Godot engine broke with windows on my hardware, Simeone suggested me to try out linux, went with ubuntu 18.10 i think. Have been using linux ever since
I’ve been running Linux in some form since 2012 - I installed Ubuntu 12 on my old laptop and played around with it - was a pain so I dropped it for Windows until like… 2015? Then I went full into it as I started getting into programming and whatnot.
I uses to be a huge Apple fan pre-2010. Everything worked, was smooth, wasn’t Windows, and it was fun trying out the terminal despite it being pretty useless for most things on Mac.
At the new decade is when it felt like Apple was becoming what it is today: a walled garden with priority of mobile devices at the detriment of Macintosh. Started to really look at Linux as an alternative (only tried Ubuntu in a VM around the time of Unity coming out) early 2010s, but didn’t make the full leap until around 2013 when I installed Linux Mint and got a Raspberry Pi to begin to mess around with. Now I solely run a mix of Debian and Void on all my machines and I couldn’t be happier.
Canonical was giving free CDs when I was a teen and it looked cool. Later versions of Unity DE were so good, I liked older Ubuntu so much. Now I run it on older devices to give them some life back
My computer's hard drive began to be less-than-reliable. And only Linux can be ran from the USB drive. I have got MX Linux, and save changes, updates etc. by remastering the image.
Back in 1999 I came across a copy of this book. Not a great book, I wouldn’t recommend it even if it weren’t decades out of date at this point. But it came with a CD-ROM with Red Hat Linux 6.2 which I installed on the family computer and never really looked back. I haven’t had a Windows install since 2004ish.
I’ve never really been an evangelist about it, though. And I would say that I was obsessed at one point but that’s waned quite a bit in the last few years. I’m still Linux only but messing about with computers generally quite a lot less.
MS Dos 5.0 on my first PC was a bit short on features and I had not enough money for Windows 3.1… I heard that American students were using something called Unix and that their was something close available through mail-order CDs. Yggdrasil CDs were cheap too!
Windows ME came out. After installing it and wasting a bunch of time trying to get it to work reliably, I wiped the HDD and installed Debian potato instead. That was 23 years ago.
I tried Linux when I was younger. I decided to try Gentoo on underpowered hardware with zero Linux experience. I credit that uphill battle for teaching me Linux! I used that until I got into dependency hell and switched back to Windows for a while. I needed PowerShell and stuff for my old job, before it went cross-platform. It was fine.
A few years later, I was dual-booting again. Then, Windows 10 began blue-screening randomly. I couldn’t figure out why. Reinstalling didn’t work. So I started using Linux full-time and I’ve never looked back.
Even when I found out that one of my memory sticks had been half-inserted for months, and that’s probably what made Windows crash all the time. How did Linux handle it? Obviously, because it’s better.
Windows 8 being unusable on my shitty laptop I had back then, IIRC it would bluescreen 9 out of 10 times on startup (this same bug still persisted when eventually Windows 10 came out). I essentially switched to Linux full time after that.
I first heard of it in the early 2000s, with my dad talking about replacing our buggy Windows ME with Lindows. Eventually, that computer died without us ever attempting to install it.
In college, I hung out with someone who used linux and thought it looked cool. I successfully dual booted Ubuntu on my PC around 2005 or 2006, but could never get the video drivers working properly (it was stuck at the lowest resolution) and eventually gave up on it.
I started adminning a web forum around 2014 or so, and the previous admin talked me into dual booting Fedora rather than only using Putty. So I started using it intermittently whenever I started working on the forum, though I never really got into GNOME. He also told me about raspberry pis, so I picked up a pi 2 and started tinkering with it.
When my wife moved in (2018), she (a software developer) was working on a project and asked me if I’d heard of raspberry pis, as she was recommended to use one but hadn’t looked into it yet. I pulled my pi 2 out of storage and she fell in love with it, so we started buying loads of pi 3s and zeroes, with me testing out different distros and setups for her while she was working on the project code.
Finally, somewhere around 2018 or 2019 my laptop started running like shit on Windows. I tried out Xubuntu and fell in love with it. It ended up becoming our go-to distro, getting slapped on old desktops she brought home from work and a used laptop I bought for our daughter. So that became the daily driver on my laptop, even as she moved onto Alpine with i3wm.
And now we both have Pinetab 2s, so I think it’s fair to say we’re full on linux nerds at this point. We still have Windows on some of our desktops, though, so we’re more pragmatists than linux proselytizers.
TL;DR: I heard about it young, and that interest grew into dabbling, until I finally got addicted to it.
Early 2000’s I took a class in highschool called “What’s in the box”. A buddy of mine and I would hangout after school just talking and building computers. He showed me Lindows. I specifically remember looking at the clock in the dock, and thinking… “Wow!!! Look how you can customize the clock so much!”
It stuck with me. Shortly there after I dabbled with Suse. Then moved to Ubuntu. By 2005 I was almost exclusively using Linux on all my machine. Had one machine running windows for gaming, but the other machines I had were all Linux.
Used to use Windows 98 SE. First introduced to Mandrake Linux around 2000. Had no Internet, got the install media from a friend of my father. Barely got it working and couldn’t read English. Went back to Windows XP. Ubuntu came. Began to use it around 2008 for a few years. Back to windows briefly and then Raspberry Pi was launched. Switched to Linux permanently.
Almost went back in 2013 due to Lightroom, gaming and a few work related medical software.
Began to grasp FOSS maturely in 2014 and switched to alterbative software. When Steam launched Proton there was no turning back.
I was obsessed but it has come and gone. Now I’m a bit of a nuissance to friends sllwly switching them to alternative software. My partner gets the worst treatment. Now she uses hardware security keys, assymetric keys auth etc
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