply copy inside a PREFIX and make it work (like some Adobe Products), or fetch specific windows files required on the System32 folder that may be needed for some apps in WINE to run, or test stuff around.

Never looked back. And about a year and a couple of months, I left M$ as well, and that company has some issues in terms of cataloguing their previous work.

[-]

JoeriVDE@reddit

Programing. Unless you're doing game dev, Linux is so much nicer to work in

[-]

unfunnypersonever@reddit

When I heard about that copilot feature I said "fuck it. I'm moving to Linux" and I never looked back at windows.

[-]

MawJe@reddit

I got into it 25 years ago while messing about with knoppix and redhat

[-]

Turkish_Nianga@reddit

Because of Cyber Security. Want to do a career on it.

[-]

PENGUINfromRUSSIA@reddit

Windows 10 literally tried to kill my hard drive with some new super fuck fetch update.

Now I'm only regretting that I didn't do it earlier my drive is fine tho it's alive and well

[-]

wuselgusel@reddit

I was 14 years old and had a lot of time to tinker with my first notebook. I never ran Linux (Ubuntu at that time) more than a couple of days, because of gaming and stuff. But this got me hooked. Even at that time I liked the idea of a package manager and the freedom of theming.

[-]

Pug4281@reddit

It was honestly just messing around with the Raspberry Pi, tbh. I played with it and liked it.

[-]

Ridewarior@reddit

Didn’t want windows, too broke for mac

[-]

Feisty_Confusion8277@reddit

Minecraft servers on ubuntu

[-]

hipi_hapa@reddit

Some Kali Linux tutorials I followed because I wanted to feel like a cool hacker. I didn't learn much tbh but I actually liked the system so I tried out some other distros and soon after I completely moved to Linux.

[-]

thejuva@reddit

Death of the Commodore Amiga.

[-]

ThreeCharsAtLeast@reddit

Windows 10, actually. A friend of mine had already migrated because Microsoft was about to end support for Windows 7 and he didn't like Windows 10. Another friend was on Arch btw for much longer. I was using Windows 10 on a second-hand laptop and I can't understand how I wasn't annoyed about the lag. Anyway, when every update took what felt like hours, Cortana was constantly begging me to accept new ToS, the search bar was just an ad for Edge & Bing and Windows decided to rearrange my start menu by overlapping the categories it became harder and harder for me not to switch.

I already had some experience with RaspyOS and CMD.EXE, so I got (or rather: was given) a new laptop to set up Linux on. It didn't end up working because the BIOS options were rather limited. Luckilly, my parents could just return it and get a more compatible laptop. Once I got a system (Ubuntu) running, I was amazed - and not just by the boot time: I'm a bit of a tkinterer and the custom keybinds in GNOME already blew my mind. Until I learned about the other tweaks you could do.

I'm no longer on Ubuntu and I'm no longer on GNOME. But I'm still excited about the same principles. Linux just proved to be everything I could ever hope for - so I think I'll stay here for a while.

[-]

JuggernautRelative67@reddit

Simply easy compilation time for code and how lightweight it is

[-]

hamizannaruto@reddit

My laptop don't want to boot. Tried reinstall windows but failed.

Fuck it, Linux

[-]

Maleficent_Problem31@reddit

I knew Linux had terminal and that you could do things faster using it rather than ui, so I decided to give it a try

[-]

Manuel_Cam@reddit

Windows 11 was a a horrible experience for me. I couldn't play Minecraft Java because of ram issues, despite having the same amount of RAM that my brother has, but he uses Windows 10, so for him everything works fine. I also used the Drive security copies because it seemed fine, but the spam saying yOu DoN't HaVe EnOuGh sPaCe, was too annoying, so I disable the copies, and then all files that where just in the cloud disappeared from my PC and I've lost a lot of time until I figured out that it was on the cloud trash. After all of that I was very mad at W11, and a few days later I had hardware issues and I thought that I could use the guarantee, buy a new PC and boot Linux on it, and so I did. At first I arrived at KDE Neon (no, I didn't try to say Plasma), it was cool until the system become too unstable, and then I moved to Fedora, where by the moment everything it's fine.

[-]

okurokonfire@reddit

The school teacher showed us Ubuntu. At that time(2009) Canonical sent installation CDs for anyone who requested it.

I got a couple of CDs and a bunch of stickers in the mail.

[-]

Alenicia@reddit

When I was a kid I was pointed to DOS because I wanted to play games and my father decided if I was going to play games I had to "learn" how to navigate and use DOS to get to the games I wanted. I learned to install software and the basics of the command line .. and then when Windows XP came around I wasn't allowed to use that. >_<

When it got to the point where I was eventually given my own computer and Windows Vista was a thing that my father was using alongside Mac OS X .. I was pointed towards Ubuntu at the time and it was what I used until high school when I needed a computer with Windows so I can properly use Office and follow along for school assignments.

But since then .. I've learned to use all the operating systems and distributions around because they all have something different to offer. :)

[-]

hy2cone@reddit

The basic computer skill every kids know back in the day with DOS. Sigh, kids just search up the game and click install these days.

[-]

DRAGONUV7890@reddit

3rd standard Linux classes in school it was good. Government wanted to give us open source os. It's been decades but the education ministry forgot the update lessoon even windows 7 is the Last updated version as per government last they remeber is Ubuntu decades old.

[-]

theevildjinn@reddit

It was 1998 or 1999, I was a university student and I was getting a bit fed up of having to go to the computer lab in the city centre to use the Solaris machines to do my coursework. I tried installing Mandrake (an old Redhat derivative) alongside Windows 98 on my home PC, and never looked back.

[-]

Reasonable-Display84@reddit

When schools declared lockdown in 2019 i had a plenty of time and an old ass laptop if i remember correctly it had like 1 gig of ram and some pentium processor so i just went on the internet and tried as many OS as i could, android x86 , react os, zorin and from zorin i went down the path of trying to optimize every single byte of my laptop. and today here i am.

[-]

CcMenta@reddit

For me it was the customization of the DE's. Windows 10 looks horrible and windows 11 doesn't have any features that I would need, the only thing that windows 11 is better than 10 is how it looks but you can replicate it on linux.

One thing that is much better on linux than windows is IMEs (input method editor). On windows you can't change the base layout so it's always going to be a english layout, you are limited what shortcut keys you can change, and you can't make (in case of japanese) hiragana the default state when IME is enabled, on linux you can change everything and on kde plasma with fcitx5 if you install the configuration tool it integrates it's self in to the system settings app so it looks like it's in kde plasma by default.

[-]

NotBabaYaga@reddit

I tried Linux for the first time recently and the reason was quite simple: Microsoft's continuous bullshit had just gotten to me so I decided to jump in.

Pretty happy so far!

[-]

Chromiell@reddit

I very briefly used Ubuntu during my highschool years because I got interested in another OS that weren't Windows, but back in 2010 there wasn't much you could do with Ubuntu on a desktop other than very basic stuff, so I quickly lost interest, I then had to use Ubuntu again for a couple of University courses back in 2012-2013 and I saw some progress, but for me it was still pretty much unusable.

Fast forward to August 2021 and I was working from home with little work to do because everyone was on vacation, so I decided to build an Ubuntu server on Google Could Platform to learn something about how cloud computing works, I span up the machine, started playing with WordPress and Docker and had a lot of fun using and learning the CLI. I then went into a bit of a rabbit hole with Linux YouTubers like Chris Titus, Brodie, The Linux Experiment and since I heard about Proton I decided to check the games compatibility with Linux, to my surprise a ton of games were perfectly playable on ProtonDB, so around September 2021 I decided to yolo install Manjaro on my main desktop PC, getting rid of Windows in the process.

I've used Manjaro for around a year with great success, then I kinda fully switched to laptops and nowadays I'm only using Debian on laptops, but since I started with Manjaro I haven't used Windows at all except for my company issued laptop which I only use for work.

[-]

DRD818@reddit

Maybe 2000, my IT brother-in-law (at the time). Showed me this thing called Slackware, and I never looked back; cool as hell to all but roll my own OS, as janky as everything was then. Spent a couple of years in dependency hell, discovered the concept of a package manager and so switched to Zenwalk. From there, tried Mandrake (which became Mandriva in the interim), then Ubuntu, and then Mint which is basically Ubuntu that doesn't suck. I like to use my machine more than tinker with it (though I'm glad I still have the option), so I'm sticking with Mint for the foreseeable future.

[-]

jnor@reddit

I was a kid at LAN party back in the day
My friend had a big brother running cs1.6 on ubuntu

When I saw Compiz in action my child mind exploded

[-]

nagarz@reddit

Work.

I had used linux for a couple years at the uni PCs back in the ubuntu 6.0 days, but until my first job I didn't actually use it. The computer I was working on already had debian and I figured it would be a nice way to get used to it, and our cloud servers where using either centOS or ubuntu server (been a while so I'm not 100% sure on that).

Since then it has rained a lot, and back in march I finally began daily driving fedora with KDE on my desktop (currently using hyprland).

[-]

LeBB2KK@reddit

It all started with pure curiosity. Back in 2001, I got my first computer, initially running Windows 98 and shortly after, Windows XP. Having never touched a computer before, I was instantly hooked. It coincided with the dawn of ADSL in France, and the possibilities seemed boundless. I dove headfirst into learning everything computer-related.

One day, I stumbled upon the Mandrake website and was intrigued. An operating system that wasn't Windows? And free? It blew my mind. I taught myself how to burn CDs, partition hard drives, and install the OS. My first real challenge was getting my ADSL PCI Modem to work. Somehow, I managed to succeed, despite having no clue about terminals or command lines – the whole process was quite the ordeal back then as I had to switch back and forth with XP and hand write commands line

While I never adopted Linux as my primary OS (I switched to Mac a few years later), my parents have been Ubuntu users since around 2005. Through them, I've kept up with the news and evolution of Linux over the years from a "consumer" POV.

[-]

rhfreakytux@reddit

My curiosity and hobby. But guess what now it's helping me earn income, lol. From personal interest to the job.

[-]

GebnaTorky@reddit

windows 8

[-]

edbgon@reddit

In 2001-2002, I was working at a small dialup internet provider where we also built and repaired computers. My boss ordered the cheapest stuff possible and one of the motherboards came with a linux demo CD. I wish that I could remember what distribution it was. At the time I thought there was only PC and Mac in the desktop realm and couldn't believe that there was an alternative. I remember my boss telling me "Linux has been around for years, it's not going anywhere" when he noticed that I was hooked.

Moved on to Redhat, Mandrake, Gentoo, Mint, and finally back to Gentoo over the course of 20+ years. I somehow got through university with linux and open office.

[-]

SilentPomegranate317@reddit

The free government laptop for high schoolers came pre-installed with Linux in my state

[-]

Conscript11@reddit

Highschool teacher gave me a copy of mandrake, I didn't even realize something besides mac and windows existed. I thought it was cool and played around with it on an old laptop. I gradually transitioned away from Microsoft as each new version came out. The main points to full Linux use were:

Vista 8 Ads in start menu The settings menu And finally the constant badgering about using a Microsoft account

I really have to thank valves and the wine/proton communities for finally letting me go Linux full time. Too bad work didn't follow suit

[-]

pentag0@reddit

L33tne55

[-]

azraelzjr@reddit

I started Linux Debian Squeeze after there was no driver support for my i5-2500k PC. I didn't like Windows 8 too

[-]

Egorianium@reddit

I was first introduced to Linux when a friend of mine brought his laptop to a computer science class. I looked at his laptop and was very surprised. Everything was smooth, beautiful, I saw how he turned on some program with one combination of keys, and then turned on the browser with another combination. I liked the beauty and fast action of Linux. Also, my 1st computer is complete shit, and linux worked faster there (I could misunderstand the question, I don't speak English so well, don't throw downvotes please) 🙂

[-]

isAnExParrot878@reddit

Bought a laptop back in 2009. It had windows Vista on it. Was not very tech savvy back then but ended up hating vista so much I replaced it with Ubuntu. It was interesting how this lead me to a career path that revolved around Linux years later. Linux made me a nerd!

[-]

Stilgar314@reddit

Because it's the coolest way to run a computer. Remember the compiz desktop cube? I do. Then I stayed because some distros are genuinely the easiest and most bullshit free OS out there.

[-]

6950X_Titan_X_Pascal@reddit

dont wanna use pirated win7 and dont wanna purchase a license key

[-]

CrabbyE@reddit

First time was forced. Only had an old laptop that couldn't run windows and changed to ubuntu. Didn't enjoy it. Now however I put linux on a separate drive for shits and giggles

[-]

dopeytree@reddit

It came on a Cd with a computer magazine

[-]

SnillyWead@reddit

Curiosity. In 2017 a W10 update borked my Windows HP Sleekbook and I couldn't fix it and I always wanted to try Linux, so this was the perfect opportunity to try it. Peppermint 8 I installed. Liked it and the rest is history. Currently using MX Linux Xfce.

[-]

Figrol@reddit

I got into Linux in my grad Job. I took a role out of uni at Red Hat. Since then, Linux has been a core part of my life and would never look back! I still use windows as my daily driver for game compatibility issues, but have a few Linux servers I run!

[-]

dreamtr7pper@reddit

To me it was the open source aspect that drew me to Linux, as I wanted to learn more about the innards of an OS kernel.

[-]

Espardrilles@reddit

It was my first OS, my ex, and it student at the time, managed to get me a computer with pieces that had laying around and I think it had a Mandrake or Red hat.

[-]

xXx_MrAnthrope_xXx@reddit

Tux. I was a child. Didn't hurt that it was mostly free (although, my first distro came in a 'For Dummies' book).

[-]

kolpator@reddit

user iterface of gnome desktop environment from redhat linux 6 (not EL) from 1999 or similar..... something like this > https://64.media.tumblr.com/eaa9310b017aa605c7f27e64ad21e61d/4f2cda8e7377ecd9-a3/s1280x1920/792ee8656b0b402b816cf6409b8d1576a07fac90.png

[-]

MinApp55@reddit

Back in the late 90s my older brother would park us kids (I was just 1 year older than his kids) infront of a Red Hat computer. That was the computer for the kids. The windows license was reserved for his computer.

So that was my first contact with Linux, Red Hat. And I loved the game Konquest.

Then a few years later I installed it myself from a PC magazine CD and found it a lot more interesting than Windows.

I think what really got me into Linux was poverty. Because I didn't fully understand what it could be, that it would be my career eventually. But we were poor and I was tired of playing demo games for one level over and over. So Linux was like a game for me, a game that never ends. Eventually I convinced my mom to buy a programming book and after that it was over for Windows in my life. So I'm a 25 years into my Linux addiction now.

[-]

jEG550tm@reddit

My fate was sealed back in 2009 or 2010 when I saw the wubi video from tinkernut.

[-]

looopTools@reddit

A metric shit ton of issues with Windows on my Laptop. I remembered that I used to use something called Yggdrasil Linux and I looked for it

[-]

urmie76@reddit

Freedom, power, absolute control.

[-]

WestMagazine1194@reddit

I think it was 2008/9 and i got one of those pc magazines where there was an ubuntu live cd

[-]

JoyousRaccoon@reddit

The pandemic (2020). I was in sophomore year of higschool at the time and had dabbled with programming in java and c on the ancient family PC. nothing serious. Almost everything at my school used to happen on paper, and when school went digital - I realized that my poor 4gb DDR3 3rd gen i5 win7 PC could not run the monstrosity that Microsoft teams is.

Quickly switched to ubuntu after and stuck with it for 3 years. Learned a LOT about the shell that time. Ran fedora for a year, and now I use arch.

[-]

Small-Movie3137@reddit

Curiosity and old hardware renovation.

[-]

CondiMesmer@reddit

So I could get wobbly windows

[-]

Liquigon@reddit

SCO Unix (the original one), and a Sun Workstation a friend used at work.

That friend with the Sun one day came with the installation disks for SCO Unix, we tried to get it running on one of my PCs, it was a mess, with multiple Harddrives connected to the PC. Harddrives outside of the PC case, with parallal ATA and power Cables coming out of the PC to have enough disk space. But we got it running, barely.
A few weeks later the friend came with some floppys containing a small Linux Distribution, SLS, must have been something in the Kernel 0.96 range. Had a Linux PC ever since, but many years sitting around nearly idle while i was enjoying Mac OS, or was forced to use Windows. Am back now to linux on my main PC, Arch btw.

[-]

BobYourUncle824@reddit

Old hardware revamping.

[-]

gabriel_3@reddit

FOSS tools I was using on Windows more up to date on Linux.

[-]

arthursucks@reddit

Windows 2000 marked the peak of Microsoft's operating systems for me. When it became obsolete, Linux seemed like the perfect fit, especially because I admired its underlying philosophy.

[-]

_Tofe@reddit

I just wanted to try preemptive multitasking, never went back since then.

[-]

kingo409@reddit

I'm generally a computer enthusiast. I had been playing around with OS/2 Warp, which was similar enough to Windows. Linux, of course, is at quite a different point in the evolutionary line. But I was up for the challenge.

I have to admit that the desire to break away from the hegemony of Microsoft was a major factor. (Anyone remember the 1th browser wars?) I also had to wait until it became more usable to use it every day. A terminal window with limited hardware support is not practical with Web browsers & office suites available & in regular use.

I love the fact that Linux is generally open source. Because of this, there are things that I like about Linux. Updates are not as hung up in red tape. The support community is more robust. It has more of a hobbyist vibe more than a business 1, tho Linux can do business!

At this point, I can do anything that I need to do with a computer in Linux that I can do in Windows, or Mac OS.

This is what got me into Linux, & why I have stayed.

[-]

Matro-se@reddit

I was blown away by the Sun Microsystems workstations we had access to at the university when I started there in 1990. Somewhere during the winter of '93-'94 I built a PC and downloaded a stack of floppies and installed Slackware. The look and feel was very similar to the Sun workstations. Loved it.

[-]

Harshcrabby@reddit

I have currently wsl but I will probably change soon

[-]

Main_Worth_7606@reddit

Middle school computer class

[-]

hera9191@reddit

I came, as a teenager, in the middle of 90's from AmigaOS to Slackware and Bash was what impressed me at first.

[-]

Sad-Personality8767@reddit

A shitty laptop I owned that was unbelievable to use one windows

[-]

SweetGale@reddit

I stayed two nights at a friend's place in 1999 watching him install Linux. I don't know which distro, but it was one where you had to compile everything yourself. The only thing he managed to show me beyond endless scrolling text was the Enlightenment window manager.

Then in 2000, I watched another friend try to install Slackware. Probably not the best choice since he was an absolute beginner, but it gave me a good overview of the installation and setup process.

In 2001, Apple released Mac OS X. I partitioned the hard disk in my Power Mac G4 to triple boot Mac OS 9, Mac OS X and Yellow Dog Linux (and then wrote about the process in a school assignment). It was in part out of curiosity and in part as a contingency plan in case Mac OS X turned out to not live up to its promises. 10.0 was a piece of crap and nearly unusable but it quickly improved and by 10.2 started to feel like a mature operating system.

I'd have many more encounters with Linux over the years before finally getting fed up with Apple in 2019 and switching over to Linux as my main OS.

[-]

SaltyMaybe7887@reddit (OP)

I don't know which distro, but it was one where you had to compile everything yourself.

That's probably Gentoo Linux. I used it as my daily driver for years.

[-]

Derpygoras@reddit

I have a very long list of very valid reasons to be hostile to Microsoft, and on top of it I essentially started on an Amiga, moved on to UNIX, then had to suffer Windows for 20 years.

Windows was not just objectively worse, they also defended its insufficients by "Yeah, that is a strategic decision we made. With the objective of establishing a monoculture such that you have to give us money" which is not the grandest of reasons.

"Hello. This is Shitburger. We are the only restaurants in this country, by law. One that we lobbied for. If you find our cellulose-stuffed burgers to be wanting, then you should know that the profit margin is terriffic."

So I jumped eagerly on Linux the moment I saw it, except it was basically trash the first 20 years. Until it was not, and since 2015 I am happy to live permanently in penguin land.

[-]

HozSensei@reddit

I'm a windows user :( would like to change since I bought the stemdeck and jump into desktop mode and experiment. Sadly, at works I have a window's laptop and it's not négociable :/

[-]

seanm277@reddit

Fell in love with the purple terminal on 10.04 and people told me i could be a hacker if i could install metasploit back then.

[-]

faisal6309@reddit

A lot of factors contributed my interest in Linux:

At first, it was something that I knew very little about. At that time, Ubuntu was delivering CDs of its OS to everyone around the world. I could not get it though. Still I downloaded iso instead in order to try it and newly introduced Unity desktop at that time fascinated me. However, since I could do very little with it except web browsing, I stopped using it.
My AMD GPU at that time did not work nicely with Linux and it was difficult for me to understand why FGLRX is difficult to install on some Linux distros and even after installation, why AMD drivers did not give the best performance compared to Windows at that time. FGLRX was suppose to be the official way to install AMD drivers in Linux but often times those drivers did not work as expected.
Then I bought Nvidia drivers and the life was actually good for a while. I was even able to explore FreeBSD because I found Nvidia driver on FreeBSD derivative (PC-BSD later TrueOS) very straight forward. However, not a lot of games were available for both Linux and FreeBSD so I went back to Windows yet again.
Later, Windows would start creating unwanted problems for me even though I was using 7th gen CPU. So I would often jump between Windows and Linux but wasn't fully satisfied with both.
Gaming actually became an option after Proton release and slowly but steadily most of my favorite games started to work fine with Proton. I don't buy a lot of games but when my one of the favorite game (Halo Master Chief Collection) started to work properly on Linux, I didn't see a reason to switch back to Windows. Furthermore, my setup did not support installation of Windows 11.
Then I found OpenSUSE which I knew before but only because once upon a time they offered a service to create your own OpenSUSE based distro using SUSEStudio. Right now, I find Tumbleweed to be the most stable and good enough operating system for gaming on Linux. All other distros (except Arch and its derivatives and other not very famous distros) gave me screen tearing or lags in the games. So I settles with OpenSUSE. I have been using OpenSUSE for over an year now. I don't see a reason to go back to Windows anymore especially because Windows 10 is reaching its end of life and Windows 11 is not an option for me anymore.

There are several issues I face even in Linux for example not so good UI/UX experience in any desktop other than Gnome. However, for me the only biggest problem with Linux so far is that I am not able to play Secret Maryo Chronicles anymore.

[-]

ZeunO8@reddit

Building from source at age 7, wanted to compile from scratch to learn about build pipelines

[-]

Chance_Bluejay_1138@reddit

i simply got tired of windows😂

[-]

SadSpecial8319@reddit

One to many BSoD in 2005.

[-]

RudePragmatist@reddit

Tivoli Storage Manager. So basically because of work.

[-]

FalseAgent@reddit

just my curiosity, mostly.

I wouldn't say i'm "into" linux because I have been watching linux videos and stuff for quite a while even though I never actually tried it myself.

however I think the current landscape lends itself very well to linux, I think the enshittification of software across the board is concerning, and the industry of commercial software desperately needs a counter-balance.

While I like Windows 11, I also have some concerns about where big tech is taking their software. Even MacOS and Android isn't spared. Unfortunately, I don't get the choice on Android phones because things like NFC payments tend to be busted on android roms.

I also think the situation software packaging and drivers on linux have come a long way.

[-]

Natjoe64@reddit

When I needed an operating system for my new basement gaming pc. I wanted it to function like a console, not like a pc. But a console with unrivaled backwards compatibility and upgradability. Thats not something that windows can do. Bazzite linux has been better than windows for sure. No bs account garbage, no ads in the os, no resource intensive ui. Its just the steam deck, but on a tv. No having to get a keyboard/mouse to do everything, just games. Amazing.

[-]

mahdyy_@reddit

NGL thought the penguin was cute

[-]

Hari___Seldon@reddit

My wife is cautiously considering moving to Linux and her first question was "do they have a cat version?" 😹 She manages a vet clinic so I figure that's a fair ask. I countered by telling her that our song being Penguin (by Christina Perri) is the sign that she's meant to join me on Linux. Now I just need to find a Debian based cat distro or Fedora's joining the party 🙀

[-]

free_help@reddit

A piece about Linus Torvalds on Reader's Digest turned me on to Linux way before I had a computer or access to one. I was crazy about computers and the idea of free software sounded very cool

[-]

Hari___Seldon@reddit

This may be the first time since 1975 when Reader's Digest helped some move forward in the tech world 😁

[-]

FruitMission@reddit

My Ex! She fucked me up so badly that I thought, ‘Maybe I should start using Linux as well at this point.’

How does that saying go? If you find out you are digging yourself into a hole, continue digging… I forget🫡

[-]

xoteonlinux@reddit

I chose to move on from Windows when Windows Update began installing software i didn't know of. That was very quickly the case pretty after Microsoft decided 25 active network connections were enough to adress the problems they had with self-replicating worms in the '90s, instead of fixing their crap-engineered software.

That movement became even more justified when i had to obtain MS certificates (e.g. MSCSE).

[-]

Hari___Seldon@reddit

Originally it was the only Unix-like OS that I could easily installed and run at home. I'd have gone with Solaris, BSD, or even BeOS given my preference at the time (mid/late-ish 90s), but my friends only had Linux installers burned to CD so I guess I got lucky 🍀

[-]

daftv4der@reddit

I tried it when I first started learning coding, as I kept hearing how amazing it was from my coworkers where I worked as an instructor for software engineering courses.

It was a miserable experience though and I battled with GRUB and driver issues. I tried Linux Mint right after it first came out, and Ubuntu as well. I might have tried OpenSuse but I can't remember.

I tried it again about 5-10 years later as Windows was beginning to force it's online login and become far worse, and unfortunately it was still a poor experience, with no support for higher than 60hz refresh rates, and again, driver issues.

I tried for the third time last year, and despite still having driver issues and issues with Wayland, I kept at it and after a few months of fiddling and learning, I managed to migrate my work desktop to Fedora and become used to it, after trying most of the popular distros (OpenSuse, Nobara, Ubuntu LTS and latest, Mint, ZorinOS, Elementary, Manjaro, Kubuntu, and others).

Now I'm motivated to stick with the platform and slowly migrate my personal OS, still Windows, over to Linux. I'll probably still require a Windows install to play games, but other than gaming I'll probably do everything else in Linux.

[-]

MrReddFlames@reddit

Raspberry Pi, I got the rpi OS and my grandfather said that it's linux based and then I decided to learn more about "the penguin thing"

[-]

subiacOSB@reddit

Windows 95/98 sucking so bad.

[-]

Mysterious_Tutor_388@reddit

I've dabbled in and out of linux since 2014 for a small amount of hours. I tried doing a swap in 2020 and moved back to windows. 2023 rolled around and I made the full dive commit to Arch Linux and just never went back to windows afterwards. I have been having a good time gaming and the OS is meeting my needs now. I don't like how Microsoft feels entitled to user data and changing opt ins to opt outs. Along with windows update being horrible, regularly breaking drivers, and other settings i had in place. When something breaks in windows you reboot it and hope it fixes itself. When something breaks in Arch i can figure out what the issue is and fix it.

[-]

Sleepy-Catz@reddit

back when i was in my undergrad, we did a project designing an operating system and we did it on cent os.

[-]

InfameArts@reddit

No crashes

[-]

AqFad2811@reddit

Recall/Cospylot news

[-]

Motor_Round_6019@reddit

I wanted to give it a shot. I stayed with it for a bit, then I broke it. So, after breaking it, I left for a while. Then Linux piqued my interest once more and I got around to using it again. The path from there is still pretty rocky, but I'm now daily driving Ubuntu 24.04 on my desktop, Ubuntu 22.04 on my laptop, and TrueNAS Scale on my NAS server. I don't think I don't use Linux in some way, shape, or form on any of my devices.

[-]

redditorrium@reddit

A crappy ass laptop

[-]

MurderShovel@reddit

In the early 90s, my older brother who was a CS major showed me how to use Red Hat, on floppys, to troubleshoot a HDD issue. First time I’d ever heard of this whole Linux thing. When I entered IT as an L1 tech, I used Hiren’s, partedmagic, gparted and some other live discs to troubleshoot HW issues. That’s when I fell in love.

I started using it for data recovery because it would read stuff Windows wouldn’t even acknowledge and I was the only person in my shop that had any idea where to start. Then came Type 1 hypervisors. NAS. SBCs. Deployment and imaging servers/backup tools. PXE servers. Scripting. The Almighty BASH.

Then I started playing more with web servers and the cloud. IIS is hot garbage unless you’re running Windows services that require it and a tiny Linux VM will run a whole LAMP stack where a Windows server would just thrash to even try to boot. That got me into Apache, Nginx, Caddy, PHP, SQL, and so on. Deploying web apps. Really understanding networking. Then network appliances got me to my current position as a network engineer.

SOOO much of technology runs off *nix and so much of the world has no idea. The flexibility, power, and control is just amazing. You can dig into every aspect as far as you want to go. It lets YOU decide instead of making you do it the MS way. It’s almost addicting.

[-]

neoneat@reddit

My job requirement

[-]

RelativeEconomics114@reddit

I had a friend who liked linux and was annoyed with Microsoft in the late XP era and did not want to switch to Vista. I did the worst switch to linux someone could do. First, I tried source mage, but it was not stable enough yet. Later, I tried Arch Mage a year, but I got annoyed cause the tool chain broke in a lot of updates. But then I found a gentoo, which was perfectly modular and serviceable, and since then, I have been happy.

[-]

iridesce57@reddit

I came to it in the early 90s after using a Mackintosh at work ( donated to the non-profit ) and then a pc running 3.0.

Then I heard that some student in Finland began with a kernel, asked for some feedback, and then oversaw the voluntary contributions from people who did it for the love of what could happen ...

Then he decided that he and his cohorts would give the world an OS that was free, as in beer ( as well as in freedom ).

I had to do whatever it took to get on that bandwagon, so searching and building interfaces with hardware using Slack and then Mandrake on homebuilt pcs was a pain and a joy.

And never looked back .

These days I run MXLinux on our work boxes and in my home machines.

[-]

Fast-Top-5071@reddit

I wanted my computer to just work. With no nonsense.

[-]

the_matrix_hyena@reddit

Windows Bloatware

[-]

DeivaDoe@reddit

A friend got me to take a linux course in 2004. He didn't get in though but I had fun. SuSE was my first distro on my own pc, but we did learn on redhat in the course

[-]

jr735@reddit

I had enough of Microsoft long ago. I had gotten a used computer around 2003 that still had Win 3.11 (and a highly corrupted install). I was putting FreeDOS on it anyhow. Soon after, I got an Ubuntu 4.04 CD and set it up dual boot. It was easier that way to get things onto the FreeDOS partition using Linux, which could get online much more easily than FreeDOS could. The rest is history.

[-]

Organic-Algae-9438@reddit

A bluescreen in Windows 98 during homework made me install Slackware in 1998 and I never had Windows ever again.

[-]

sonny894@reddit

I think the first time I saw any *nix was the first Dial-up ISP we had in the 90s, it was a local small one, not AOL, and they let you telnet in. I don't remember all the details except there was some security hole my best friend showed me involving changing the dictionary setting in the mail program that made it send you the passwd file. We brute forced a few people's logins.

I thought it was the coolest thing. Reminded me of The Cuckoo's Egg.

Then starting college in '97 and the math and physics and CS departments all had their own servers we could get a shell on. I remember logging into one called "chaos" but I don't remember what OS it was specifically. For some reason csh or tcsh was the default, so that's what I've used since then, only recently switching to zsh. Never really used bash.

Later when I had access to some old parts, I bought a burned Red Hat (5.2?) CD from somewhere, maybe it was mailed to me, and setup my first Linux box, a server in my house (Me and 2 roommates after college) as a firewall with 2 NICs. It didn't really do anything else but I also got a free wide format dot matrix printer from somewhere that I hooked up to it.

My best friend from above also went to the same college and we'd hang out at his place doing stupid computer stuff all night instead of physics homework. He started a web hosting company from his place back around 2000 and was a great guy, my first personal email was on his server for a while, mylastname@hislastname.net.

RIP Robert.

[-]

ThisInterview4702@reddit

I was in college at the time and I think it was right around the time my first Acer died and someone had sold me this ancient Dell that still ran Windows XP. I couldn't install 7 (the latest at the time). I don't remember exactly why but it probably wouldn't have functioned on such an old POS. Ubuntu, however, ran perfectly fine!

I had used Linux before this but this was the first time I had daily-driven it personally. Before that, we had some version of linux installed in a computer lab in my high school. I have no idea which distro that was, it looked kind of like MX but this was in the early 2000's! Before that, I vaguely remember SunOS!! My elementary school had a lab full of Sun computers. Neither of those were anything like Ubuntu but I didn't really have any issue navigating it, all the software I need was free and I was able to do my homework without having to beg my grandparents for a new laptop or save up from my crappy job. Ubuntu really made that ancient dinosaur of a Dell shine!

[-]

that_one_guy_v2@reddit

Started learning Linux in college, realized I was much more effective/efficient using Linux rather than Windows. I setup a dual boot at this time. Then Microsoft started their stunts of forcing Edge, playing ads, and then general not allowing me to use my system how I wanted, I got rid of the dual boot and haven't looked back.

[-]

Captain-Serious@reddit

Back in the days, I spent money on Windows Vista. Not too much later, I started dual booting Ubuntu. Some 5 years ago, I noticed that I boot Windows once a year or so and got completely rid of the malware.

However my very first experience with Linux was SuSE 6.??, which came with some PC magazine and which teenager me tried out of curiosity. Figuring out how to install a Fritz!Card without having a wiki at hand was... well, interesting.

[-]

Rocky_Mountain_Way@reddit

1992: I just wanted to play “rogue” which my university had running on their multiuser PDP-11s

Next thing you know, I’m downloading boot and root floppies

[-]

drew8311@reddit

Having to answer support questions years ago is probably why he is still cranky when dealing with people even to this day

[-]

Frossstbiite@reddit

My hatred for Windows 10 and further hatred for windows 11

[-]

FantasticEmu@reddit

Was given a Mac for work and loved it for dev work. I’m too cheap to buy a Mac for my personal machine so I went with Linux since it’s very similar.

Still love Mac but Linux is just as good for me

[-]

mok000@reddit

I have also been a Mac user since forever, but I pretty much do everything in the terminal, browser and Emacs, so I move completely seamlessly between my Mac laptop and Linux homelab systems. When you're in the terminal and with homebrew on the Mac there's literally no difference.

[-]

shaulreznik@reddit

Around 2004, I came across a mention of Linux on my LiveJournal feed. Curious, I asked the blogger where I could download it and soon found myself distro-hopping through various distros like Ubuntu and Mepis.

[-]

TheRakeshPurohit@reddit

dissatisfaction of windows 🪟

[-]

Yanik_9@reddit

Actually i was board and somehow i got into watching christitustech and i was like linuz whats that abd watched his videos and his windows 10 to linux mint series and went to linux in may 2022 but went back to windows in september because i wanted to play overwatch and it didbt work well and i didnt want to mess with things anymore and here i am back on linux with debian 12 kde plasma pretty heppy with this

[-]

aomidRS@reddit

When I started coding.

[-]

CodeRoyal@reddit

Attended a free software keynote with the main guess being Richard Stallman in 2016.

[-]

InfiniteVastDarkness@reddit

I was working with a guy that kind of liked to needle me about being a computer geek. One afternoon he made a comment like “well why aren’t you using Linux yet like all the hackers?”, so I looked into it. This was somewhere around 1995 or 96.

[-]

ChocolateDonut36@reddit

I like customization, and by customization I mean it, being able to select a desktop environment (or even creating my own) is something that, since I learned I can do I loved it (that and the end of windows 10 support on 2025)

So, got debian 11 installer and it was a nightmare for my system, no graphics or audio drivers for me then, surprisingly, debian 12 got released just in time, and the kernel 6.1 had everything I was missing, and instantly loved it. Using XFCE made my few first rices and time to time I changed something, window decoration, wallpapers, panels, colors and more.

since then, no more windows for me

[-]

ChocolateDonut36@reddit

I like customization, and by customization I mean it, being able to select a desktop environment (or even creating my own) is something that, since I learned I can do I loved it (that and the end of windows 10 support on 2025)

So, got debian 11 installer and it was a nightmare for my system, no graphics or audio drivers for me then, surprisingly, debian 12 got released just in time, and the kernel 6.1 had everything I was missing, and instantly loved it. Using XFCE made my few first rices and time to time I changed something, window decoration, wallpapers, panels, colors and more.

since then, no more windows for me

[-]

Boring-Onion@reddit

Looking back, I loved the idea of using Linux because it wasn’t mainstream. And something about being in the terminal just felt so right…

[-]

effivancy@reddit

Couldn’t upgrade to windows 11, was a bit familiar from a computer class but never fully grasped it, that was around a year ago still to this day I’m a noob but a lot more happier (still can’t get all my steam games to run on my laptop :/ )

[-]

Fit-Key-8352@reddit

I got my first PC in the late 90's, borked my windows install and did not know how to fix it. I went to the library and I found a book that included Mandrake linux cd...

[-]

Dustin_F_Bess@reddit

I played with Linux on and off starting seriously with Warty, But deleted Windows after the Vista debacle.. wasn't until 2020 that I bought a new laptop and left the Windows 10 / 11 on it.. still use Linux as my main OS on my desktop.

[-]

robunuske@reddit

Lost my coding software due to windows update. Like WTF! Really Microsoft?! In the midst of your job. Hahahahahaha.

[-]

djustice_kde@reddit

went to jail for telnet/smtp spoofing across state lines. met the real deal hackers and heard the word. ashamed of my visual basic knowledge, i grokked everything language from lfs through arch. landed firmly on Qt6/C++.

[-]

AccurateBandicoot494@reddit

I had a Linux basics class during my undergrad. I installed Ubuntu on my personal laptop to try out the things I was learning, ended up sticking.

[-]

citizenswerve@reddit

Running an os on a netbook that didn't cook the thing to death.

[-]

De_Clan_C@reddit

I took a computers class in high school that went over the basics of computer hardware and microsoft office, and just for fun the teacher had Ubuntu installed on some of the PCs to expose us to Linux, that piqued my interest into what it was. I later got a Chromebook for school that I found out it could run Linux, just a terminal and limited apps from debian 9. That's what started me down the rabbit hole. I would later install Ubuntu on a few old laptops just to see how it ran, and then on my school laptop and now I daily drive Fedora on my desktop and laptop.

[-]

JasenGroves@reddit

I really didn't like Windows 98. I hated it. So my buddy told me to switch to RedHat. He got me the disks and everything. I tinkered with RedHat, Mandrake/Mandriva, and BeOS. Eventually Ximian Desktop came out and I was just enamored by it. Head over heels. It had everything I ever wanted in a desktop. All the applications had a unifying look that wasn't so Redmond-ish. Everything just worked. But, eventually it got sold off the Novell and buried into the ground. And I never again found anything that good in a desktop environment. I've spent every day since then Chasing Ximian... So to speak.

[-]

MegaVenomous@reddit

It was 2017 and I had received my FIL's old laptop. The original hard drive was shot, so I had to replace it. A replacement drive came without an OS. Someone suggested either Chrome or Linux.

Being Google-averse, I chose Linux. I remember seeing the commercials for it (check 'em out on YouTube) in the late 90's, but knew nothing about it. But after some digging, I started with Peppermint, then moved to Ubuntu, then settled on Mint. (This is the very condensed version.)

[-]

cla_ydoh@reddit

Software piracy and sharing via the Warez scene in Usenet circa 2000.

I discovered this by searching for " Free Photoshop plugins" to find interesting things to try using with a crappy application from Adobe called Photo Deluxe. Search back then was pretty much just keyword matching, so sketchy websites and reference to newsgroups were extremely prominent.

[-]

djustice_kde@reddit

♪ hoist the colors high! ♪

[-]

False_Strawberry1847@reddit

From the hype, I get that it’s the most versatile for different uses.

[-]

Flench04@reddit

After Mircrosft broke Office and anything requiring a microsft account after my updated from 10 to 11, I've distro hopped. I don't use Linux much right now since I do lots of gaming and Womdows programing for school. But I will pledge that linux is 100 times better.

[-]

artful_nails@reddit

My dad had this old laptop to which he installed fedora (I think). I was intrigued by the idea of an OS that wasn't Windows. I didn't use it much and retreated to the family computer's safe Windows 7.

Flash forward maybe 10 or so years, that intrigue which had been silently growing in the back of my mind came back with a vengeance, and after I assembled my own PC, free of an OS, I decided to save money and to do what I've always kinda wanted to do. I switched to Linux.

[-]

sininenblue@reddit

I got bored, had a spare laptop, and I'm also a nerd

I think a lot of newer linux users are probably in the same boat

[-]

thekiltedpiper@reddit

Microsoft offered me the free Win 7 to Win 10 upgrade, then after a bad update I had to reinstall......and they said my key was no longer valid. So I bought a copy of Win 10. Two months later another bad update borked my system again. I installed Pop! as it had the Nvidia drivers already installed. Several years and a few distros later....I'm still on Linux.

[-]

triemdedwiat@reddit

It was $$$ free and thin Win 3.0 and programs cost lots of money.

[-]

Extreme-Ad-9290@reddit

portable systems on USB drives with Tails OS

[-]

tricheb0ars@reddit

Probably around 1997 or so. I was a computer geek and I still am.

I specifically remember the headache of LiLo back in those days. Sure I didn’t have to install dos and loadin but fuck that boot loader had my 15 year old noggin confused as hell

[-]

Malfaroa@reddit

my friend, for years, he scolded me for using windows, I finally made the switch, he teaches me by sending me google links and scolds me to learn to ask google how to solve my issues

[-]

haro0828@reddit

Curiosity. All the smart computer people I met on IRC used Linux or BSD. And I was into programming, they were a match made in heaven

[-]

silverwakeskater@reddit

I hated vista

[-]

truethoughtsgbg@reddit

Fall of 93 I was taking college classes and the instructor introduced me to Slackware. I've loved it since even though back then it wasn't a daily driver but now it is.

[-]

konqueror321@reddit

In the mid 1990s I was in the custom of downloading files from usenet. Using windows, the list of files would almost always be interrupted by a blue screen crash, and failure to do the task. This was after upgrading to Windows 97. and learning that it was a "cooperative" multitasking OS. Which meant that an individual program running under W97 could hang and never return control to the OS, and the blue screen was the result.

I did my research, and learned about Unix (specifically the bsd versions available), and also about a newish unix-like system "linux". I bought a boot loader program (shareware) and bought the current version of Red Hat Linux at CompUSA, a local computer store. I dual-booted it (installed on a separate partition and booted using the boot loader) and it worked well.

I could do the same task with linux (Red Hat) and it would always complete without hangups or blue screens -- total success!

So since then I've always dual booted windows (now windows 11) and some version of linux (for the past 12 years debian testing) and run linux as my everyday driver, but boot into windows every few months just to keep the OS updated, and so I can run a tax program once per year. [I've never found a workable tax program that operates on linux natively].

tldr: windows failed at required task, linix succeeded with honors.

[-]

CrimsonDMT@reddit

So, I've got a bit of a story.

When I turned 18 I built my first PC, my friend worked at Geek Squad and he had this CD with a pre-activated version of Windows XP which was the shit. Unlimited installs on unlimited machines, I had an absolute blast with it. I played so much COD4 and Halo PC. Then Vista eventually came out and I ended up skipping that version due to all the backlash it got. Then Windows 7 RC came out, I fell in love with it but couldn't afford a license. So I sailed the se7en seas and ended up finding a way to activate Windows 7 Ultimate for free. Ultimate because it was the best, and I was a gamer, lol. I eventually salvaged a legit license for free and it felt so good to finally have a legit copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. This is sadly where my Windows experience peeked and abruptly came to a crashing halt. Exit Windows 7 Heaven and enter the dawn of Windows 8 Hate, oooh boy was I naive but just SO excited. I had a steady job, extra income, so I built a new PC, and finally purchased my first legitimate copy of Windows ever, fresh off the shelf. The experience of Windows 8 was so bad and I had just built this new PC, I felt so scammed, so angry, so disappointed, but very much in denial. After all, I had just spent a ton of money on a nice rig, I had to enjoy my purchase, even though I was lying to myself. Then one day while at work I noticed my coworker was working on a PC and I saw an interface I've never seen before. I leaned over and asked what skin that was, thinking it was a Windows 8 reshell or something. He just laughed and said "Ubuntu, look it up". Before then I've never really heard of Linux, the only thing I may have heard conjured images of terminals and what not. That night started a 4 year journey of distrohopping I thought would never end. I learned a lot in those 4 years and eventually landed on Fedora being my distribution of choice paired with all AMD hardware. I achieved pure PC bliss and it continues on to this day. Fedora, and all Linux distributions, truly make the PC a Personal Computer.

[-]

CinnamonLoyalty@reddit

Windows.

[-]

guzzijason@reddit

A paycheck.

[-]

Just-Brain-6618@reddit

I just sort of fell into it in the late 90's. On a whim, not knowing anything about it, I picked up a copy of Red Hat for PC on CD at the local bookstore on and didn't do much with it. Not long after, working on Windows 95/98 (?), I created a hobby website that was hosted on a pay per month linux server. I connected via telnet to launch a connecting terminal, and used ftp software to transfer files to the server. I soon grew frustrated with MS Frontpage though - so I started coding HTML and dynamic scripts from scratch (still using windows, but telneting to the linux server). I picked up some quick skills in BASH and PERL at that time and started to see how powerful linux was. After that I didn't do much with linux again since it wasn't the OS of choice at the "shop". I gradually got into linux desktop out of personal interest about 10 years ago with Puppy linux, but only cursorily. As time has passed, I have gradually used linux more and more, and now it is becoming my main go to. Absolutely love it.

[-]

MoChuang@reddit

I got a Chromebook.

[-]

hiimjosh0@reddit

I was a physics student looking to do some radio astronomy.

[-]

Drate_Otin@reddit

A Guide to Unix using Linux.

A class for my associate's way back when.

[-]

Organic-Lunch-9043@reddit

Curiosity 😧

[-]

ebcdicZ@reddit

My 80386 would keep crashing with Windows 3.11. I just didn’t have the money to upgrade. I installed Linux and it didn’t crash anymore.

[-]

StevieRay8string69@reddit

Bunch of people crying about Windows again.

[-]

panconcocoa@reddit

I got bored of windows and discovered the amazing resource management in Linux and then the customization was a pleasant surprise

[-]

cammoorman@reddit

Started using Borland Kylix on linux to extend my Delphi knowledge.

[-]

gideonwilhelm@reddit

I had a book, "building a PC for Dummies", and in the chapter about installing an OS it mentioned Linux. Being a teenager, I was intrigued cause it was different, but I never got to build my own PC and try it out. In 2009, a friend showed me how to download and install Ubuntu on my laptop, and I've been in love with the Linux desktop ever since.

But gaming wasn't there yet in '09, and I'd stick with mostly Windows and the occasional Linux foray until two years ago when Windows just decided not to work on my PC. No version of Windows I installed would boot, so I tried Linux and it was so frictionless and I loved KDE so much I haven't gone back.

[-]

kjodle@reddit

I really like that Linux makes you think and get better at things when you run into problems, rather than just making you more dependent on some company that only sees me as a source of income.

[-]

insey1@reddit

My school started replacing windows with Linux. I began to dig into it and was learning about it until actually installing mint for the first time. (And almost destroying compatibility with windows because I didn't know the dual boot was a thing lol)

[-]

Scholes_SC2@reddit

Curiosity and the fact that it was said to be safer than Windows and for free

[-]

brunoreis93@reddit

Windows

[-]

kjodle@reddit

Oh gosh, I could get into a long story here, starting with a Commodore 64, coming up through various shades of Mac OS v6 through v9 and OSX1 through OSX4, and finally landing on Windows 7, which I actually liked. But Windows has a huge amount of suckitude, and Mac OSX (or Apple OSX or whatever the hell it's called these days) is keeping right up with it. When 7 was over, I knew it was time to switch to something that would not devour my soul.

[-]

Superb_Raccoon@reddit

Some guys came into the computer shop I worked in at the time, building whitebox PCs.

They described Linux, and I went out and bought Slackware 1.0 f4om Tower records, installed it on a 386-40 with 1 MB of memory a customer left behind.

Late 93 or 94... can't recall exactly. I remember tinkering on it over that winter getting it to run sendmail and Squid proxy.

[-]

bmfrosty@reddit

Windows 3.1

Took a few years to fully stick though.

[-]

OptimalAnywhere6282@reddit

In 2022, I got a computer from school (for free) that came with a custom Linux distro, called Huayra, based on Debian; and a very clear order: don't install windows on it.

I saw that it performed way better than my other windows laptop, and almost as good as a midrange laptop (consider that government laptops are low-end, with Celeron processor and 4 GB RAM). While it meets the minimum requirements for windows 11, I saw on my mom's laptop, which is just a little bit better, that was running windows 11 and it was hella laggy.

I've used Linux since then.

[-]

punishedstaen@reddit

eee pc running xandros linux in 2008-2009, that and watching a family friend play spore on his ubuntu pc and being enamoured with the "box" desktop animation

would later inherit my dad's old IBM thinkpad x61(?) (the one with the antenna) and would likewise run ubuntu on that. i wasn't enormously smart at the time and didnt exactly understand what linux was, so i would run minecraft through wine for no real reason

trouble is it would take several minutes for the launcher to open, and the game would regularly crash after about an hour, so my solution was to just boot up several instances of the launcher, wait for them to open, then just open a new minecraft window whenever one of them would crash, so i wouldn't have to wait

not sure what my thought process was there, to be honest.

would end up running windows on my first Proper PC until switching to fedora linux full-time in january 2022

[-]

UndevelopedMoose222@reddit

Wanted to look cool

[-]

gatorboi326@reddit

Free Software philosophy

[-]

anovadim@reddit

A friend show me Ubuntu 11.04

I was dumbfounded to discover that my computer could actually run another OS besides Windows.

I remember how weird it felt at first using a OS with different theming, different cursor, different fonts.

Since then it has been a struggle back and forth due to software exclusives but I finally settled with Windows on the desktop and Fedora on the laptop.

[-]

epSos-DE@reddit

Frustrating Windows experience.

Still drives me mad how silly and slow Windows is !

[-]

GiveIt2MeBigDaddy@reddit

I wanted choices

[-]

bittersweetjesus@reddit

I had a netbook disguised as a desktop computer running Win7 with a AMD E450 Dual Core processor, and 5 gigs of ram. When I updated it to 10, it crawled so I looked online and some people suggested installing Linux on it. I checked out Ubuntu which was too much for it but then installed Mint Cinnamon (that was process in itself) and I’ve been a user of Linux in some form since. That was probably in 2015.

[-]

antonpodkur@reddit

My father

[-]

lucybonfire@reddit

Because software development on Windows is an absolute nightmare

[-]

Jumper775-2@reddit

hackintosh. I got into that for quite a while, and got pretty good at it. I did that for years until eventually fate forced an nvidia GPU on me and i couldnt hackintosh anymore. Windows just never was what I wanted and eventually linux filled that hole.

[-]

lolguy12179@reddit

the only computer available to me was a HP laptop that claims to support Windows 10, but i don't really believe it. It ran any windows horribly, but runs most Linux distros pretty well, so I downloaded light distros and distrohopped for a while

[-]

met365784@reddit

I started in the early 2000’s using knoppix live cd to fix Windows machines. I played around quite a bit with the live environment. Eventually, I constructed a server, installed Ubuntu, built a nas utilizing freenas, and now, pretty much all my machines run Linux (Fedora KDE), because windows just doesn’t offer the same versatility or power that Linux has.

[-]

Iammethatisyou@reddit

I took a 3 month python programming class. I learned that some people like to code on Linux and I was like huh, after a while I was like why not try it? So I started with fedora kde, then xfce then Arch dwm.

[-]

computer-machine@reddit

I discovered that there was an alternative, then received a free CD in the mail.

[-]

Scattergun77@reddit

I just wanted to get away from Microsoft and Apple.

[-]

Skibzzz@reddit

I worked at a computer repair shop and a lady brought in a laptop with Ubuntu on it and I was very confused cause I've never heard of Linux so I hyper fixated on it & then in 2023 I switched completely now chilling on Tumbleweed with no plans of switching.

[-]

ChallengeOrganic2302@reddit

It was free

[-]

ShiromoriTaketo@reddit

The short answer is, Windows started pissing me off... The rumor of the time was "Windows 12 is coming, and it's going to be a subscription model"

The long answer is, I was on a looong business trip... took me 6 months from start to finish. Toward the beginning of that trip, I watched some Youtube and decided it was time I at least learned my way around Linux, just to have some options available if Windows did something to push me out.

I have a friend who works a lot with Linux, and when I finally got home, he gave me a bootable USB with Mint Cinnamon on it. I had 6 whole months for the frustration of Windows, and the anticipation of Linux to fester.

After that, I did a lot of exploring... I tried dozens of distributions, most available environments, and I found what I like and dislike... This exploration period lasted about another 6 months, and I've been pretty stable since then...

I've been using Arch, usually with Gnome or Plasma, and sometimes another DE or WM that I'm experimenting with... pacman is my favorite package manager, and even with Gnome or Plasma, the whole system still comes in quite a bit slimmer than other distributions.

Here's what my Laptop is doing:

https://imgur.com/v50lB7a

https://imgur.com/CNvIXkZ

And here's what my Desktop is doing

https://imgur.com/BvDxok0

https://imgur.com/GDoWZCN

And other than that, I'm avoiding Windows like a hazmat accident... Especially after they thought Recall was in any way, shape or form, appropriate.

[-]

TheOnlyCraz@reddit

I couldn't boot my laptop into windows for more than 10 seconds at a time before it would freeze. Turned out to be a graphics card driver issue that still wasn't resolved 10 years later when it happened again when I dug the thing out. But every time I boot into winblows it gives me another reason to leave it behind

[-]

jmantra623@reddit

Took a class in technical college on Linux back in the mid 2000s and one of things we learned about was Samba. I was blown away by how I could have a file server for Windows without paying for licenses. From there I was hooked.

[-]

sporosarcina@reddit

Curiosity and need to tinker.

[-]

Thetargos@reddit

For me, the answer is rather simple: gaming and being a tinkerer... I've been using it for the past 28 years (exclusively for the past 23).

Yes, I did make compromises, especially regarding gaming, but once I was comfortable enough, I ditched Windows in a heartbeat.

[-]

whitewail602@reddit

trauma

[-]

backst8back@reddit

Mid 2014, I got into a Dogecoin pool (people were mining, still). I was using Windows at the time and with my notebook I found a block, which is incredibly hard lol.

Later I joined the pool's IRC channel and I heard people using cgminerwith Linux and it got my interest. First distro I tried was Ubuntu and an year later I hopped to Arch, never left since!

[-]

Thick_You2502@reddit

As I stated in another similar post, I'm too old to remember when microsoft it's just another software company

[-]

Frird2008@reddit

Quicker & more reliable than windows depending on distro chosen

[-]

omniuni@reddit

I saw icons with transparent shadows and asked if it was Windows 2000. My teacher said "no", and then later in class when we were supposed to be installing Windows on computers he skipped me and said "wait a moment". While everyone else was installing Windows, he handed me a CD emblazoned with "Red Hat Linux 8.0".

[-]

oodzchen@reddit

For the some special keyboard shortcut customization, neither macOS or Windows meet my need, only Linux can.

[-]

MarsDrums@reddit

I found Linux at a computer show back in 1994. I saw it running on one of the computers and I was intrigued. I brought it home, put it on a spare PC and yeah, I was pretty impressed with how well it ran. It was kind of a step or 2 backwards from where windows was at the time (just before Windows 95 so I was using Windows For Workgroups 3.11) but it looked promising.

I then tried to commit to a dual booting system using a hot swap drive tray system. It actually worked really well. In fact, I found myself spending more time in Linux than I did in Windows. Which was really nice actually.

But then, I started doing lots of photography work and I was pretty much living in Lightroom and Photoshop. So, I kinda put Linux on the back burner for a little while.

Then windows 10 came out and I tried putting it on my computer (which ran Windows 7 perfectly fine) and Windows 10 pretty much ran like a car while riding the brake pedal. Very slow. Even though windows 7 ran fine on that PC, 10 was a no go... I had to do something. So I just put Linux Mint over Windows 10 (I had the Windows 7 drive on a shelf in case I needed to go back to it) and low and behold, Mint ran like a champ on that 8 year old (at the time) computer. So, I officially switched to Linux in 2018 and haven't looked back to Microsoft.

I kinda knew that I would eventually be running Linux over Windows at some point. And I came really close in 2010-2012 to switching. Had I not gotten into photography, I might have switched earlier.

[-]

debu_chocobo@reddit

Had always been aac guy since college. Decided in 2016 I didn't want to pay 30% more than for the last model, and the upgraded display was not worth the asking price. Realized good hardware for Windows laptops was going second hand or discounted. Tried Windows, couldn't live with it. Installed Ubuntu and it fitted me like a glove. Can't imagine using anything other than Linux now.

[-]

Eveltation@reddit

i just got into linux for educaition purpose, my school push me to learn it idk. btw its actually fun, yeah sometimes you got into trouble and don't know how to solve it by yourself. and the community its idk? friendly and yep they giving me some tutorial and the other stuff.

[-]

digiphaze@reddit

Hatred for Bill Gates/MS. (This was 1990s hatred).

[-]

bitspace@reddit

It was more appealing to me than NetBSD. Windows didn't have a useful tcp/ip stack.

[-]

dynamiteSkunkApe@reddit

In 99 or so I saw an article about it in my local newspaper. I went down to CompUSA the next day and walked by the isle with Linux/Unix distributions. I had no idea what to pick so I just grabbed the one that advertised the most packages, SuSE Linux 6.4.

[-]

Impossible_Cause3213@reddit

DOS

[-]

Mr_Lumbergh@reddit

Windows XP getting repeatedly pwned led me to order my next computer with 2 drives with the intention of trying out Linux for security reasons, and I just wound up liking it better.

[-]

spfr679@reddit

I first got introduced when at university in the early 2000's (old RHL) and loved it. I've been using Linux on and off since (depending on job and needs).

[-]

timmy_o_tool@reddit

It was still new when I first tried it. Was somewhere around '96-98 when I was still in high school. I have had it installed as mostly main OS ever since.

[-]

benjaminpoole@reddit

My very first time using Linux was back in 2013, I had some friends that used it and I was using a laptop that was on its last legs, so they recommended I try Ubuntu as a way to keep it going until I could get something else. I went back to windows after that because I purchased a gaming PC and gaming on Linux was pretty abysmal at the time.

I no longer game on my computer (I’m a full time console guy these days), and only use my laptop for basic stuff like browsing the web, Discord w my friends, Spotify and some very basic photo editing. About a year ago I became interested in online privacy after one of my friends introduced me to using a VPN and password manager. The more I learned about computer security the more I became skeptical of Windows 11’s “always online” features, and also I hated seeing ads every time I opened the start menu, so I decided to give Linux Mint a try and have been content there since.

[-]

high-tech-low-life@reddit

Being POSIX it was close to Ultrix, AIX. Solaris, and so forth.

[-]

Anchovy23@reddit

In the early days of the WWW, mid 90s, I made web pages and wanted my own web server on an internal network for testing. I also wanted to network my house. So, I installed Debian on a really nice box at the time and used Apache and Samba. I hopped a couple of years later to SuSe. During this time, I also learned how to compile and install custom kernels, Emacs, Perl, X and WMs and Gimp. Fun times.

[-]

mark20206@reddit

My Acer swift 1 sf114-32 is running out of space

[-]

TrinitronX@reddit

Experiencing frequent BSODs in windows 95 & 98, and seeing how software bloat over time made running programs slower on the same hardware. I came across some posts made by Linux users reporting about its stability and also ability to run more smoothly on old hardware than Windows.

I tried out Slackware and eventually Gentoo and Ubuntu. It turns out that what they said was true and so I never looked back since.

[-]

Aiko_133@reddit

Programming using wsl2. One of the best Microsoft moves.

[-]

creamcolouredDog@reddit

I got into Linux around the time NSA's PRISM program was revealed, and it was also around the time Valve released Steam for Linux. I installed Ubuntu on my old college laptop, and I was surprised at how everything worked out of the box, without needing to hunt down drivers. However I was still dependant on Windows until April this year, when I fully switched to Linux, thanks to Wine and Proton I don't need Windows to run most of my games.