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Being a geek, I have tried many linux distros (I’ve been using Linux since 1998, on and off). Curiosity was what was driving my usage of it.

In the early 2000s, when I used to write for OSNews.com (second only to Slashdot for OS tech news back then), I really didn’t find any distro polished enough to be a daily driver for me. Red Hat was big at the time, but even when ubuntu came around, it was still not as polished as it is today. These days, I’m using Debian-Testing mostly, however I concede that the best distro for newbies (and for me really, I’m too old now to be tinkering) is Linux Mint (flagship version). Mint really is well-thought out for daily usage. It might not have the latest tech innovation in it, or be bold with its choices, but it just works 99% of the time.

As time has gone by, and seen corporations taking everything for themselves (via enshittification), I have stopped using Linux because it was the geeky/cool thing to do, but I started using it because it frees me from all the spyware, and corporation agendas. Back in the 2000s, when I was a news editor for foss matters, I was mostly siding with the BSD license side of things (and mit/apache/ etc). I felt that the GPL was too restrictive, and that we should allow innovation take its course as it wants to. Now, that I’ve lost all my faith in corporations doing the right (smart) thing, I’m now a GPL3/AGPL type of a gal. The more “restrictively open” something can be, the better. Don’t allow anyone to manipulate you, or use you, or take away your data etc.

It looked different

I switched probably 2010 or 2011. I think I was on windows 7, but it might have been windows vista and I never got to 7.

At some point I had made a realization that software I downloaded from sourceforge (this website has been terrible for a long while now, but I think it was decent way back) was heavily correlated with not being shitty. After making this observation, I was able to generalize it to open source software tends to be less shitty and I had a year or two of experiences afterwards that reinforced my theory, which led me to try experimenting with linux installs.

I started with dual-booting Fedora, I had no idea what I was doing and didn’t like the user experience as much as windows at first. I did a little bit of distro-hopping to see if there was something more appealing to me, but during that time I discovered the free software movement and that resonated with me a lot more than open source had, so I decided I wasn’t interested in going back to windows. Moved to Trisquel (originally an Ubuntu derivative, and fully-free to the point of being FSF-approved) and grew to love it.

After a couple years, I decided I was curious enough to learn more about how the system works, so I moved to Parabola (fully free Arch derivative) to force myself to learn. I really learned barely anything, but I got very good at getting things working by trial-and-error while reading documentation I don’t fully understand. I haven’t progressed very far beyond that point at all in the years since, but I got too comfortable to make a significant change.

In the past five or so years, I’ve to some degree dropped the free software philosophy in favor of a philosophy that the problem runs much deeper (no hope of a successful free software movement in a capitalist society, and software is not even close to the most beneficial consequence of getting past capitalism), and I’ve moved to legit Arch rather than Parabola.

I’ve basically gone ten years without real issues on arch installs, but I still have no idea what I’m doing, I’m just comfortable with it and don’t want to put any effort into a change. I feel like if anyone from the arch forums or anyone knowledgeable in general took five minutes to look at my pc they’d be like wtf are you doing. It’s whatever, it works well enough for me.

I like to tinker and learn how things work, and windows ME blue screened on my one time too many, so I picked up Linux in 1998. Redhat box from compusa, if anyone remembers that place.

And that’s when my life changed; using the skills I taught myself i got well paying jobs as a sysadmin and then as software developer and now I’m an “infrastructure engineer” (I write terraform to manage cloud infrastructure and i do other sysadmin stuff ).

It’s paid off!

Both. I have to use windows at work and I hate it.

I did a little bit of distro hopping: Mint, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Arch, Guix. Now I think I finally arrived at Tumbleweed, no need to hop somewhere else so far.

But I really like the concept behind Guix, it’s just not finished enough.

I did it because it was interesting.

I prefer Linux not for freedom, not for money, not for privacy.

I do it because I’ll be fucking damned if hardware I own is going to generate value for some large faceless corporation. It’s my computer. I paid for it. I’m not going to install Windows so it can send telemetry and show me ads in order to benefit Microsoft’s bottom line.

It’s like owning a car and letting Uber use it for free every once in a while. No thanks, not me.

I switched because I was sick of dealing with corporate garbage and abuse at the hands of Microsoft.

It wasn’t the cost, I’ve always activated my Windows installations with gray-market keys bought on eBay for 5-10 dollars. Plus I’ve paid far more for open source software than I ever did for Windows and their proprietary trash.

I had so many problems with Windows over the years. Fighting with drivers, fighting with software installs, fighting with the registry, etc etc.

I also couldn’t stand how bad their spying was getting, how bloated and clunky their software was, and how much adware they were forcing on me.

I finally vowed about 3 years ago that I would never use Windows again for any of my personal computing, no matter what I had to sacrifice.

Turns out, I didn’t have to really sacrifice anything significant, and I gained far more than I lost. I would never go back to Windows now, especially with what is happening with windows 11.

My main computer runs Nobara, because I use it mostly for gaming. I use KDE Plasma as my DE. Both work fantastic, games run fast and smooth, and everything looks so pretty lol.

I use Mint Debian Edition with Cinnamon on my laptop and it’s awesome too. Almost never have any problems with it.

My work allows me to use Linux, so I run Debian with KDE Plasma. It took a bit of work to get everything running smoothly, but I’m enough of a power user that it wasn’t too bad.

My phone runs GrapheneOS, I’m on it right now typing this. Love it also, so glad to be off a corporate version of Android. GrapheneOS is awesome and does everything I need very well.

I’ve used a ton of different distros. Different strokes for different folks. I’ve used Arch, Fedora, Zorin, Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, Alma, and several others. Some were a fad, some I use for my servers, some I use for home lab testing, etc.

I use it for its elegance mostly.
I can configure it to only contain and show the stuff I actually need and use.
So it feels like an OS that’s for me, while Windows definitely shows someone else designed it with their own motives, which don’t align with mine.

You can hack into Windows quite a bit, too. But it’s clearly not designed for it to be done by end users.
If you want to change a deeper setting, instead of running a short terminal command with all its options documented right in the man page, you’ll have to create a registry key named HFEsghireuHJHFIUEDnfu4835 and assign it the value 3.

I’ve hopped around quite a bit, but keep coming back to Debian and Arch. Arch is the most elegant distro under the hood IMO, and Debian is the most relaxing.

I chose it for development reasons. I kind of fell into a decent career but one I didn’t enjoy and was tied to a specific geographic region. So, I was learning to code and my coworkers who wrote code were using Linux and all our servers were CentOS (or maybe WhiteHat or whatever it was called then). So, I installed Fedora Core 4 — I’m old — and liked it better than Windows. I loved being able to customize everything.

Eventually, I learned the philosophical reasons for open source after I got into it but they matched my personal beliefs so that was no issue.

I used to distro hop frequently and I’ve probably tried all the major distros at least once but after awhile, I began to just stick to Fedora or Ubuntu LTS for servers (and I guess Arch on Steam Deck, Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi, etc.). I like Vanilla Gnome nowadays and when I want to see a new distro, I just check it out in a VM.

I think Chrunchbang (R.I.P.) was my favorite distro when I was all-in on distro hopping and customizing everything. But at some point for a developer, your OS becomes more of a tool for opening an IDE and/or terminal and you value stability over customization or having the very latest software. In the Flatpak era, that’s even more true since you can run the newest versions regardless of the system.

Partly for freedom, partly for free software, partly for tinkering opportunities. I broke some installs before I started thinking of Linux as my daily driver.

I’ve tried Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Puppy (and then Fatdog), Knoppix, Rasbian, Xandros, Damn Small Linux, Tiny Core, Arch and Endeavour, but Mint is my favourite. It’s never failed to just work.

Started using it because I was a nerd, still using it because windows cannot provide anything close to a sway/i3 style of wm.

Also setting up a programming environment is dead easy, just install a package and you can compile your code within 5 minutes of a fresh install.

and also the kernel logs actually make sense and tell me what I need to fix when the system breaks. windows errors are just a goddamn mysterious mess

I first got into Linux because I was a kid with an old hand-me-down laptop that was meant to run Windows 98 but I somehow stuffed Windows XP on there (it had a 4gb HDD and it was filled to the brim, I’m shocked in hindsight that it actually installed). Then I discovered Ubuntu (I think version 6.06?) and installed it, and it ran great! Once I got newer computers I ended up using Windows primarily but usually had a Linux PC kicking around. In college I started dual booting my main machine since Linux proved to be useful for my courses (Computer Science). Then I built a PC and just installed Windows 10 on it, but now that my 7th gen Intel CPU is “too old” to run Windows 11, I said screw it and installed Linux again. Plus I just really like having a bash shell natively, and a proper package manager is really nice.

First experimented when Windows 8 took away Aero Glass and other customizations. Committed when I had to fight with Windows 10’s twice-yearly feature updates that messed with my settings and wasted space with new programs I didn’t ask for. I now keep a separate laptop just to run Windows when I have to.

Distrohopping was mostly confined to my first year using Linux. Deepin (kept crashing) -> UbuntuDDE (went unmaintained) -> Arch Linux -> Debian. Settled on Debian Stable since it just works, I haven’t been using bleeding-edge hardware, and I don’t like things changing around too often (see my Chicago95 rice).