That sounds kinda like my journey, although without the Marxist part.
Clueless about tech, bought an iMac
These ads are annoying. [Installs adblock Plus]. There. Except for fricking Taboola, they can DIAF. And the cookie popup banners. Why do they love cookies if they’re not playing cookie clicker?
It’s the MacOS Catalina Update!! It Thanos snapped my iPod music library. This taught me to avoid MacOS and realize that updates often just make things worse. Set up a dual boot with Windows.
I start browsing r/asshole_design too much. Teaches me to never trust a corporation. I also realize how phones keep dropping useful features. I finally realize uBlock origin blocks much more than ads.
Oh boy, this is where the rabbit hole starts. I’m sick of how slow my Mac is, addicted to discovering new cool apps on my phone, and discover FOSS. I install Linux for the first time, and it runs quite well on a laptop from 2009. Also YouTube goes full greed mode.
Get my new Windows gaming laptop, try to balance privacy with convenience. But I’m irked at how slow it is for some basic tasks. Everything is stable, except when the laptop’s SSD borked.
Uh oh. Discord, YouTube, and Reddit all make massively greedy decisions, and I don’t want to support those platforms anymore. I discover Lemmy. I try to focus extra hard on FOSS and donate $150 over the course of the year. I think this tells me I’ve became radicalized. Proprietary platforms keep getting worse and worse.
Linux resurgence. Tired of Windows, and one of my classes needs a UNIX terminal. Sounds like it’s time to dual boot (on 2 SSDs), with Ubuntu being the default. Also I buy a year of Nebula to support creators and stick it to Google.
Your post couldn’t be more true. Decades ago I was sold on MythTV, this PVR software but it only ran on Linux and you had to compile it yourself. So I gave Linux and MythTV a shot. As it turned out, both MythTV and early desktop Linux were a buggy, frustrating mess. X broke all the time. Incomprehensible, ungoogleable compile errors all the time.
I spent so much time troubleshooting MythTV and compilation problems that I ended up learning Linux inside and out and the C programming language to be able understand the compile errors. I went on to lead a major open source project and have had a long career as a programmer, using all the knowledge I gained that started with fighting MythTV.
I don’t want to dox myself so I’d rather not say, but it was some time ago and I’m no longer leading that project. I do still do development in the same field though!
Welcome. I just started using linux recently myself and have been loving it. I would Definitely recommend checking out all the desktop environments to see what works best for you! I’ve done a bit of shopping and I think I’ve landed on KDE, myself.
Good luck with the transition!
I got pissed off at Google Photos, which led me down a self-hosting rabbit hole. Ended up installing Linux everywhere, even my “gaming” one eventually (I do development, and WSL was a resource hog).
The hardest thing to degoogle has been email - I’ve used the same address for years. But I use Thunderbird so at least I don’t have to see ads in my fucking inbox
I DO have an ad blocker. I still ended up seeing an ad, that one time. It might’ve been on mobile. Or I might have had my ad block turned off. Either way, I’ve gone out of my way to make sure I never see an ad in my email again. Used mobile devtools to uninstall the Gmail client, Firefox with uBlock add-on, etc…
May I recommend Proton Mail? I used gmail for years then decided to finally switch and it was easier than I thought, tho tbf I also don’t have a lot of people who need to email me, it was mostly services where it’s easier to tell them to switch over to the other mail.
I’ll have to check it out! Same here, mostly services on my end - but I’ve accumulated enough of them to make it tiresome. Still, I’ll have to do it at some point
I guess there’s that beginner period when that should be allowed. I kind of wished it happened to me again, instead of daily driving boring Arch systems with no incentive to ever change.
Yeah when you’re a beginner or when you get back into Linux you have like a grace period to reproduce a productive environment, then you’re worried about changing too much in case it all breaks and goes wrong
Wait for Arch to slowly grind away at your sanity. One day you will realise that stability is pretty damn important, and the hopping will start once again.
This is pretty cool. We really have moved over from Reddit, since we already have some of the niche communities. There are plenty of Linux users already, so it shouldn’t take long for people to start posting there.
Bossmang, I know that we’re paying more for RHEL licences than for the entire IT department, but if we switch to Arch we’ll cut down the costs significantly.
I am so happy that my parents didn’t buy me a better laptop a decade ago, so I was forced to use a shitty thinkpad laptop. After reading online, I figured out that Linux makes it faster…
It’s the path of many of us here, now you will hate linux if you come from windows, give it a couple of months and you’ll ask yourself how the fuck you could be on windows till now.
The reddit api blocking 3rd party apps pushed a whole bunch of people onto lemmy, and lemmy is very big on FOSS and Linux so it’s been a gateway of sorts
Not to mention, Reddit’s assault was followed by seemingly every tech company looking on and saying “hold my beer”
I’ve always been wary of the ability of tech companies to pull the plug of services on a whim, but holy shit did 2023 bring that way up the priority list
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