How did you end up using linux?

[zmezoo]

To all those that are using Linux on your personal devices, i was interested in hearing how or what made you choose to use Linux? Whats your story?

For me (skipping past 2 decades of computer use before where my linux usage starts) it was tying to keep an my only and old laptop(Apple Macbook) at a time by installing linux on it, when i could not afford a new pc, when it stopped getting updates. When i finally did get a new window 10 laptop, i installed liunx along side after having such a good experience, and kept using it from time to time, When windows 11 rolled out and frustrated me, i found myself back on Linux the majority of the time. Then i picked up a steam deck and my windows 10 desktop for gaming kept getting less and less use. Fast forward to today and my current laptop, where i immediately uninstalled the preinstalled windows 11 and have rolled my own Arch Linux setup, i continue to game on my steam deck, and that gaming desktop is now repurposed as a server.

[Kingdud]

I learned Solaris (for sparc, back when OBP was a thing) for work, and linux was just an easier version of solaris. Used linux at work for years, but only in headless environments. I stayed in Windows XP until like 2015, when work gave me a windows 7 machine and I realized, ok, the UI changes aren’t completely stupid. Fine. But windows 10/11 (also through work laptops) made it clear those were complete garbage, so I stayed on windows 7 until very recently, when I built a new PC and booted linux (and only linux) on it.

So…the shittiness of Windows 10/11 is what drove me to linux. is it perfect? No. My biggest gripe is copy-paste. In windows it’s super consistent. The best I’ve found is to set the OS to copy any text I highlight automatically, but that’s a massive PITA when fields auto-select the text inside, since it ends up copying that and overwriting the copy buffer. I’m sure I could spend 10 seconds learning the keyboard shortcut for ‘paste clipboard slot 2’ but…meh.

[lae]

grew up as a pokemon fan, started a pokemon fan website with a friend during middle school and started managing webservers on Windows until I found out you could do the same thing more reliably and more easily on Linux…which got me (and said friend) curious to use Linux on the desktop (though I think we were using web hosts/VPS hosts first as our initial exposure to Linux). We were having a lot of fun with Compiz etc at the time, too. I think probably the primary thing that attracted me to using it as my primary OS on the desktop was the more thorough knowledge of knowing what’s running on your PC, as opposed to the slightly black box feeling WIndows gives you (from the perspective of a teenager at least).

[gc71]

i work on servers and cloud infra, its all Linux all the way down

the status quo is generally to use macOS as your local system and Linux on all of your remote systems e.g. servers. This includes home servers, and any sort of workstations too.

more often than not, I am ssh’d into some Linux box or cloud instance, from macOS, writing or editing code that lives on the remote box via VS Code + Remote SSH Extension. This also applies to home use of workstations. I have multiple Linux systems sitting on and around my desk. I dont plug a keyboard / mouse / monitor into any of them. I just ssh into each of them as needed from the MacBook.

linux is the best tool for a lot of jobs that dont require a GUI

[jode]

My nerdy self was drawn to Linux 0.99 because it could run LaTeX (for free!) which offered infinitively better word processing than Microsoft Word 1.0.

Being the predominant OS in biz I spent many years learning all the workarounds that allow using Windows.

After some 20 years I grew tired of working around MSFT issues and their increasing insistance of spying on my activities. Finally, I stopped using the last software that tied me to that OS. For the last years I use Fedora as my daily driver.

[michael_parker]

I had heard about Linux for years i use to see suse Linux at compusa i had a hp probook 4530s back in 2012 and wanted to try Ubuntu out of curiosity so i backed up windows 7 and installed ubuntu 12.04 and then tried out several other distros i think i have tried all of them except gentoo and currently i am dual booting windows 11 and arch Linux on an asus vivobook x415 that i put a extra sata drive in and i have 4 other laptops that run several different distros on.

[Aug]

I got introduced to Linux (and other server stuff like Win NT4 and Netware) when I started my system administration studies. We played around with it there for web and file hosting, but I didn’t get around to using it for myself until years later when I started doing my own web and email hosting. It was never really suited enough for my primary PC needs; gaming. So while I tinkered around with dual boots, it never was suitable for fulltime use.
But then Win11 came along and I’m sick and tired of the way Windows handles things. Steam has greatly helped improve the gaming scene and the last anti cheat locked games my wife and I play have become Linux compatible. So last summer I switched over our main desktop to openSUSE.

[akarin]

In 2002 my guitar teacher who knew I was “into computers” brought me a of CD-ROMs including Mandrake and we installed it together on one of my machines. Since then some sort of “Linux” alsways lived on my machines which turned out to be quite useful when starting to work in system administration. I have to say though that I am not cool with the current state of Linux desktop. It really feels like it got a lot worse of the last decade instead of getting better, but this could also be being old. Maybe it is a general thing the enshittification ruining tech.

[zmezoo]

just curious since i have been using linux for less than a decade what has changed?

[MadMatt]

Hardware changed, and distribution fragmentation happened, and X windows still sucks after 40 years of being tinkered on, and macBooks happened, that provided a way more stable and performing platform than any dell/lenovo/Asus for a devOps/SRE/software engineer to actually get work done for a price that was and is 20-30% more than the non Apple equivalent on paper, but gives you 10 times the productivity for some type of workloads. And yes, I dig the ability to manually set the window layout by pixel, I get the ability to spend two days creating a lean kernel config that exactly suits my needs, or to be able to dynamically set ny cpu governor, or to run Kali linux and pretend I’m a hacker, but that has nothing to do with getting actual work done so in the long run (at least for me) it wasn’t worth the effort needed.
Also, to this day, every time I hear someone say Laptop x is n times more powerful than a 50% more expensive macbook I ask them to turn it on and wai for the fan whine to kick in, and smile, nod, and go back to my silent and cool desk …

[imhigh.today]

@zmezoo

since i have been using linux for less than a decade what has changed?

I see MadMatt saying fragmentation happened but my subjective experience is the opposite.

Systemd ate basically every Linux distro, and now things feel mostly the same except for default desktop choice, theme, and package selection. Package availability now matters more to user experience than the underlying technical decisions made by distro developers.

With that change was the explicit dropping of cross-compatibility with other FOSS systems, like the BSDs, as a core development goal.

[GoldenAngel1997]

Aware of it, from fellow CompSci/CompEng students
Got roped into it, through some late game Research courses [Ubuntu Heron era]

Science Dept had a server, that was regularly running backscene operations
But we had capacity, to inject theoretical scripts, into this server
We were testing energy release(s), pending on bond breakage AND location
… Built my first desktop + having dual boot support [via separate drives]

EDIT:
Although I did fumble, quite about a lot, with Linux – Never fully committed
Some programs, weren’t exactly equals, and/or, file compatibilities misaligned
Also some hardware, didn’t exactly play ball… But I’d still [periodically] test away
Probably one of my favourite engagements, had been testing full HW support on laptops

Gaming, was a major bastion point, to keeping a Windows rig around
This was of course, 'cause Linux being outright disowned OR abysmal performance(s)
It had improved to point of parity AND I also severed ties to some [windows bound] games

Any new laptop, I immediately go free-floating hostility, to nuke out M$FTs existence
Dual Tower PCing for polar OS’s, has been eliminated, through the last few years
… Have 1 rig, with an A770-8, for game fumbling [roughly sensing driver gains / compatibility]

[lincolna-gaundo]

Have been running a homeserver for decades. Migrated to Gentoo because it had rock solid support for 9550SX-16ML and optimized kernel config to slim down bloat.

SATA II/III changed the game and Windows was far more stable via inexpensive Marvell SATA hardware. Stable open source drivers for cheap commercial hardware was not a thing.

Back to Linux for LSI SAS3008 9300-8i, Mellanox ConnectX-4 10G/25G networking, and NVME PCI4 caching and storage. Kernel is rock solid with top-of-the-line server performance. Impressive.

At the moment am migrating desktop to Ubuntu 24.10. Network drivers are superior to Windows10 and have excellent stability and performance above 10G. Local NVME storage rock solid and ZFS offers enticing desktop features.

Linux support for my older games and development tools may finally sink Windows for good. Don’t appreciate Microsoft intrusion and spying. Six month evaluation under way. Current outlook is positive.

[Niel_Fourie]

Windows kept killing my 4Mb/s rural broadband connection with updates. So I got a AMD graphics cards and started using nobara. Been at it since December and apart from KDE dying from time to time on a Valheim world save and one setting missing on OBS. Overall a improvement over Windows.

[dumetrulo]

There’s a story of my Linux use here:

1 Year Linux Challenge: State Of Linux Usage After Many Years

Hi! I’m new to L1T, and I found the 1 Year Linux Challenge mega-thread, so I thought I’d do a summary write-up of my Linux experience over the years. Depending on what counts, I’ve been using Linux on and off for the last 25 years or so, and full-time on my home system for the last 12 years or so. Here are some bits and bobs of these years that co…

As to the why: I always disliked Windows, and used it in the beginning because I didn’t know anything better, because I could game on it, and because most everyone else used it. But I was always fascinated by alternative systems, and Linux was the obvious ‘alternative choice.’

[mattlach]

It was the early 2000’s.

I got sick of the constant bluescreens in windows at the time, so I decided to try something different.

It’s gone in fits and starts over the years, but at this point I have been using Linux as my primary OS since ~2001 or so.

I still dual boot to Windows for games.

(Linux is getting better at gaming all the time, but it still does not provide the performance I demand in games, in part because AMD GPU’s are the only ones that really perform well in games under Linux, and there is no AMD GPU that is fast enough for my 4k Ultra quality demands)

I also still use a Windows VM for my work stuff (because I need to use the Microsoft 365 ecosystem that pretty much every professional setting uses these days).

Other than that, I am 100% Linux, and have been for almost 25 years now.

My first Linux experience was actually in like 1994 or something, when a PC magazine I bought came with a CD Rom that had some old version of Slackware on it. I tried it, didn’t like it, and switched back to DOS

Then in 2001 I briefly experimented a little with Linux for my game servers (I ran some high profile community Counter-Strike servers from ~2001 until ~2005). For those I used old pre-RHEL/Fedora split, RedHat.

Then a couple of months later is when I had had it with Windows and blue screens and decided to install Linux on my desktop.

I started with Gentoo Linux, because I liked the idea of optimizing C-Flags specifically for my hardware. Back then, Gentoo didn’t ahve an automatic installer. You had to boot up a live image, and then bootstrap your system compiling all of th epackages to be installed. This took a long time on 2001 hardware

The practical benefits of that were probably limited, but it appealed to me at the time.

Over time I struggled with Gentoo often breaking. I had to run the unstable repositories as I am (or at least was) a “bleeding edge hardware” kind of guy, and often nothing but the unstable branch would work with my hardware.

At some point (I want to say it was ~2006) I just got tired of things breaking all the time and having to spend hours troubleshooting to get my sound back, or something like that, so I decided to try alternatives.

I switched to Ubuntu. (I think it was called “Ubuntu Linux” at the time, but that seems to have been erased from history in favor of just “Ubuntu” After being used to Gentoo, I was astonished at how everything (or at least almost everything) in Ubuntu “just worked”. No workarounds to get shit working. No hunting for rare kernel driver modules. I just installed it, and everything worked. I liked that.

Then in 2011 Ubuntu decided to use the Unity interface as the default desktop instead of Gnome2. I absolutely hated it. I know I could have just installed another desktop, but I took this as an opportunity to see what else was out there. I landed on Linux Mint. First their Gnome 2 version, but as Gnome 2 was abandoned and no longer maintained, that split into the Mate branch (a Forked version of Gnome2 for purists) and the Cinnamon branch (a from scratch Gnome2 work-a-like, but more modern).

I tested both, wound up liking Cinnamon more, and have been using it ever since.

Over time Mint has become more and more amateurish though, trying to ship a desktop with a lineup of packages all pre-installed, where everything is configured from the GUI, etc. etc. Having been used to command line configuration since my Gentoo days, I really chafe at this.

Mints dependence on Ubuntu is also really starting to annoy me, as over the years Ubuntu has had no shortage of controversial episodes where they try to bully and take over the Linux world.

I am considering another switch, but haven’t really gotten around to it yet.

I really like the apt package manager (and hate blob distribution like with Snaps, Flatpak or AppImage with a passion) This limits me a little bit.

I might just go with vanilla Debian at some point, and manually install the Cinnamon Desktop on top of it.

Debian’s package base is often a little older, and that can cause some issues, but that also means it is tried and true, and I like that.

I’m still undecided. Time will tell.

[zmezoo]

@mattlach

Ubuntu “just worked”.

I know the feeling, its what i put on my macbook, it felt similar but different than mac os, and “just worked” unlike windows, that i was constantly fighting to make work for me.

Have you given Arch a go in your distro hopping, curious to know your thoughts on pacman and the aur?

[ack]

Windows 98 was really crap and came pre-installed on my first computer.

I wanted to learn about my computer to use it better, and tried reading the OS docs. They were terrible and win98 an unstable mess.

Somehow I’d heard about Linux (from IRC?) and replaced win98.

It as a rule didn’t crash like win98 had, and unlike the windows world was a great learning environment. It was enjoyable to use unlike win98. All major problems were solvable and there was minimal voodoo, unlike the windows troubleshooting which frequently ended with “reinstall stuff until it works” which included the windows itself!

I never switched back, as windows (and macos) never became compelling to me, Microsoft would go on to mostly resolve their stability issues with win2k and winxp, but we got product activation.

Eventually Microsoft switched from spreading FUD against open source to owning github and releasing their own open source. But now windows itself almost requires a Microsoft cloud login thing.

At the core of it, Linux and GNU gave me a world where we the users were king. In the Microsoft world the stock holder was king, and I was just a wallet to be maximally drained.

Nowadays I can’t live in that world of spyware and restrictive licencing, of product managers deciding how my computer works based on their KPIs, of black boxes.

Some consider it a religious rather than pragmatic thing, but I consider open systems that we can copy and modify as needed to work as I personally want to be a very very valuable feature!

So it’s either Linux or a BSD for me for the foreseeable future. I also use OpenBSD

[wr250]

late 90’s i needed a firewall appliance, so i took a old (pentium 166 i think) computer and installed linux (kernel 2.something i think). there were various linux based firewalls floating around at the time, but with some research i managed to setup ipchains to act as a firewall.
I was running windows 98se at the time and switched to 2000pro when it can out. I got a MSCE cert for 2000 server, and ran that for a short time for assorted services.
Nice thing is the linux firewall blocked and logged a DOS attempt against me specifically (the details are funny).
shortly after that i switched on a permanent basis. Always had a windows machine around just for troubleshooting family computers…

[georgezilla]

Long story. This is the short version ( okay, shorter version ) …

Mid-70’s, electronics tech in the US Army, where I got my love of hardware. Left the Army, couldn’t get a job doing what I loved. So I went to school and learned programming. CoBOL, Fortran, Pascal and Basic on PET’s running CPM connected to an AlphaMicro server. Got a job for a small Computer retailer selling Kaypro 2’s and 5’s. Taught customers how to use them and wrote demo programs for the Kaypro. Met a guy that used Linux and got interested. Sort of.

A few years later got tired of Microsoft, XP or 98. 17 year old was a junior sysadmin at my ISP. Asked him about what he used at work and he said Linux. LIGHT BULB moment. He showed/suggested Slackware to me ( late 90’s? ). Went home and downloaded it, installed it on a spare computer ( one of many. Took days of watching it install from the CLI ( hours of watching green text on a black background. ). ( Hardware was and is still my love ). And we we’re off.

Went to the first of many LFNW’s. Now for the “and we’re off” part … Built a 4 node Linux cluster with 4 Slot1 CPU’s, 4 total Gig of ram and 1TB total storage. Spent a year learning OpenMosix and openmosixviewer and took it to my second LFNW. Built 2 more clusters of U2 servers, 6 and 8 nodes running Rocks Cluster Linux. Wife hated the noise and the electric bill.

From the day the kid told me about Slackware until the present the present Linux has been my daily driver. Distros? Slackware ( dont remember the version ), Redhat ( 4? ), Ubuntu ( 6 and haven’t run it sense. Reasons. ) SuSE/opensuse ( Version? I’m old, don’t remember. Got it in a boxed set, included a manual. In German. Don’t speak German. But I had a manual!! ). Have run it for … oh… 20+ years?. I still distro hop, on a second desktop. But opensuse is still my day driver. And that’s my story.

Note: For all the “new” Linux users. Linux is easy compared to when I started. Tar.bz files is what you got apps as. Dependency hell? You have no idea what that really is. Cross distro package managers? No thank you. Not needed. Terminal installs? Haven’t had to in I don’t know how long. And when I have had to? Read me files. Instructions from the dev, copy and paste. Everything else has been “one button” install.

Recommended distro? Nope, don’t do that. Download any one with a live version try it out. Make sure it finds all your hardware and make sure it works. If it does, click the install icon on the desktop. Get something to drink. Come back, reboot and use ( usually ) your new Linux Desktop.
Not that hard. But I do recommend … DO NOT install it on your daily driver!! Get yourself a “older” used desktop/laptop and install it there. That way if/when it breaks, and it will, you still have your daily driver. When you feel the time is right, take the leap and use it on your daily driver.

Linus WILL break. I’ve broken mine so many times that I don’t remember the number of times. Just not a big deal at this point in my journey with Linux ( some times on purpose (?) ). And for me … It’s part of the fun, and another reason why I started with Linux ( the old programmer in me? ).

Hardware is my love. Linux is a good friend. I have done hardware for … oh shit!! 50+ years. And Linux for 27 ( ? ) years. ( I said I was old ).

And as they say … that’s my story on Linux.