I was broke and my hard drive failed. I’ve heard/read somewhere that Linux can be booted of a live cd, something quite new back in the days(like 15 years ago?). So I made one a used my broken laptop with broken hdd for about 7 months, just from the live session without persisting anything. It was a pain to wait for everything since most things would have to be loaded from the dvd, but it worked!
Laptop wasn’t running smooth anymore. Tried a bunch of stuff in Winxows, nothing helped. Formatted the drive, installed linux, ran buttery smooth for years until some graphics shit died. Did the same to a thinkpad back in 2018 or 19. Still up an running like a champ but the thing went crazy on the original windows it came with (2nd hand. I’m also cheap…)
I was lucky to meet some real operating systems (VMS, Unix) before I got contaminated with Microsoft products. So when I first heard about Linux (some guy in Finland wrote a new kernel and showed it to Prof. Tanenbaum, and when he grows up, he wants it to become a full fledged unix :-)) I knew already what it is.
Ubuntu used to ship out free installation CDs. Since it was free, I figured why the hell not. Played around with it, loved it, but didn’t use it for much more than messing around.
A decade later those fond memories enticed me to buy a Raspberry Pi and play around with Linux again, and a few years later it became my main OS. It’s just so much fun to tinker with in a way that Windows never was, and nowadays it runs almost everything without a problem.
I’ve been running Fedora for years. I tried out Arch and OpenSUSE a bit this year just to see if I was missing anything, and went right back to Fedora afterward.
Not as fussy as Arch and better package availability than SUSE (for my needs at least). Also dnf is my favorite package manager despite being relatively slow.
Lack of money, I couldn’t afford to pay for a Windows license. After discovering how to install Linux more than 25 years ago, I became eager to learn it and never looked back.
As a long-time Linux user, I feel like it says something about the maturity of desktop Linux that it is good enough now for the kinds of users that find LibreOffice insufficient.
I first heard about a Raspberry Pi on the 2 meter band, someone mentioned making contacts in Europe with one. Sounded intriguing. I wanted to work digital modes but didn’t really want to hook up my laptop to my radio for fear of wiring it wrong, so I bought a Raspberry Pi. Which runs Debian Linux. I learned how to cd and ls and sudo and apt-get.
Then that laptop I was being so precious with suffered a monitor backlight failure. And it was time for a new laptop. This was in 2014, Windows 8.1 was on the shelves at that point.
I was enjoying using the Pi at the time, and decided to try running Linux on my new laptop instead of Windows. And I’ve been using Linux Mint ever since.
No specific rust experience with either, but some thoughts on the popularity reasons outside of the language:
I suspect a bit part of this difference in framework popularity may be due to GTK being more attached to gnome and friends, and by extension, Ubuntu (for better or worse, the most used desktop distro for quite a while) Most of the time that’ll be mainline Ubuntu which has always been GTK.
So if a developer or company is going to target something, then it may come down to “what is the ideal platform to build on for Ubuntu as our main target? GTK? Cool, that’s what we will use.” Of course, either framework is just fine, and either framework targets other OSs as well. I don’t have any experience with either, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the choice of GTK more often is akin to Swift + Apple’s toolkits for iphone development being more popular by a large margin than Ionic/Capacitor, React Native, Xamarin, etc, even though the others provide some benefits (and some significant context-dependent downsides, of course)
If i remember correctly, Qt was not fully FOSS for a while, so GTK was much more widely adopted and recommended early on. But that was pre-2005, I think.
I generally don’t really think this is the case, there are still plenty of apps from other languages in QT. in fact, for cross platform apps, QT is immensely more popular then GTK is. Rust itself had disproportionately less apps developed in QT then other stuff, (Python for instance). especially when you consider cross platform. and at least for open source anyways. closed source I cant comment on
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