My windows 10 install broke itself after running an overnight update. I tried to fix it using the Microsoft tools and stuff I read online and ended up needing to do a fresh install. I couldn’t recover the windows activation key.
At the time I’d been listening to the WAN show talk about their upcoming 30 day linux challenge. So I thought fuck it why wait until that comes out to see if linux is good. I shouldn’t have to re buy a license for an operating system that just killed itself.
And I picked mint. It was an absolutely horrible experience, nothing worked out of the box and I spent at least 5+ hours troubleshooting display, WiFi and drive mounting. I got it to s point where I was happy and I could do what I wanted. Then decided to try out some other distros. Tried endeavour, it was broken out of the box. Tried Ubuntu and realised I do not like gnome. Tried garuda it was ok but ugly and WiFi didnt work. Tried arch… Did NOT know enough to get a nicely working system. Then I tried Manjaro and it had a nice clean KDE plasma setup out of the box everything worked, updates were lighting fast so I stayed on that for a year and loved it.
When the 30 LTT linux video came out I was shocked by how bad their experience was. For me I had a working system minus a few bits of hardware not working and software was pretty easy to install and worked very well. I was also mad that Linus uninstalled his GUI and then blamed linux dude you ran that command without reading it. Thats day 1 shit you learn. You have some responsibility to know your system.
The windows machine was keeping secrets and refusing to do what I tell it
I want to run some code, let’s have a discussion about admin privileges and finding the correct shell app and oh shit “something went wrong”
Linux just doesn’t say no, if I do something wrong it tells me exactly why it was wrong. So I guess visibility is why I jumped
Privacy and Foss philosphy
I don’t have be a programmer to understand the difference between taking one guy’s word who swears about the description of his software than the masses who can verify that ackt-choo-choo-ally being the fucking case.
And if it’s not popular I can put a fucking bounty on a CIA’s jerry slip into and against something that can be good fucking shit.
Learning web development and did not like Apple devices. Didn’t take too long to also start gaming on Linux and abandon Windows completely.
Lots of programming and server use for jobs at work. I spent whole days in WSL (just one window) or putty / cygwin and it was stupid. About that time, since I was using different hosts pretty frequently, I started to learn Vim and it was a gateway drug.
It was maybe 2 weeks into vim I made the switch in the office. When I switched to Linux at work, I switched to Linux at home for consistency (and because I wasnt really gaming at the time so no big deal). At that job I frequently would just remote in from home so it made sense. Once I learned the ropes I switched to arch and dwm and never looked back. I guess I’m an nvim guy now so I’ve evolved a little in 15 years or so.
w10 support ending and w11 being spyware thats also an operating system
I kept disabling features and they kept getting re-enabled by updates.
I installed WSL to run gcc and it bricked my graphics drivers, requiring a full reinstall.
Requiring a microsoft account to access my own computer.
App recommendations (ads) in the start menu.
Maybe there were workarounds for this but I shouldnt have to trouble shoot that kind of stuff for a product that values itself at such a price. I just couldnt feel like an owner of things I have purchased.
I used it for a few things in uni, then a few more, then a few more, and eventually realised that my workflow had become
- Boot windows
- Turn on VM
- Use Linux the whole time
- Shut down
So I decided to cut out the middle-man
Microsoft said they were going to start tracking everything I do, to, you know, help me or something.
Fuck that.
NTFS shat itself on newly bought hard drive, from what I remember in event viewer it said something about filesystem corruption. My steam library of 500+ GBs was gone, as well as my ripped music collection (at least I had that copied to my phone beforehead)
In other instance, a family computer. It was late 2023 and some buggy update happened that made start menu and taskbar unusable. Not clickable at all, couldn’t hide it either. Numeruous throubleshooting attempts later not even update supposed to fix the issue worked. I caved for linux for this PC too
I believe in situations like filesystem corruption you can recreate the filesystem, make sure not to format, and you’ll get back the files that weren’t corrupted. Not 100% certain this works for NTFS tho
I built a new computer at the same time proton was released and was just like ok why not.
I’ve been purging all big tech from my life as much as possible. Meta was easy because they don’t really offer anything. It took quite a while to eliminate google. Once that was done, it was Microsoft’s turn.
I’ve also been absolutely fed up with Windows over the years. Each release somehow gets worse and more clunky and in my way of doing what I’m trying to do. So on top of being untrustworthy, using my data and generally being capitalist assholes, Microsoft’s product itself is shit.
I installed Mint and seen what innovation actually looks like. I also realized most of the things I love about android are actually features of linux under the hood. So I intend to jump on the linux phone bandwagon as well.
I’ve been using Photoshop for over 20 years. That’s been the hardest part. GIMP is impressive but for as long as it’s been around it’s still a little rough around the edges here and there. I’m learning to deal with it though.
I’ve been using Photoshop for over 20 years.
I hear ya. I’m a print designer and the biggest hole is scribus. It is impressive for how good it is in the last few years, but is no where close to where I need it to be for pro work compared to indesign.
But, I think Krita is definitely good enough to do what I need photoshop for… and Krita is better in some ways. Like for illustration work. Krita is better than GIMP for my uses because it has the strong color model functionality that GIMP doesn’t have. Mostly that would be the CMYK functionality. GIMP only exports to CMYK. You can’t work directly in it. You need that for print design.
Interestingly, the biggest problem is the whole “using Photoshop for over 20 years” (30 for me) thing.
After several years so much of what we do with these programs becomes second nature and we don’t have to think about it. Even if the other program is better, it takes a lot to get to that level with a new program. I’m trying to use Krita more and more and I still feel like I am no where close to that goal. albeit… somewhat closer…
While GIMP does have a clunky interface, I think part of that is that we just aren’t as familiar with it as the program we have been using for decades.
I don’t know what you use gimp for, but Krita might be worth a shot. Although I think if you only work in RGB and only do “photo shop” kind of tasks, GIMP may still be better.
+1 for Krita. As another long-time Photoshop user, GIMP leaves me cold, it’s unintuitive and needlessly complicated. Krita is a delight to use.
Mostly because I don’t like gaming on windows and I want things to work without having to tweak every single security feature and all the junk I turned off every single time there’s an update. I’m also tired of MS breaking things with updates and generally using the public as free beta testers to the detriment of their products.
Also, fuck 365.
Windows 95 got a click of death virus and fucked up my drive from freshmen college years. All my photos on my first digital camera too. That day I decided to try Linux.
I installed Gentoo first. Mostly because I’m and idiot.
Soon after I tried red hat but it was uptight. Then I jumped to Mandrake and I kept using mandrake for many years until it died. I tried a bunch of others until I tried Ubuntu. I’m going to stay on Ubuntu until enshitification dictates that I need to change. Moving to Mint soon probably. Ubuntu still feels okay enough to stay but it’s showing signs of enshitification.
A long time ago, there was this misconception that “linux” was terminal-only. You know, like the interface sysadmins and Hollywood hackers use.
A small long-defunct non-tech forum I used to be a member of had a tech sub-forum, and in that sub-forum there was a new post one day introducing “linux” and covering some basics. It was full of DE screenshots (GNOME 2 and KDE 3) specifically to dispel the “terminal-only” misconception.
That was almost ~20 years ago. And the rest is history. I never liked Windows or M$ anyway for both technical and non-technical reasons. So it wasn’t that hard to convince me.
I almost exclusively use the terminal for everything except web browsing now, and don’t use a DE. So you could say that I myself ironically became a perpetuator of the misconception 😉
