What caused you to get into it, are you an evangel and are you obsessed?
I installed Linux and the feeling of freedom and privacy hit me so hard that I immediately began committing crimes, knowing that the FBI could never track me. Piracy, sexual assault, trademark infringement, petty larceny, tax fraud, you name it. I also own several fully automatic firearms even though I live in the state of California, but it doesn’t matter. Ever since I removed Windows 10 from my computer and replaced it with Arch Linux, and began using a PinePhone as my daily driver phone, police can’t even stop me in traffic. Windows may have a lot of video games, but the benefits of Linux should not be understated.
New copypasta just dropped
Edit: also, username checks out
It gets deleted on another post so you have to paste it elsewhere in the same community
Big if true
Windows kept doing things I didn’t want it to.
The last straw was when I had a 24 hours render running, and Windows decided to update and reboot 1 hour before it was done. I was using the computer at the time, RAM, CPU, and GPU were all at max, the mouse was being moved, I clicked “later” every time the update pop-up appeared, and it still rebooted.
Linux does what I tell it to, and doesn’t do what I tell it not to do. I didn’t think that was a big ask until Windows.
The Foss philosophy and being poor
I was on windows and I was forced to update and then it bricked my computer and I had to reinstall windows except when I did it asked me for a windows license key. I tried everything to recover my license key but wasn’t able to.
This was around the time linus texh tips was teasing his upcoming month on linux series so I was like fuck it I’ll give it a go. Spent a week on mint and wifi was broken then tried Endeavor, Garuda and fedora and settled on manjaro. Manjaro was amazing to me. Everything worked out of the box and kde plasma looked so clean and I could set it up exactly how I wanted.
Then I watched linus tech tips video on linux and I was like wtf how did he have such a bad experience is he dumb?
He’s pretty much the quintessential QA tester. He wants to do things his way, regardless of whether or not the OS wants him to do that. He’s usually skilled enough to fix anything he messes up, but he doesn’t know enough about Linux to do that, so he ends up breaking things. I feel like most people have a better experience than he did, but his technique uncovered a ton of bugs and usability issues that significantly improved the Linux desktop to have fixed.
Knows enough to be dangerous and confident enough to dive in head first. Deadly combo
So basically the Dunning Kruger effect.
He wanted to do things his way
This quote alone tells you how Linus acts
So basically the Dunning Kruger effect.
Love those videos, mostly because it is my perfect argument on why the Linux Desktop isn’t ready yet.
Was Linus an idiot in those videos? Yes, Luke even said so, stating he installed in and in the month chose not to use his machine (recent wan show)
However it shows, just how easy it is for a novice to break the distro, and how much work is needed to get it to the point of Windows for general population usability. Granted the issues Linus had with POP_OS was dumb and shouldn’t have happened. But it showed me that Manjaro existed, which I am using to this day.
I think linux desktop is ready for open minded people who see interested in a new way of doing things. I don’t think it’s ready for people who can’t use a computer or troubleshoot. Windows breaks often so I’m not as harsh when I see linux break.
Agreed, I am surprised how often file explorer crashes on Win 10. Or I need to restart windows for random reasons since moving to Linux. Its to the point I want to gut my desktop and put Manjaro on it too.
Compared to when I started using Linux in the late 2000’s, Linux has matured to an unbelievable point. To someone who is even slightly interested in learning, its perfectly usable as a Windows replacement… depending on your Distro, Desktop Environment, etc.
It’s this depends which makes recommending Linux hard for me, since when a problem occurs, I find its not as easy to troubleshoot especially with how many flavours of Linux exists.
I was fucking around with my windows pc.
And then i found out that you can fuck more around in linux, and that was the story of my first ubuntu iso burned on a cd.
I had no clue about anything but was blown away by something “different”
That is exactly my story, too! I’m glad we both found our way here like that. Fun stuff :)
I joined the Fediverse and it seemed like everyone was using it!
I’m unable to fully convert at the moment, but boot it up every so often to experiment.
lmao, i mean fediverse, opensource, descentralized, and need a linux server to run, overlap very much
Well……ummm….yes.
Windows. Windows caused me to get into it.
It BSOD’ed its last screen.
Fuck that OS.
Back in the 90s when I was in uni, it was the only way to have a unix-like development environment for C/C++. I also spent an inordinate amount of time testing linux on exotic hardware, like 386 laptops or older Macs. There weren’t many distros back then, but I tried them all: Debian, Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, m86kLinux and even (shudder) Slackware.
It was (and still is) an extremely fun way to tinker around. But I have to say, I’m not complaining that pretty much everything works out of the box nowadays!
Most people want to stick to Windows or MacOS, and that’s fine for them if they want to put up with it. Pushing Linux or OSS in general is counter productive IMO and just puts people on the defensive. I’d rather plant a seed here and there. If someone complains about Windows on a kid’s laptop, then hey, I got an old laptop for my daughter and put Fedora on it. It was easy to install and maintain, unobstrusive and she can get everything done for school she needs. Or talking about gaming - you know the Steam Deck? You can game without Windows - Linux is a painless, drop-in replacement!
It pains me that a lot of Linux users were pushy elitist neckbeards that spent so much energy defending their distro of choice and Linux in general. The community tends to make Linux appear like some difficult, arcane way of using a computer. “First you must pass the initiation rite and choose the correct distro!” Seriously, fuck that mindset. Just download whatever, install it and enjoy hassle-free computing!
I’m a cheap bastard.
Free is free
Privacy
I thought maybe Minecraft would run faster on it. It didn’t, but it kicked off a learning process.
For me it was all the frustration I had trying to disable Win11 telemetry and other non-essential distruptive things like adds in the start menu.
Switched to Debian with GNOME. I have been super happy ever since. Seamless transition and awesome experience using a OS that is not adversarial.
Windows
Windows Telemetry at first. Then Windows browbeating various products - “Edge please download Firefox” - Edge: “Why, I am better than Firefox” Me:“Do as I say” Edge: “But -blah blah nah” and so on. I know there are ways around it, but if someone can force an update against my will on my machine, it is not my machine. This leads to questions of what else can they do without my permission. Linux is my machine. I control when and how and what. Also customization.
I was at CompUSA back in the 90s and there was a Red Hat box with a manual in the clearance bin. I think it was Red Hat 4. I took it home and installed it on an old computer. I mainly used it as a server for testing Perl scripts for my own websites but I did use it as a desktop some.
I was a Windows N/T and Novell Netware administrator at the time and the company I worked for needed a “Linux guy”. Most people had barely heard of Linux so I became the de facto Linux admin. I ended up managing an Apache server and writing what was really just an API that ran under mod_perl. It returned structured text like modern APIs (JSON wasn’t a thing yet).
Now almost 30 years later and I still love Linux. Linux powers my life. I run my own email and web servers. I self-host lots of stuff. I’m not a big fan of desktop Linux but I work on Linux servers all day long. I have no desire to come home and fuck with my workstations.
