I’ve been running 99% Linux for ten ish years or so. I finally got rid of the last windows vm a few months ago. The one hold out piece of software now runs in wine properly and I got to delete that vm.
As a FreeBSD desktop user from the mid 90s, I held out for a LONG time before installing my first linux OS in my home. I still don’t really feel comfortable on any of my linux boxes, but I guess it’s been well more than ten years now.
Dual booting with Ubutu a couple tiimes over the last decade, then tried dual booting with Mint 3 years ago on W10, thenW11 is annouced, seems the enshitifaction would be worse but, didn’t use Mint, same reasn I’d not used Ubuntu, fell back on the familiar.
Purchased a new NVME 2 years ago, instilled Mint on it and took the dual boot NVME physically out, 3 months later formated it and use it for Timeshift :) Then.went to LMDE.
Eventually got sick of the nagging on my infrequently used Surface Pro 7 about going to W11 and did the same thing there, wiped it and installed LMDE, a few hiccups but used the Surface Pro drivers from Github and got it sorted eventually, touch works etc
The main reason i stayed was Adobe Lighroom but that was enshitifying as well. I still haven’t wrapped my head around Darktable properly but less time spent on photography these days as well
I’ve been using Linux since 1995, but had an on-again-off-again relationship with it for a while, because I wanted to play games. So it was usually dual boot. But in 2007 I bought a PS3 and have been gaming on PlayStation exclusively since then, which allowed me to go fulltime Linux. I also worked a lot with OpenBSD and still miss pf, which is such a lovely firewall. iptables is horrible shit compared to it (I am aware of nftables, but it’s too new to replace the long years of iptables).
In 2004 grandpa gave me an old laptop from 1995 to play around with. I wanted it to be faster so I tried using g.ho.st. That was a terrible experience, too slow of internet, cloud computing was never gonna work. After that I tried suse. They had this fancy iso builder at the time that let me pick all the packages I want from the repo and have them present on my ISO.
That’s started my journey, outside of school I’ve had Linux exclusively since.
Last year sometime. Frustrated by Microsoft’s latest tomfoolery, I decided, “eh, might as well give Linux another shot, it’s been a decade or so since the last time.”
So I booted up my fifteen-year-old desktop computer as a testbed before I put it on my daily driver laptop. First I booted it into Windows (7, because that’s how old it is and it couldn’t hack Windows 10) to see if there was any data I needed to pull off of it, and predictably it was an awful experience. Slow? Try glacial. Constantly paging out of memory. I had to put it in safe mode without networking just to get it to boot all the way up. I grabbed everything I thought I needed and breathed a sigh of relief that I was done with that.
Then I put Linux Mint on it. And…wow.
Like, I knew Linux did a good job on older systems, but this was unbelievable to me. It was snappy and responsive in a way that it has literally never been. The thing ran like butter. I was flying around that OS, installing games, setting up backups, even trying my hand at a bit of light self-hosting.
But the real kicker came when I installed VirtualBox. See, I have one program that I still need Windows for; an Adobe program that some people I work with still use. So I installed VirtualBox and put Windows 10 on there, fully expecting to clown on Windows for a few minutes but just hoping I’d see enough to know whether it would be usable on my laptop.
But no. Windows 10—which, when I tried a decade ago, couldn’t run on that machine at all—ran almost flawlessly in VirtualBox on Linux. I mean, it wasn’t the quickest thing ever, but for a modern build of a more-or-less modern OS on a computer older than my marriage, it was honestly amazing.
So, when did I go full Linux nerd? When I discovered that it can run Windows better than Windows can.
There are a few other things, too. The software manager, the customizability, the lack of ads, the unobtrusive updates… And at some point along the way, I realized that it actually felt like my computer, which is a feeling I haven’t felt in ages.
It’s a great feeling.
0.92
Some time after I went OpenBSD and then FreeBSD nerd.
Earlier this year when I made the switch as I was getting blue screens at least once a day while gaming. Initially to endeavoros with cinnamon, then switched to Hyprland.
There have been some fixes that make me wonder at what point am I tinkering vs implementing a fix that should be included in the base version of the Linux flavor… Many rabbit holes over the last 6 months, many more to come.
Uni, around 2019! Had a professor on the web team who encouraged all students to do the entire uni education on Linux.
All tools and course material was tailored to work on Linux. Hand-ins, exams and anything related either functioned or had custom solutions built by the teachers, student and professors on the web programme.
Everything was open source and if we found any bugs we could just open issues on GitHub. Weekly hand-ins were done on the student server on your own instance of the web server.
In almost every aspect i think that programme was so well tailored for learning real web dev work.
It was far too recent for somebody with my background. I learned how the UNIX command line was different from DOS in the late 90s, but it was only last year that I switched from a VM to a native Linux install at work. Then I swapped over the home PCs during winter.
After defaulting to Windows for so long because of games and employers favoring it, it was almost frustrating how fast, smooth, and “clean” feeling it was to install Linux natively on a system compared with the recent versions of Windows. And that’s without any special lightweight distro. I am a proud Linux Mint Cinnamon user, lol.
When I got frustrated with Windows around 2019 and I had spare time I decided that enough is enough and spent a couple of days to take the time to learn Arch Linux and all of its quirks.
Around 2020 I started tinkering with NixOS as well which culminated as my NixOS configuration.
Although at this point I’m going back to Arch Linux as I actually know how to fix and make modifications faster and better than I could on NixOS.
During 2013 in college I had an old MacOS laptop. Like a 2009 macbook. It was good for it’s age until it wasn’t. When it came time to replace it I had stumbled upon the world of Linux. I knew I wanted to build a desktop and all I needed to do was choose a distro. At the same time I had an Information Technology class. One day I asked the professor if he ever heard of Linux. That question derailed the class and I left that day knowing I was gonna spend the next few days installing Arch on my new system. The rest is history. Arch is my first and only distro. It’s been an amazing ride so far.
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It’s 1995!
Now that I’m older stress weighs on my shoulders
Heavy as boulders but I told ya
