Messing around with a Raspberry Pi was what got me over the threshold of learning enough to utilize Linux primarily, and then eventually exclusively.
Obsessed? No. Persistently interested though.
I communicate Linux as an option when the circumstance are appropriate. It is often not worth getting involved in other people’s tech decisions. My mother is now a satisfied Mint user, after she asked me if there was more pleasant and private way to use her computer. It has been great for me, because my providing tech support has gone to basically zero.
I didn’t have a lot of money and went dumpster diving for parts. Changed out a bad capacitor and got a system booting. This was back in Pentium 3 and 4 days. I found a 512MB stick of memory that had some bad areas. Linux was able to map around it with some kernel options at boot. Since I had limited storage I used knoppix and had a print out of the needed kernel options and memory addresses.
Once it was up and running I was able to do anything and everything I wanted. I did built a better system and got gentoo going a year or so later.
Eventually I got gaming mostly working with the project that eventually became crossover. First software I ever purchased too. I started dual booting less.
I bounced back and forth between windows and Linux and when I built a system around 2010 I didn’t even bother configuring it for dual booting.
I haven’t really touched anything windows since around the release of Windows 10 and only used windows 7 for work reasons prior. These days I’m pretty useless with anything on that end.
So I’m an evangelical fan of Linux. I use it everywhere I can and the FOSS philosophy resonates with me. I advocate for it where it makes sense and works. I’ll go out of my way and spend time & money helping people move into it too.
Curiosity. It began while trying to play around with programming, and finding a lot of talk and resources about Linux, and then trying it. 3 broken Debian installations just for messing around, then Ubuntu as a more permanent install, all of this alongside Windows.
Then I began using less and less Windows until I just deleted the Windows partition because I needed more space.
Dark mode back in the day (XP/Vista era). I wanted to theme everything and have cool UI/visual features in a non-shady download-this-third-party-totally-safe-theme-engine-wink-wink way.
The year was 2002 & I was fed up with windows for various reasons. Connected to the internet looking for a windows alternative & ended up finding slackware. Installed slackware & got it somewhat working. Happily used it for a short while, before moving on to Fedora Core when it was released…
My computer was trash. I migrated out of necessity. It took 40 minutes to boot into Windows XP. Old-timey Lubuntu kept that computer alive for another 5 years.
When I got a real computer, I found that using Windows was unpleasant – So when Proton started to mature, I switched back to Linux (cuz hey, vidya gaems).
… Then I became an adult and the political radicalisation began.
I’m not “obssessed” so much as I am politically motivated, so I guess I’m an evangelist in a way. If there were ten other mature open source operating systems I’d shill all of them. As it is there’s Linux and BSD. So those are the ones I shill.
Generally I’ll pester anyone willing to listen to get as far from Big Tech’s walled gardens as their life necessities allow them.
I’m not a tech person, I think most Linux people are? Instead I’m just someone who studied basic sociology and history, and can see the kind of power that walled-garden tech can (and HAS, in recent times) give to very few people.
Windows 10. When your OS no longer respects your choices and you have to fight it every minute, there is something wrong. The creeping invasions on privacy have only cemented my use of Linux
Truthfully, I’m not sure if I would have ever switched over if Microsoft kept the Windows 7 paradigm. But I started my search for alternatives when Windows 8 - already too adventurous for me - came with the computer I bought.
Towards the end of my time using Windows 10 as my primary OS, the realization that the UI is not an inherent component of the OS sealed the deal. As a Windows 2000 fan, I fell in love with the way Chicago95 Debian replicated the look and stability that I had sorely missed.
I was trying to run a forum in the early 2000s and was pirating Windows Server with IIS to do it, and I discovered this entire other free, legit OS to do what I wanted to do with ease. Back in those days you could install a "LAMP" stack during install which gave you Apache, MySQL, and PHP automatically configured, whereas in IIS I was having to install a seperate PHP interpreter and figure out how to send php scripts to it and back, the whole thing seemed janky.
After that Linux became my go-to for any IT related project, and even more so when I started my electronics hobby due to how you can just make it do any damn thing you want.
In 2020 it became my desktop permanently after Microsoft decided they didn't want their OS running on my perfectly fine computer anymore.
I’ve been using Linux for a long time on various other systems but what caused me to finally ditch Windows completely on my daily driver was:
A nonconsensual Windows Update which caused my bitlocker encryption to become corrupted and I lost everything on that disk.
This unscheduled reformat combined with all the other shady practices on Windows lately cemented my choice.
It’s been several months now and I couldn’t be happier!
The quality of gaming on Linux has advanced an incredible amount in the last year or so since I’ve tried it. Most of my games will either run natively or require a few extra clicks to use proton in steam. A few outliers that aren’t on steam required Lutris.
On average I find the performance in games is better on Linux, even for non-native games using proton/wine.
Definitely would recommend giving it a shot if you are on the fence. Particularly if you’ve tried gaming in the past and were disappointed.
If you wanted to host your own site and services, a Linux vps was (and still is) the only choice. Back then it was Debian, nowadays I use Arch on everything. Same with Raspberry Pis when the first one became available in 2012. With university I started using Arch on my laptop and later when Proton and Wayland became good, I moved to it on the Desktop as well.
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