I borrowed an installation CD from the local library around 1998. It was RedHat 5.x, and I started messing around with it due to me being interested in alternative operating systems. Before it, I had OS/2 Warp 3.0 in our IBM Pentium 100 MHz family computer which didn’t really do it for me to be honest.
It took weeks to get anything working with Linux. I went to the library, borrowing books. In our middle school we had an internet connection, so I utilized it to learn how to configure modelines correctly to get X11 running.
When it did finally run, the default window manager was FVWM95, almost like Windows 95!
I used OSX a few years in the power PC times, just to switch back to Linux around 2008.
Edit: my real love for Linux started when I got Debian running. RedHat didn’t have anything comparable to apt those days. You needed to download RPM packages manually with all the dependencies, while apt just worked with one command.
Windows is boated and eventually becomes unusable or unsupported.
Linux has no such issue.
That was my initial reason for trying it.
Since then I’ve revived countless computers with Linux.
I wanted to switch to Linux for several years because I was very sick of how Windows did things.
With Valve doing Proton and Windows 11 being a much shittier Windows 10… With rumours of it eventually becoming a FORCED update!.. I decided to actually switch to Linux last November.
Haven’t regretted it. Haven’t used any other OS since.
I actually don’t know how that happened. It was either a youtube video: when linux met r/unixporn or my privacy & freedom concerns that suddenly appeared in like the span of a week
My boss at the time (I was a writer for a tech magazine) asked me to review FreeBSD. I couldn’t get it to install (at all) so someone suggested Linux (Slackware) which was an insane idea at the time around 1995 or 1996. Slackware sort of worked, no sound and I had to do various really annoying things to get it to see my modem (which never really worked). But something about it was interesting and I stuck with it.
I taught myself some shell scripting and unix commands after being gifted an iMac running 10.3. I then decided I wanted to fully immerse myself, so I dual booted that thing with OpenBSD.
The installer back then was pretty barebones; I used a scientific calculator to set up the partitions. After install I was dropped into a root shell and had to recompile the kernel to apply the latest system patches, then set up my user account, sudo, and bootstrap the package installer.
Getting the latest Firefox meant compiling it from scratch, which took about a week. Setting up flash involved configuring a Linux emulation layer. It worked on most sites, but not others.
I began pining for the binary updates, native flash support, and huge package libraries available in Linux, not to mention the cool wobbly window cube that compiz fusion offered, so I made the jump to Linux.
I’ve switched distros and even switched to other unix-likes, but in the end Linux won for me.
I believe that it’s always a good idea to support alternatives.
I prefer to use products and services that I actually support.
I do still use Windows occasionally because not everything works or at least has an alternative available but Linux is and will probably always be my primary OS. Even if by some miracle Microsoft, Apple or Google actually start listening to their users and make their OS and business models perfect, I would still use an alternative like Linux as my primary because there would be nothing preventing these companies from reverting their decisions.
Despite being an ECE major, I didn’t really bother doing anything with Linux until two things happened at the same time:
I started having to work in several different build environments that were just easier to set up in Linux
I started running Minecraft servers/doing server modding (starting back in the days of Hey0’s server mod and carrying up through Bukkit).
I wouldn’t call myself an evangelist at all. If you’re doing something that I think will be specifically easier to do in Linux (mostly servers and specific kinds of software development), I’ll point out how… but I find that a lot of people’s advice on “use Linux and X FOSS tool” ends up being akin to giving someone bike shopping advice on which welding torch to use to construct their bicycle frame.
in the fall of 2002 the windows millennium installation on my computer broke, trapping an entire semester’s worth of work on the hard drive and i was a starving college student with less than $20 to my name, so i couldn’t afford to buy windows xp and didn’t know anyone where i could get a pirate copy from.
i bought a mandrake linux cd pack for $8 from circuit city and used google in the computer laboratory to learn how to mount the hard drive, install drivers for ntfs and copy my all my work to a usb drive and i’ve been using linux ever since. i switch to 100% only linux both professionally and personally sometime around 2010.
Embedded Linux is such a huge part of embedded software in every industry. I’ve done a bit with build root but mostly Yocto. There is just no replacement for the Linux kernel. If I need to know how the kernel actually handles a platform driver, I can just look up the relevant source. This is just impossible with Windows (IoT or otherwise)
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