I was in 6th grade and wanted to know more about computers. I thought being a computer programmer would be a cool job one day. I’d heard Linux was difficult to install and use and thought hey, that’ll help me learn. So I had my parents get me a copy of Mandrake 6. It was perfect because I had the free time to play with it and figure stuff out by making mistakes and fixing them without the pressure of having to do really important work.
I do preach the good word of FOSS, but only to those who are in a position to appreciate the suggestion and benefit from it.
I wanted to update my family PC (technically, but I don’t think anyone else apart from me used it). Windows XP licence was too expensive for me as a kid and I found a CD ROM in my library with a FOSS OS advertised on it.
Fast forward to now, and I have been using Linux almost exclusively for 15 years now (some Windows usage needed for work or gaming)
High School friend showed me their install, and how it had these sick spinning cube desktop. Ditched it once I realized I couldn’t do anything I wanted on it.
In University, the ComSci labs all had networked machines with Ubuntu installed. It was cool, but again outside of coding, I couldn’t do anything I wanted on it.
2022, I got a new Laptop, couldn’t use Windows 11 without an account (I know of the work arounds). MS has Windows 10 with a EOL in 2025, and Valve is pushing the Steam Deck hard. Gave it a second shot. I now can do everything I want on it without issue. I even made a 1 year retrospective video about it.
Fedora immutable (ublue kinoite) has been so bulletproof. Moved from Arch, which is now on distrobox, so painless. Now ~ 1 year… 2 laptops + desktop, other is destined for NixOS…
The last straw was when I had a 24 hours render running, and Windows decided to update and reboot 1 hour before it was done. I was using the computer at the time, RAM, CPU, and GPU were all at max, the mouse was being moved, I clicked “later” every time the update pop-up appeared, and it still rebooted.
Linux does what I tell it to, and doesn’t do what I tell it not to do. I didn’t think that was a big ask until Windows.
When you’re not telling us which package you’re trying to install in which packaging system, the only meaningful answer is: you’re trying to install the wrong package.
I needed something lighter than windows 7 basic on a cheap network my girlfriend at the time (now wife) bought me when we were in high school. Ended up using Ubuntu 11.10 netbook edition. After spending 5 hours getting my Broadcom wireless card working, I was hooked. Used it until that laptop died and during that time I slowly migrated all of my computers to Linux. Only kept windows on secondary drives or a different partition for the occasional time I need it.
I’ve been using Linux off and on again for the past decade.
The original reason I used Linux was because as a kid I got stuck with whatever old laptop was laying around, so my dad would install Ubuntu to make it usable.
When I built my first computer a couple years ago and started using Windows 10, that’s when Windows stopped working for me. Nothing made me want to switch more than when the major Windows 10 updates broke my software every 6 months.
I had dual boot with Win10, which I used for almost everything, and Arch, for SSH-able stuff for work and university. One day Windows decided to nuke both the EFI partition and Arch, which made Windows itself unbootable, so I just wiped the entire disk and installed Manjaro. Now I’m a sysadmin and I don’t think I could do my job if I had to use Windows.
I was being encouraged to learn programming by my brother-in-law, so when I was going through the lessons in the course he bought there was a section on Linux. At first I was thinking on how would I be able to install in a virtual machine but my brother-in-law in all his wisdom said “why don’t you dual-boot”. After some planning so I don’t nuke my hard drive and flashing LMDE as my first distro I installed Linux and did the rest of the course there.
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