I woke up one day, and copilot had been installed on my PC overnight. I didn’t like that lack of control. This was, coincidentally, a weekend that my wife, kid, and dog were all gone. Since I knew Win10 only had a year left, and I had the time, I figured it was as good a time as any.

I downloaded Fedora and Kubuntu. Spent a bit of time with each, and went with Kubuntu. For a few days. It had issues waking from sleep, and I had to do some kind of tweaking with every one of my games to get them to work.

I don’t mind tinkering with stuff, but i just don’t have the time to make my computer my hobby. So, I switched to Mint. Everything just works. So, I put it on everything else. I guess the one time I really had to dig into terminal stuff was getting a wifi driver for my living room PC off git. Other than that, super easy.

Now, I’m coming up on a year of Mint. Couldn’t be happier.

I really, truly, seriously hate modern implementations of AI and am willing to make concessions in my life to avoid using it. Windows 11 forcing Copilot was my last straw for using Microsoft.

I wanted to code in C. I saw some tutorials for windows and found it very complex, but I saw one in linux where the person just gcc hello.c. And since then I’ve fallen in love

Homework.

College used linux because I did computer science.
Topic: concurrency. College then gave us a programming assignment that required adding a code library, which I had never done before or even heard of, and thus did not understand.
Since this was a library that was platform-specific, they had made one library for linux and one for windows.
Way too late I got the gist of it but still couldn’t install the library.
Since the question contained the linux directory structure I was convinced that the windows library was broken and every other college student finished this task in Linux.
Thus I installed Linux.
Ten years later I understood and finished the assignment.

FreeBSD didn’t have working nvidia drivers for amd64 in 2006, so, Linux it was.

Because windows has become spyware and enough shit works to be worth the hassle. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a constant struggle. I have many hobbies, and for some of them it’s really annoying to be on Linux. Programming is awesome on Linux, gaming is for the most part fine, music production gets a lot more iffy and some of the photography stuff isn’t really cooperating. But I’ll just have to endure it, I’m almost one year in and for the most part everything works in some way or another. I only start Windows once in a few months now.

I saw fvwm in a magazine and it had a really cool 3D look to it and I wanted that. I had never seen anything like that. We were very poor and I only had an old computer, a 486, so it was either pirate software (and there was no version of Windows in our language) or use Linux.

I ended up on Red Hat from a magazine and then later Slackware. I liked Window Maker so I stayed on that for two decades. Learning Linux gave me a constructive hobby, introduced me to free software philosophy, and gave me technology skills. We moved to the United States. When I was 15 or 16, I helped a college math professor install hardware on Linux. When he found out that I was dropping out of a very racist high school, he provided support and I ended up graduating from their college. Those Linux skills came in handy and helped start a career.

I have only ever used Windows to upgrade firmware on a laptop or to download an ISO so I could replace Windows. Like everyone else, I was enamoured with macOS back in the 2000’s but couldn’t afford one and when I finally could, it couldn’t do sloppy focus and that was a pet peeve of mine so I just returned it and got a used ThinkPad.

I moved back to Asia. Now I use sway on Debian and get to ride my bicycle to work and my kids grow up better than I did, so life is good.

cuz windows sucks major balls and i was sick of it breaking itself (and the spyware)

My heat was out and I needed a way to warm my apartment so installed Gentoo on my Dell XPS. /s

That was around the time Windows 2000 was coming out and I couldn’t afford a copy. I’d been dabbling for a year or two before. That was my first and last dual boot computer. MythTV really sold me on linux.

Went to Linux when I was a teenager, went back to Windows.

My return however is a lot more bittersweet. One of my cats died. The other cat went into mourning. Wanted to keep him company while doing my shit, so I took my old laptop and installed Xubuntu on it. While I was using it I realised that Linux had come a long, long way since I last used it and I could use it as a daily driver. Got a new laptop soon after and installed Mint on it.

Then Windows on my main PC started demanding I update. Realised I couldn’t afford to, both software and hardware wise, so I decided to go full Linux. Never looked back. Typing this on my Laptop running Fedora while I try kill time before an interview.

TL;DR: I came back to Linux because I wanted to hang out with my cat while he mourned.

I started a masters program and I was assigned an an office computer with MintOS that contained all the software and data for my research project. Unfortunately, my advisor couldn’t remember the password so my first task was breaking into the computer. You’d think being able to externally reset the root password would turn me away from Linux, but the ease and functionality of the terminal shell really made sense to me. Plus now I know how to better secure my Linux systems.

It’s a long story. But back in the time, when there was a company called Commodore, I used Amiga computers, because I didn’t like Microsoft and MS-DOS. When Commodore went bankrupt and my Amiga started to fade away I was forced to buy a PC. And because I didn’t want to have Windows 95, I bought S.uS.E. Linux and that’s the way I am now. And I’m happy to be Linux user all these years.

Back in 2002 it was eye candy.

Compiz compositor. The 3D cube and wobly windows.

And still Linux can be the most beautiful UI of all OSes out there.

Dark patterns, kajouling, telemetry, settings that reset on upgrades, and the overall feeling that my computer is not truly mine.