ad and annoyance-free

Being a geek, I have tried many linux distros (I’ve been using Linux since 1998, on and off). Curiosity was what was driving my usage of it.

In the early 2000s, when I used to write for OSNews.com (second only to Slashdot for OS tech news back then), I really didn’t find any distro polished enough to be a daily driver for me. Red Hat was big at the time, but even when ubuntu came around, it was still not as polished as it is today. These days, I’m using Debian-Testing mostly, however I concede that the best distro for newbies (and for me really, I’m too old now to be tinkering) is Linux Mint (flagship version). Mint really is well-thought out for daily usage. It might not have the latest tech innovation in it, or be bold with its choices, but it just works 99% of the time.

As time has gone by, and seen corporations taking everything for themselves (via enshittification), I have stopped using Linux because it was the geeky/cool thing to do, but I started using it because it frees me from all the spyware, and corporation agendas. Back in the 2000s, when I was a news editor for foss matters, I was mostly siding with the BSD license side of things (and mit/apache/ etc). I felt that the GPL was too restrictive, and that we should allow innovation take its course as it wants to. Now, that I’ve lost all my faith in corporations doing the right (smart) thing, I’m now a GPL3/AGPL type of a gal. The more “restrictively open” something can be, the better. Don’t allow anyone to manipulate you, or use you, or take away your data etc.

For the philosophical reasons of free as in freedom and because it’s way more cool

The Linuxes are the bestest IDEs ever. They even let you run mini IDEs (vim, vscode, etc) inside them. Coincidentally, they’re also where a lot of server code gets deployed, so they’re a a good place to verify fresh coffee.

I’m sure other platforms have caught up, but when I started out, *nix was the most accessible dev platform I could find.

Excel wouldn’t stop converting sku numbers to date formats. IT guy was excited to share an “easy fix” for that with Open Office…

When I saw his genuine excitement as he described Linux, plus the security it provided I realized, if I ran Linux I’d have the best support in the company. And I did.

I eventually had to move on from Linux at work after 10yrs or so but it’s all I run at home.

All because of Excel and those fucking date codes. Which yes, Open Office solved as advertised.

And yes I know you don’t need Linux for that but it was a long time ago.

It was and still is a few things: Mostly the cool factor. It’s different, does what I tell it (safety be damned lol ).

Security: Mostly sane defaults (like not making the initial user with full admin rights).

In the early days, a major factor was being poorer, constantly rebuilding Frankenstein PCs that would trip Ms activation crap. And with so many used parts, performance was better too.

It’s free, gratis and it’s fun to use and tweak.

I took a couple of in-person Linux courses when I was about 16-17. Teacher gave me a Kubuntu 6.06 CD to try at home.

A short time later I was using Ubuntu 8.04, 9.04, etc. and until last year I was on Ubuntu MATE 14.04 until I made a new MATE 20.04 install and I built a new main PC with MATE 22.04.

I really notice the difference in UI apps between Ubuntu and Debian, which I tried (and failed) to swich to several times already.

I’ve used and gave support to RHEL in a couple of jobs (graphical and non-grahpical)

It looked different

I quickly fell partly into the Linux and open source rabbit hole.

So far I have tried small amount of distros on VMs, and the only distros I’ve run outside of VM and outside of my IT classes I’ve gone through so far would be Ubuntu on a very crappy laptop, and MX Linux on my current laptop. So far, MX with KDE Plasma 5.x (don’t remember the specific version) is my favorite distro.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both. I have to use windows at work and I hate it.

I did a little bit of distro hopping: Mint, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Arch, Guix. Now I think I finally arrived at Tumbleweed, no need to hop somewhere else so far.

But I really like the concept behind Guix, it’s just not finished enough.

I prefer Linux not for freedom, not for money, not for privacy.

I do it because I’ll be fucking damned if hardware I own is going to generate value for some large faceless corporation. It’s my computer. I paid for it. I’m not going to install Windows so it can send telemetry and show me ads in order to benefit Microsoft’s bottom line.

It’s like owning a car and letting Uber use it for free every once in a while. No thanks, not me.

I stuck with Windows for as long as I did because of the widespread compatibility and ease of use, and I still use Windows 10 on one laptop that I’ve been using for 4 years because I just don’t want to go through the pain of switching everything over when I’m likely to just upgrade the hardware before long anyway.
But I did switch over to Mint on my desktop and I’ve been shocked at how easy it was to switch. I haven’t ran into any insurmountable compatibility issues and flat hub makes everything a breeze.
I’m super happy with the frequent updates and The cinnamon user interface is very familiar and easy to adapt to.
That being said, I’ll never use a Windows operating system on a new machine or build ever again.
Windows 11 is just trash.
The UI changes alone left a bad taste in my mouth but you can undo most of them with a little bit of work, But you just shouldn’t have to.
Then with the addition to advertisements in the taskbar and start menu I’d had enough.
I’m over the top, just fucking DONE with being a commodity and I refuse to use any paid service that serves ads.
Yes, Windows comes with most machines but it’s not a free service.
And the option to stay on Windows 10 and continue receiving security updates on for a monthly fee is just short of extortion.
My personal tin foil hat theory is that they purposely made windows 11 trash so that people would support a subscription based Windows service with Windows 10.

I made the switch at the start of the year out of curiosity. I had worked for QNX as a student and though that I should have had a better understanding of the system, so I started using WSL for all my programming.

Then joined Lemmy in the summer and that increased my interest in trying it out full time. I was also getting increasingly disappointed with Windows pushing updates for Win11 and features like onedrive.

I’ve been super happy with it so far. I’ve gotten way more familiar with my OS and it’s been such a huge shift in perspective for me to be able to shape the way the OS works to my workflow rather than the inverse.

Perhaps a different perspective, but I am gearing up to switch at the moment.

While I have previously used Linux (I have been running Debian 12 on my laptop for about a year), I bought windows 11 for my Desktop as I was still under the impression that is was the only real way to play games.

I recently learned about what Proton has done for games on Linux and also noticed how many games are truly playable on Linux now with the ever increasing market share.

Even though I am using NVIDIA hardware, I have looked up the process for installing the NVIDIA drivers on Linux and while not as easy as AMD, it appears to be quite easy anyway (I am an IT graduate so it seems pretty straightforward to me).

It really was only games that was holding me back I think.

Windows, especially lately has been growing more and more and more and more invasive. I feel like in the last 6 weeks I have read tens of articles on how Microsoft is trying to insert ads into the OS, watermark the OS, install AI into the OS, force the use of MS accounts instead of local accounts etc, and it is completely disgusting. At this point given the recent activity, I would not at all be surprised if they started to try to enforce the OS as a “subscription service”.

The moment I installed windows 11 I knew it was going to be a poor experience, considering I had to create registry keys and manually relaunch the OOBE with flags in order to use a local account.

For all these reasons (Gaming becoming ever more accessible on linux, and MS consistently making their product less valuable), I will be switching to either Debian 12 on my desktop or Arch in the near future.

It is a disgusting corporate world we find ourselves in right now, but while this is in many ways a bad thing, I have never in my life noticed more people taking notice of that, becoming interested in FOSS, in Linux, in even considering no longer putting up with this kind of thing, and that gives me hope.