I was very curious about computing and trying different applications
I liked customizing and tinkering with my setup: Launcher, window manager, icons, etc.
I was a poor teenager
On the windows side, there were neat apps like Stardock Windowblinds, for the most part, everything was paid and expensive for someone with no disposable income.
Mind was blown when I realized everything I wanted was available for free! My first install was actually from a CD that came with a book I checked out from the public library
I was on windows and I was forced to update and then it bricked my computer and I had to reinstall windows except when I did it asked me for a windows license key. I tried everything to recover my license key but wasn’t able to.
This was around the time linus texh tips was teasing his upcoming month on linux series so I was like fuck it I’ll give it a go. Spent a week on mint and wifi was broken then tried Endeavor, Garuda and fedora and settled on manjaro. Manjaro was amazing to me. Everything worked out of the box and kde plasma looked so clean and I could set it up exactly how I wanted.
Then I watched linus tech tips video on linux and I was like wtf how did he have such a bad experience is he dumb?
He’s pretty much the quintessential QA tester. He wants to do things his way, regardless of whether or not the OS wants him to do that. He’s usually skilled enough to fix anything he messes up, but he doesn’t know enough about Linux to do that, so he ends up breaking things. I feel like most people have a better experience than he did, but his technique uncovered a ton of bugs and usability issues that significantly improved the Linux desktop to have fixed.
Love those videos, mostly because it is my perfect argument on why the Linux Desktop isn’t ready yet.
Was Linus an idiot in those videos? Yes, Luke even said so, stating he installed in and in the month chose not to use his machine (recent wan show)
However it shows, just how easy it is for a novice to break the distro, and how much work is needed to get it to the point of Windows for general population usability. Granted the issues Linus had with POP_OS was dumb and shouldn’t have happened. But it showed me that Manjaro existed, which I am using to this day.
I think linux desktop is ready for open minded people who see interested in a new way of doing things. I don’t think it’s ready for people who can’t use a computer or troubleshoot. Windows breaks often so I’m not as harsh when I see linux break.
Agreed, I am surprised how often file explorer crashes on Win 10. Or I need to restart windows for random reasons since moving to Linux. Its to the point I want to gut my desktop and put Manjaro on it too.
Compared to when I started using Linux in the late 2000’s, Linux has matured to an unbelievable point. To someone who is even slightly interested in learning, its perfectly usable as a Windows replacement… depending on your Distro, Desktop Environment, etc.
It’s this depends which makes recommending Linux hard for me, since when a problem occurs, I find its not as easy to troubleshoot especially with how many flavours of Linux exists.
I wanted to see what the fuss was about after windows 11 came out, because I was sick of Windows intrusive UI and shady business practices.
I still use windows for some things, but now I duel boot to cinnamon and it is my daily desktop driver. I vastly prefer the clean interface and speed of Linux over windows, and I now play most of my games on it too. I was shocked when I realized that Elden Ring runs great, and looks better, on Linux while it was unplayable on windows at release.
I also installed Fedora to my surface pro after a windows update made it impossible to use without severe slowdown. I’ve had my surface for 6 years and it runs great on Linux.
The only downside to Linux is that, as am artist, the apps are limited. Blender is fantastic, Krita is catching up, but there is no way to use clip studio, harmony (toon boom, storyboard pro), or Zbrush (yes I can sculpt in blender but it is not quite there yet.)
The year was 2002. I was told about Gentoo Linux by a college. I saw it as a new, shiny toy and immediately wanted to try it out. I realized that it was better than Windows, so I stuck with it. (Not with Gentoo, but with Linux. I still use Gentoo sometimes today, but I also tried out many many other distros throughout the time and I don’t use Gentoo exclusively nowadays.)
are you an evangel
Yes, I believe that Linux is far superior to Windows and I tell people about it
Cost and price … I could never afford much in terms of tech purchases 20 years ago.
Always collected second hand systems, first learned to find and use cracked windows copies, then when that got too complicated and difficult, found Linux and have never looked back. The amount of money I’ve saved not to paying for proprietary software, went into buying better hardware that I used to install Linux and OSS software.
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 11 was so buggy that simply plugging in a USB device caused it to crash, I joked about installing Linux then I actually did. I have not looked back since.
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.
It was two decades ago, when someone gave us the CDs of Fedora. It was so very different than Windows XP. I came back to Linux when my school library had Ubuntu on their computer. I'm gonna ask someone to gift me Steam Deck upon graduating from college.
Up until February this year, I was still using a 14 year old DDR2 desktop. Windows 10 started to get quite slow and had some annoying crashes (mainly the fault of my goofy old hardware, of course)
I learned about Linux as an alternative through a Linux Tech Tips video about gaming on Linux, and Valve’s announcement of the Steam Deck, I was also interested in FOSS apps as alternative to proprietary ones.
Decided to try Linux Mint. With no prior experience with Linux, lack of luck finding good tutorials, and some weird thing happening with my games not launching, I had a very rough start.
But thanks to Mint, suddenly my DDR2 desktop got a lot smoother :D also, all of my drivers worked out of the box, and I got very surprised with Linux’s plug-and-play hardware capabilities.
So I decided to learn how to use it, tinkered alot with my system, and broken it alot! It was kind of frustrating, but fun at same time.
And without noticing, I had already learned lots about Linux from a more technical, and then, philosophical point of view.
Now I’m a great fan of Linux and FOSS, and have been helping friends to move to it by giving support with issues I had in the past.
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