Wait you can get badges for doing this?
Because I did do this
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Just hit year 3 on my daily driver.
Switched in 2020 when Win7 hit EOL, and never going back…
edit: did someone say badges?
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Do a write-up on your experience, and we give out the badge. 
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Eep.
Concise…okay here goes… Like i am reading this to a crowd of people who’ve not had their coffee yet!
Summary
Usage either on bare metal or in virtual machines or devices:
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W10, W7, WVist (my favorite microsoft flavor) and WXP, variations of MacOs/iOs and android and ChromeOS
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Elementary OS, Zorin OS (proprietary) Ubuntu, Mint, puppy, PopOS & Fedora with my longest time spent on Elementary OS, though Pop is catching up. Total linux exclusive time is almost two years and linux non exclusive time is over three years.
I’ve used various forms/distros of linux as my “daily driver”, my desktop. There is much still to be exposed to, as assembling a nuc doth not make a system builder bee! and while despite attempts to be and accepting i’ll never be a gamer, there’s still all the wonderful driver issues experiences of dedicated graphics to look forward to some day, and one day, assembling my own tower and then and only then will i feel actually accepted into the community both in general, and here. Knowledge and experience matters and is valued. Its nice to be valued for my mind.
Oddly enough despite the issues it has, fedora is surprisingly comfy compared to the annoyances of mint and its overzealous nature. I’d rather things break than having to be constantly asked for auth. Yes there are ways around it but that and the DE just aren’t my thing.
I love the freedom which linux provides and i’d like to learn a lot of the security measures which have been sorted out for me for reasons, so i can understand what makes them do the things they do. I would very much like to use davinci resolve one day though my nuc (and not dummy dedicated graphics drivering or having the nvidia version of Pop) isn’t suited.
I make videos with kdenlive, which is super limited but it does what i need. I draw with charcoal, pencil and graphite and import into krita, gimp and other apps for touchups. i explore the stars with stellarium… theres so many wonderful open source apps to choose from with various degrees of learning curves and to keep this short i’ll just say DE changes and tweaks, optimization and all that fun stuff is an ongoing learning process and experience too!
My Linux journey has been exciting, humbling, occasionally isolating but always rewarding. I feel others may agree with me in that when you decide to commit to becoming a Linux user, you’re able to develop better critical thinking skills, say for when doing some research for a problem fix you can be confronted with many different answers, many helpful, some not. i find it amazing that something as left brained as Linux can at times be so right brained (creative) so i get a good whole brain tickle from it!
Although i spend a lot of time in the lounge thread here, one look at my post read count on my profile should show y’all i read through a lot of your posts, even if i don’t understand them. You’re all pretty darn amazing to be honest.
So…I’ve not reached a level of knowledge where i would be compiling my own kernels or building arch from scratch (plus i’d need a patience patch for that too!) that’s still a ways off and life, socializing and other stuff takes up plenty of time too but i’m happy with my pace and knowing there is always more to learn excites me greatly.
Its for that reason that i don’t deserve the badge yet even tho i want all them thar badges! maybe on my forum cake day, that can count as one official year officially since my first (deleted sorry) post/comment on level1 was in the lounge right after PopOS decided to go kablewy just a bit, which showed i was already a happy Linux user.
and that was the last time anyone ever suggested milzybee do a write up for anything!
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idk what constitutes a writeup, but I installed Kubuntu on my main desktop in September 2021 when I was sitting at work reading something online about Proton and how more or less most single player games work (ie, the only games I play), and I was thinking about what software I used (OBS, the GIMP, Handbrake) and realised it was mostly FOSS, and even the proprietary software I used had a free Linux version (which I eventually ended up ditching for FOSS anyway).
Kubuntu was neat, almost all online guides are, for better or worse, for Ubuntu and KDE Plasma is a DE I like for customisability reason and also it’s one of the few imo that does Display Scaling well even on X11. (I’ve used it on TV-based HTPCs before for this reason, and with my three 4K and one 1080p display setup it was imperative this be done well. This is more or less the only thing I credit Windows with. It actually handles multiple different DPI displays with fractional scaling well, which is something Linux didn’t prior to Wayland. More on that later).
Kubuntu was great, but had certain quirks that I didn’t like. I had a love-hate relationship with Pulse Audio. In general my 5.1 surround setup via Nvidia Just Worked, but one of my monitors (and my AV receiver) does double duty with my game consoles. When I switched audio to this, and then switched it back to my PC pretty much nothing short of killing Pulse Audio and restarting it via the Terminal worked. It was not a graceful transition. Then there were Nvidia-issues. I’ve outlined the difficulties I’ve had in updating Nvidia in Kubuntu before (which had rendered not only the GUI but also the terminal near impossible to use). Obviously Nvidia have major issues with Open Source development, but I think some of this is on Kubuntu. Kubuntu was far less gracious when going from one numbered version to another than the experience I’ve had with a rolling release, which really shouldn’t be the case. I have, however, definitely had breakages with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, and I must say that using BTRFS and making a snapshot that you can boot from prior to any software update is fucking wonderful, and it should be a fundamental feature of any OS and filesystem, and that goes for Windows too (especially given Windows 10’s infamous boot loop updates). It’s not a backup and it annoys me when people treat it as one, but it’s meant I haven’t had to fall back on a backup… ever, actually.
Ultimately what finally pushed me away from Kubuntu was Snaps. I had a couple of Linux machines by this point, as shown in the Neofetch thread (one of them was briefly a FreeBSD machine, but it’s now an openSUSE Tumbleweed machine back at work), and the fact that sudo apt install firefox installed a snap without consent was half of the problem; the fact that the snap version took over a minute to launch was the bigger problem. Another problem with Firefox especially being a snap is that when it updates entirely by itself without any input from the user, the browser will completely refuse to continue functioning until you restart it: which is annoying if you’re using it to watch online content whilst simultaneously working in another window. I’d personally like to update when I’m not watching twitch or youtube or something, and this reliance on snaps robs me of that autonomy – which is one of the issues I had with Windows in the first place.
So I looked at the software I used and thought about how I used it, and I realised that given my penchant for installing PPAs from the software teams so that I got the most up to date versions anyway, I figured I might as well go full rolling release. I went with openSUSE Tumbleweed because as far as rolling releases go they are one of the more tested, and I was already familiar with SUSE since that’s the distro I dual booted back in like 2004. Naturally, that’s nearly a decade ago so quite a lot has changed anyhow.
I’ve had a couple of Nvidia-related issues, but nothing major. They changed how DRM worked that one time, which meant that I just didn’t have a GUI: I rolled back and fixed it before updating again. That was a non-issue purely thanks to BTRFS. Then I had a weird issue with a monitor just not being enabled when I logged in and I couldn’t enable it in X11. I had to go into Wayland to fix it, and eventually just stopped using X11. Wayland in Plasma with Nvidia still has graphical issues, but it’s now at the point where the UX improvements outweigh the bugs. I can now use my 1080p display more fully because I don’t have to set it to the same scaling as my 4K monitors, I can play games at 144 hz and use FreeSync again without being limited by my other three 60hz displays.
What I will add as well is that, not to jinx it, but it has been many, many months since either a kernel update, OS update or an Nvidia update has caused any kind of breakage. Even Windows can’t boast that… Speaking of Windows, I now find it a pain going back to Windows 10. The impenetrable registry, the five different settings and control panels, the two terminals, but worst of all the lack of package manager; opening a piece of software and being sent via a browser to download and update and having to wait, install it, and then probably reboot before I can actually start work, then opening another piece of software and having to do it all again. That is by far and away the single most annoying thing about having to use Windows, I can’t just update everything together, at once. And also the lack of tabs in Windows Explorer. Seriously, is it still 1998? Konqueror had tabs when I used it in 2002. Sort your life out, mate.
Huh. Turns out this was quite a write-up anyway. lol.
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It’s great to see how others interact with Linux and how it impacts your day-to-day so I’m inclined to share my short experience with it and how it objectively help me be better at what I do for a living.
First up full disclaimer, I use Windows desktop for games, and MacBook for simple daily tasks like email and casual browsing.
My team is 4 people who develop tools for manufacturing packaging for the company we work and that is owned by a massive multi national conglomerate. Our workflow used to be we use Windows and CAD software to develop the packaging then send it off to designers to make it pretty and we proceed to manufacture any required tooling for the factory, like die cutter tools, gluing protocols, injection tooling and stuff like that.
Back in 2017. I’ve installed Fedora on my work laptop and tinkering with the OS. Getting into terminal to get some stuff done kind of opened my eyes to getting deeper than just using GUI to get the work done. We started playing with the idea of getting into data gathering and analysis and started dabbling in PHP and Python. Over the next two years we installed an Ubuntu server and started learning more about PHP, MySQL, NGINX and we came up with new setup protocols to make manufacturing setups much faster than before. We can now do predictive maintenance so manufacturing is never interrupted because of bad tools or tools breaking during manufacturing - things we never would have considered with Windows and Excel.
In early 2022. we started playing with Blender and it turned out to be this amazing peace of software that can rival 3D industry titans and can absolutely be a poster child for how great can open source be. I’ve learned about it years ago while browsing Fedora software repo but never gave it much thought. In December however we pulled the rabbit out of the hat by importing CAD designs for the end product, than texturing after designers do their thing and exporting to universal 3D. After we converted it to Apple AR scene we tested it on an old iPad we had and sent it to upper management to see if they could make use of it. What they had before was a couple of Keyshot renders from different angles so they were so impressed that we just had a fully tricked out iPad Pro with lidar land on our doorstep. Designers are so seriously pissed off right now.
This year I’m hoping to get more into C and C++ and microcontrollers so we can get real time telemetry from our tools to make them even better and more resilient.
Other than tool design and manufacturing I’m not an expert in any of the programming and dabbling, however it allowed me and my team to save millions in manufacturing time and tool maintenance.
Since we started working here we moved the needle forward so much that we had more than five fold increase in compensation.
And all of it from that moment I had back in 2017:
“Ooooooooo, you can actually use the terminal to sort and find differences in lists so fast that using Excel to paste data in and insert tables and sort the tables and compare the data and then go rearrange things if the difference is more that couple of rows…”.
Maybe my experience can help push you to take that first step and look deeper into Linux - it may just change how you do things. Forever.
And the best part is you don’t even need to be that good at it.
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you know nothing Jon snow 
You’re fine, perfect, succinct with all the important details. Maybe sarge’s little nudge will help more people talk about their experiences too!
exactly! just got to dip your toe in the water, its all it takes! 
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Should I have included how I learnt how to modify fstab to spread my Home directory all over my various hard drives, or experimented with BTRFS RAID or learnt how to automate various aspects of my PC cleanup with shell scripts, or learnt how to alias commands to simplify things like system updates, or started playing around with Unreal Engine 5 and worked out how to work around Epic’s obnoxious attitude to Linux, or set up my own local calendar server to sync between my PC and phone/watch because I don’t like using other people’s clouds, or how I learnt how to SSH from my Linux machines to my FreeBSD machine?
There’s a lot of stuff I’ve learnt over the last year that I could probably have done on Windows, but it wouldn’t really have occurred to me to do it. The list is only going to grow as the years go on.
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Like a blog post.
But this works.
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Thank you Kindly
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Very few people actually compile the kernel, but it’s mostly an automated process anyway, just click some menus and tick some checkboxes. Doing a diy arch distro is an achievement, but nothing to really write home about as a general linux user. It just gives you an insight of how linux works a bit and how the GUI is glued to certain commands in the backend.
You used linux a year as your daily driver, you get the badge. The challenge is for beginners, it’s mostly so that people actually take the first step towards their digital freedom.
lmao
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I used to do it all the time back in the day, but now… yeah not so much.
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I still remember compiling the kernel for the first time. I think it was circa 1994. We had just gotten into Linux using a version of slackware that came on ~40 1.44MB 3.5 inch floppies. The kernels weren’t universal back then and there was no kernel module system. Very rarely did the default kernel have the right drivers enabled. I remember it taking a couple of hours on a 386 40MHz machine between each attempt.
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I sense a “i compiled a kernel uphill both ways” boomertale there! hehe /s 
I belong to the generation that’s never seen or used a floppy disc other than seeing it as the save icon 
but i know enough, and know what a 386 is to know how amazingly fortunate we are in 2022 2023 with current era tech. because:
Thank you! and to the badge giver-ofer!
that’ll just be another milestone in my linux journey in the distant future where i miss headaches and just crave them!
Yeah… I was one of 2 people responsible for getting our first CS Linux lab setup without any real knowledge of Linux. While we had plenty of experience in HP/UX and SunOs, a unix operating system on a casual PC was quite novel for the CS department. It would allow CS students to tinker with kernel internals without taking down large systems.
Nowadays, I compile kernels and modules quite regularly as I am one of a handful of people that help our hardware team adapt Linux to new custom boards and non-standard devices. At least in the device driver arena we no longer need to deploy full kernels and can do that through either the loadable modules or device driver tree blobs.
I truly enjoy how far computing and Linux has come since then. I do not miss the long compile times.
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It was a good 75 minutes on my q6600 IIRC…
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Never have I ever compiled a kernel. Everything just worked 
Ubuntu/Debian/Arch you name it.
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When the loadable module support entered the kernel it solved 2 problems. It cut down on the initial size of the kernel so that it only needed to be big enough for initial board support (to boot). This allows for the kernel to fit in places on small boards (like sometimes in the bios itself). Secondly, this also allows for distributions to ship every driver they want on the rootfs and have it loaded as needed ensuring much wider support without having to know what hardware your deploying it on.
As I said earlier, the only time I compile kernels nowadays is to support custom hardware (not in the mainline kernel) and to update older kernels with security fixes. Some of my company’s hardware has to pass paid testing so wholesale kernel updates are discouraged whereas security patches are generally allowed. Regulatory agencies get finicky when your handling various third party private keys.
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Kernel compilation is overrated these days, for sure. Most innovations worth anything will come out in the next big kernel release and from there it is one to three years later before it is in every distro - even Debian freaking stable.
Still, when it comes to embedded things are starting to become ridiculously powerful, I started with Yocto seven years ago on a 6 core 6 thread where a full system build took 7 hours and was an overnight job.
Now? 12 cores, 24 threads on a 5900X and the same task takes barely an hour. Compiler optimizations, kernel optimizations and just hardware improvements in general makes embedded Linux ridiculously easy and efficient 
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Back in the day I installed distcc on an LTSP cluster and got my kernel compiles down to sub-10 minutes. 
/nerdflex
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