Windows 10. I was happy with Windows 7, got prompted to 'upgrade' to Windows 10... I declined. Next morning, my PC had Windows 10 installed. I got this crazy idea that my PC belonged to me and that I would be the one to decide what OS to use. Hello Linux Mint.
This so much. It’s like, you’d think when you shell out cash to pay for a license (or well, I did anyways. But tbf, most PCs you buy come with a valid license), you’d at least be entitled to do as you will with your copy of the OS (within reason, i mean. Yeah, less than legal stuff, go off Microsoft, but stuff like settings and such?) But, well…Microsoft just loves telling you “you opted out, but what you REALLY meant was to opt in. Source: because we say so” with basic settings, not surprising the do it for an OS…of course they would. My bud said it best at the time: they don’t care how you gain it, they just want everone to be on Windows 10
I was learning C/C++ back then and although the nostalgia is strong with this one, Turbo C++ was obviously shit (and Borland quickly killed it later anyway), and while looking around for alternatives I found DJGPP which introduced me to the GNU toolchain and so the jump to Linux to have all of that natively instead of running on DOS was very natural. My very first distro was Redhat Linux 6.2 that I got as a free CD along with a magazine (also got a Corel Linux CD the same way that I was excited about given how their WordPerfect was all the rage back then but I was never able to install it, I don’t remember what the issue was) and it looked like this (screenshot from everythinglinux.org/redhat62/index.html ):
I was at CompUSA back in the 90s and there was a Red Hat box with a manual in the clearance bin. I think it was Red Hat 4. I took it home and installed it on an old computer. I mainly used it as a server for testing Perl scripts for my own websites but I did use it as a desktop some.
I was a Windows N/T and Novell Netware administrator at the time and the company I worked for needed a “Linux guy”. Most people had barely heard of Linux so I became the de facto Linux admin. I ended up managing an Apache server and writing what was really just an API that ran under mod_perl. It returned structured text like modern APIs (JSON wasn’t a thing yet).
Now almost 30 years later and I still love Linux. Linux powers my life. I run my own email and web servers. I self-host lots of stuff. I’m not a big fan of desktop Linux but I work on Linux servers all day long. I have no desire to come home and fuck with my workstations.
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.
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.
Windows 9x was really, really unstable. I couldn’t believe how much more stable and convenient (packages managers) this free OS created by volunteers was. And around 2000, once I started building machines with Linux support in mind it’s been all I run. I’d say I’m obsessed.
Saw what windows 11 was going to be like and figured I should bail and learn Linux before I had to move over. Been just under 2 years on Linux. Don’t regret my decision.
Same. I heard MS was checking out the possibility of adding advertising in the file explorer. I don’t know the veracity of the reports or where I saw them, but it spooked me enough that I knew I needed to get started familiarizing myself with something else before I had no options.
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