Just windows, I had windows 10 installed on my laptop and was constantly fighting with windows update so when the system broke (wouldn’t boot) I finally installed Ubuntu. These days I use arch BTW.
Curiousity, wouldn’t say I’m obsessed but I’d hate to switch Windows now since I’m way more familiar on Linux. And I’ve satisfied (killed) any curiosity in Windows server and desktop in professional life
I already wanted to switch since i disliked the privacy issues, and then once my laptop got too slow for windows (1 min in a call/video before i got sound), i replaced the hdd with an ssd and installed linux mint, which i still use.
It started as a dislike of Windows 98 for me, extremely unreliable and buggy OS. I didn’t switch immediately but that was what got me looking for the alternatives, having fully made the switch around the time of Windows XP. Windows only seems to have got worse since then, stories of advertising, forced updates, etc., I’m glad I never had to deal with that.
Privacy and programming communities. I tried to stay at Windows at first, but when I was bith recommended GNU/Linux for privacy and had to use it for programming, I knew I couldn’t keep the resistance up.
Three years later and I have 0 regrets. All games I play work, except for, recently, TF2 because of a weird malloc library issue on Arch-based systems. All apps I need just work, and whenever I need something Windows-only I have a VM setup just for that. Developing and managing your system on a Unix-like system is just so much easier.
Curiosity, back around 2010 before I was a teenager. No clue how I heard about it, but the concept of replacing the entire operating system was fascinating. I figured it must be really good if it was such a well kept secret.
A few years later, when I started to learn programming, Linux was the obvious winner. The online course taught C in a Linux environment, and I was amazed that the default Ubuntu build at the time had everything built in, whereas a Windows equivalent required visual studio and licensing adventures.
It really stuck as a daily driver after Windows 7, where a clear trend emerged: Windows got in my way, Linux got out of my way. Simple as.
Being poor. In college in the 90s, my lead sysadmin couldn’t afford Minix for this system we had, so we tried to compile Linux on it. Three days later, we still failed, and gave up, but this was kernel 0.93 or something, so it had a ways to go. But I learned so much from that experience without paying for a university course or something.
Years later, I bought a copy of Red Hat 6 at a Costco. Windows 95/98 was big, I didn’t know how to pirate it, so I went back to Linux and it worked great on my “franken-puters” cobbled together from spare parts dumpster diving. Steep learning curve back then, though. Then I brought it to my workplace, went from UNIX admin to Linux admin, and soon I preferred it to Windows. Been my daily driver for decades, now.
Am I an evangel? A little, but I find that “right tool for right job” is a better approach. Linux is great for everything, BUT a comprehensive system like MS Office AND Active Directory simply does not exist in FOSS space yet; everything is cobbled together and a kludge still trying to catch up.
Obsessed? Kinda. I just assembled some ansible scripts to roll my own distro. Why? To see if I could.
I wasn’t happy with windows vista’s prformance and wanted to try something different. Didn’t make the switch permanent for a decade because I needed games in my life but I always ran linux on my laptops when I got them.
Resenting Microsoft more than I hated Linux basically. When Windows started pushing malware-like popups and automatically “upgrading” peoples OS without asking I started using Linux as my main OS. At that point I disliked Linux because I had had some bad experiences with attempting to use it in the past, but it was becoming clear it is the lesser of two evils. Over the years it got more tolerable while Windows just got worse. Not an evangelist or obsessed at all, I actually still dislike it, but there’s no way I’m going back.
I think there’s a pretty big thing here that people are kinda missing and it’s the ease of app creation. Recently gnome has done a lot for app developers to make the experience really good. Workbench, gnome builder, biblioteca all combined with the ease of libadwaita and the gnome circle make app development significantly easier for gtk than qt. There’s a big community now with a lot of inertia. I think workbench has around 100 tutorials now or so. Super low barrier to entry. Also libadwaita is pretty.
I already use gnome now, but even before I had settled on a DE, I took a look at both ecosystems and was heavily leaning towards gtk because of all these factors and against qt because of its reliance on c++. Until all of those factors are replicated well for qt (and by extension kde), I don’t think they’ll see the same level of development.
I’ve never tried NixOS, but it looks really promising.
I usually use Fedora or OpenSUSE, which have good software availability (unfortunately not as good as the AUR). Fedora provides selinux by default, and has profiles for basically everything. SUSE uses AppArmor, but Arch doesn’t provide convenient configuration for either, and only supports x86_64 (which is why I switched away from it).
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