tl;dr: if you think this is too long, don’t read it.

near the end of 2004 i was given a computer that cost $100 at a garage sale. it had windows xp installed but it was not activated. i had also just gotten out of jail for amateur botany (growing weed) and was on probation. there were strict rules with probation and commiting any illegal act would have meant far worse sentences if i were caught. since i could not afford a windows key and did not wish to illegally pirate one as that put me at risk of prison (at least, in my head it did but this was unlikely) i looked for alternatives to windows. that led me to linux.

i should add that my memory of this time is not the best and any or all of this could be absurdly wrong but it’s how i remember it, however incorrect that may be. my brain’s memory does not work right.

at the time my only access to the internet was one hour at a time per day, through the local library. it was there that i tried to download linux onto a flash drive. i thought it could be installed like any regular windows program. i don’t think there were linux distros that even had USB installation support back then, although that might have been a motherboard limitation. i used a 1gb flash drive and saved a .txt file to the drive which i had copied and pasted man pages into, like ‘man man’ among others.

i don’t know what it was i downloaded for sure anymore but i believe it was a linux kernel, as in just the linux kernel source code. no DE or bootloader or anything else, i think it was a .tar.gz of source code in text files but i never figured out what to do with them. i didn’t understand what a .tar.gz file was until years later. i believed they were linux somehow, that’s all i understand. needless to say, i failed in my endeavor and that $100 computer ultimately became an oversized media player, forever in ‘you need to activate this copy of windows’ mode.

fast forward to 2009. i had completed my probation and finally was a rehabilitated citizen. i had established friendships with more tech savvy people than myself (but still not very tech savvy, they just played WoW a lot) and with their help, i built a computer from a tigerdirect barebones kit. one of my coworkers installed a copy of windows xp on it that did not need activation. i doubt it was a legitimate version but i was still too ignorant to care. i was reminded of linux at some point and to show off my newfound knowledge of computers, i decided to upgrade my system to a dual boot of windows 7 (courtesy of a local college) and linux mint. it was successful but i had also made friends with several gamers by then. linux gaming was fairly nonexistant at the time. i did log into the mint installation occasionally but i never did much with it and none of it involved the command line. i soon forgot about it entirely.

i built my second computer in 2012 and upgraded to windows 10, for free because i had started classes for computer science. i quickly learned that where i lived, IT jobs were non-existant unless you had military base security clearance, which was impossible for me due to my previous life of criminal gardening. i gamed heavily instead of attending classes and soon dropped out entirely. i spent a few years drinking heavily in a haze of depression. i quit drinking in 2016 and worked a minimum wage job a few years in a haze of depression.

by 2019 i had saved up enough to upgrade my computer. in the upgrade process i changed enough parts to trigger windows to believe i had an entirely new computer and it demanded i purchase a new copy of windows. i’ve learned since that there were ways around that and that i probably did not need to buy windows again but thanks to that and to my cheap, frugal nature, i decided to revisit linux once again. i installed linux mint. two days later my apartment was hit by 2 tornados, frying my power supply and bricking two of my three harddrives. one was a data drive with all my important personal files and the other drive had mint on it. i was left with a plain install of windows. this is when i learned how important backups are. it took me until nearly the end of the year to be able to afford a new power supply. early 2020 i spent a lot of time trying to recover accounts. because my landlord is a slumlord i was fixing a lot of my apartment as well.

in march of 2020 my mom gifted me my first smartphone. it was an android phone which reminded me of my linux journeys in days of old. i bought an SSD and a couple flash drives with a tax return. i started downloading distros while also downloading all the apps in the google play store. i rather quickly acquired malware on the phone which in turn spread to windows i think. within a couple days time, the pandemic lockdowns began, i became unemployed, my internet was shut off, my phone wouldn’t work and all i had was a flash drive with a few iso files of 64 and 32 bit linux distros. without internet, i had to rely on man pages to learn things. i couldn’t download anything. i couldn’t search the internet for help. i had lost my drivers license back in 2004 and while i had gotten it back, i had not been able to afford a car so i couldn’t drive to friends houses or the library for help. it was not a pleasant experience. there is no direction to the man pages. if i didn’t know something, i probably didn’t learn it. it did not help that i had an nvidia gpu.

i’ve been mostly using manjaro kde with moderate success since winter of 2021. i tinkered with a few other distros and made all the rookie mistakes. i really enjoyed puppy linux and always have a version or three on a flash drive and play with it from time to time. i’ve learned a lot and unlearned some bad behaviours. i quit videogames entirely as well as tv and movies, so i could focus more on learning. i still barely know what i’m doing and i make mistakes often. they aren’t critical mistakes at least now and i have a backup system that’s almost good enough.

last year it was determined that i am developmentally disabled. my memory, meaning the kind in carbon not silicon, doesn’t like to work properly. i tend to use repetition to force it into long term memory. numbers don’t process well either but i’m not counting that. the previous sentence should demonstrate that my sense of humor is also probably affected.

this became far longer than i expected. my linux journey has not been conventional. it has not been positive until recently but mostly due to my own mistakes and ignorance. if i could change something, i would have asked people for help more. i hope you enjoyed reading it and thank you for your time. have a nice day.

In a nutshell,

Zorin > Ubuntu > Debian > Arch, while (always) pestering google about trivial stuff, “How do I install something on Linux?” – “Oh look! A package manager! Which package manager is the best?” – “Distros have their specific packages? Cool!”, etc.

I guess it all depends on perspective.

I love that it’s free compared to those $10-20k licenses for similar systems.

I love that there are good package managers.

I love that it’s open source.

I hate that it’s GPLv2.

I hate how bloated the kernel is. I’d like it to fit into main memory.

I hate how it’s not POSIX-certified.

What’s this? A software app store? Swell! I no longer need to download stuff off from dodgy sites or numbingly installing everything manually!

In what year are you in? macOS and Windows both have App Stores. Windows has the built-in winget package manager, similar to apt that has open contributions on github and all the software in the word.

How was your experience with this Unix-like wonder? In a home user manner and/or a business use manner?

I use both Linux and Windows actively and macOS from time to time. Linux works really well it’s free and I love it and it is definitely great if your workflow is all browser-based and/or you don’t have to collaborate on a very specific industry with very proprietary tools as default that everyone expect to be used. If you’re in such industries and people expect to share complex MS Word, Excel, Adobe, Autodek etc. files then Linux isn’t for you, you’ll be in more compatibility pain than anyone should be in.

I’m on Guix, so you tell me…

Hint: I can barely write any decent Scheme.

I started on Ubuntu if I recall correctly, then made the jump to Fedora at some point. I think Manjaro was in there too? That was my first exposure to KDE Plasma

At some point I installed Arch in a VM and then I was hooked. These days I daily drive Arch with Hyprland (apps and whatnot provided by Plasma)

• What’s this? A software app store? Swell! I no longer need to download stuff off from dodgy sites or numbingly installing everything manually!

Ayyyy! Some recognition! Some people install linux and ask “where do I get apps from?”, you show them the “store” and they go “wow, that’s so complicated”. That’s when I question how they manage to survive in this digital world.

Keep on fraggin’!

Anti Commercial-AI license

I’ve used Linux for decades but not for desktop usage. I work with Linux every day.

I recently purchased a high end workstation to act as a hypervisor for multiple desktop systems. The plan was to boot into a Linux system and then from there load up one of many desktop OS and work seamlessly within a VM. This has worked well on a Windows host with VMWare Workstation and allows me as a contractor to have separation of configuration between customers.

However I found Linux desktop to have too many glitches. From failed package installs, multiple monitor problems and some special keys being sent to both VM and host. I also found the user interface of some apps to be bad, which I can look past but with the other fundamental issues it added a bad taste to the experience. I really want it to work and I do go back every now and then to try again.

I use Linux servers on my job and I did a ton of research. I felt confident in moving from Windows to Linux and for the most part it went very well. Most distributions provide a live environment is the installer is extremely easy.

I had a ton of small little problems with Nvidia, Wayland, audio… I ended up fixing most of them, or at least apply some workarounds but it was a painful experience.

Gaming works really really really well, which I found surprising.

Linux has been the biggest rabbit hole I’ve been in. There are too many distribution for me to choose one without testing as much as I can. It made me change what I wanted/needed. I went from “I don’t want to use CLI at all” to “man, GUI is too slow for that”.

I tried many Debian children and grand children distributions, Fedora based ones (Nobara, atomics bases,…), Opensuse, NixOS, Solus, arch based distributions…

Now, I’m on cachyOS, that seems to be the good balance I need (for now), between GUI/already configured and “I can do it the way I want”.

One year after starting using Linux, I’ve switched from a 3060ti to a 6700xt, just because it made hopping easier.

If you exclude me not being able to settle down on a distro, Linux is a funny experience to me. My needs are not that big, as I just play some games, have a light need of an office suite. I can do anything I used to to in windows, but without Microsoft and his friends looking above my shoulder.

Linux is my primary OS. I have no experience with Windows. Therefore, I cannot compare Linux and BSD systems with Windows. When I started using Linux, it wasn’t very functional, but I didn’t want to pay money for something as glitchy as Windows was in 1998. But for my needs at the time, Linux was sufficient. The PC usage pattern in 1998 was a bit different from today’s PC usage pattern. Mail, primitive messenger (IRC), primitive games. Torturous WEB. I’m back in the days when an html page would load within a couple minutes and I didn’t consider that unusual. I remember times when I would spend all night downloading a 5 megabyte package. The Internet connection would glitch and break and the price of the connection was no fun for anyone. Then FreeBSD 5 came out, and after the glitches of Linux it was pure bliss. I even considered switching to this system completely, but unfortunately FreeBSD quickly began to lag behind the capabilities of desktop PCs and I had to abandon this idea. I could tell IT tales for a long time, but I will say that Linux became a digestible OS relatively recently, around 2015. I currently use OpenBSD and Fedora. I’m happy with all of them.

Every year I upgrade to something better and found the past distros very disgusting.

6/2021: Ubuntu, Debian, Mint (for ~15 minutes), Kali Linux 2022: Ubuntu, Lubuntu, RHEL, Fedora (for some days), Arch 2023: Artix (for some days), Gentoo, Alpine (Alpine is the best distro I’ve ever seen), switched to OpenBSD in the end of the year!

2024: OpenBSD. Have a machine running FreeBSD but currently unplugged and haven’t learned anything from FreeBSD.

OpenBSD is so simple and I started reading man pages when I use it. I’m starting to learn tmux. Started to learn sed. Started writing some shell scripts. I can confirm I wasted time using all the distros above except Alpine. Except when I compile the linux kernel on Gentoo. I switched to OpenBSD without any problem. I quickly forgot the /dev/sda1 and learned disklabel. Not using vim without any problem, and I learned how to use vi efficiently.

OpenBSD is not too hard for any “newbies” that can read English. They can type “help” and it will open help(1). When they have read help(1) they will read afterboot(8). afterboot(8) is just comprehensive. It’s a pity that package management is about the end of this man page, but package management is just simple: pkg_add and pkg_delete package-name. They may read pkg_add(1) and pkg_delete(1) when they want to upgrade.

Default X11 window manager is fvwm. xterm is launched when X is started. You can move windows with mouse. Minimized windows also appear on the grey screen. But you have to double click much. This is usable. cwm is also available when you want a wm that can be used with a keyboard. It is much efficient.

2025: plan 9 ???

AMD GPU just works, no fussing about, get straight to fragging on Xonotic and Counter Strike

Unless you have a monitor that requires HDMI 2.1 to get full resolution/refresh. Then it only works partially.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Linux, and I’ve been using it on my desktops/laptops for almost 30 years at this point.

But there are still issues to deal with on a regular basis, same as Windows or OSX.