I began using Linux as my daily driver in 2001. I was 21. I think my story is pretty unique.

I lived in a house with 5 roommates, of which I was the second oldest. The others were 17, 18, 19 and 43. Except for the 43 year old we were basically all friends from Waldorf School (which is a fucking cult disguised as a liberal arts school, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise).

There were only two computers in the house. Mine was the only one with an ethernet card. I got a Cable Modem. No one else thought they needed fast internet.

It was a kind of disaster of a living situation… like the 17 year old was an emancipated minor who was stripping using a fake ID, the 18 year old was a stoner who worked at the local bagel shop and sold weed. The 19 year old was a kid who immigrated from Mexico City when his mom married a American and was into a BUNCH of sketchy shit. SUPER nice kid, but his friends were like, in retrospect, obviously a bunch of gangsters.

Before the 43 year old we had two other roommates. The first was a girl who was 20 who we knew from school, but then she left and went to college out of state. The second was a girl our stripper roommate knew who was ALSO a stripper and had an inoperable brain tumor. Poor girl was 19 years old and was told she had 18 months to live. She quit school, became a stripper and dedicated her life to sex, drugs and partying. She was a complete mess and her friends + the gangster guy’s friends turned our house into an absurd party flat that got the cops called on us (for noise or trash or sketchy people hanging around) like once or twice a month.

(yes… this IS the story of how I became a Linux user, I’m getting there).

So terminally ill stripper girl just disappeared one day. Never came home, never showed up to work, we never heard from her again. We needed to pay rent and we were all poor young people. Gangster guy has a legit job as a dish washer at a Mexican restaurant and he’s like “Hey, this dude who’s a server there needs a place to live.”

Enter the 43 year old who is a TOTAL creep ball (imagine that). Just to cut straight to the chase, one of the first things he does is start regularly fucking 17 year old stripper girl’s 16 (or possibly even 15) year old best friend from middle school, who starts spending the night at our house almost every night (and also ditching school all the time). They don’t just fuck in his room, they fuck all over the house and don’t clean up. Like I had clean up their used condoms and cum tissues from all over the house.

The other thing 43 year old creep ball does is fucking use my computer to download a shit ton of porn while I’m not around. Here’s how we caught him.

Some friends and I are messing with my computer and we notice that… for some goddamn reason… AOL has been installed. Why the FUCK would AOL be there? I have a goddamn cable modem! So my buddy, who’s also a computer nerd and is starting to get into Linux himself and I uninstall AOL and it asks if we want to save local files. When we say yes, it dumps… a bunch of AVI files of the hairiest 90s porn you can imagine onto my desktop and all I can think about is this creep ball who’s used condoms I’m cleaning up sitting in my chair in my room when I’m not there jerking off.

SO… my buddy and I nuke my OS and install Debian. I leave the house and leave the computer logged in leaving a virtual console running.

Creep ball comes in to watch porn on my computer and is faced with the linux terminal. He typed (I’m not kidding)

• dir
• win
• win.exe
• windows
• start windows
• motherfucker!

That’s the 100% true story of how I became a Linux user.

Coming from Windows and DOS originally Linux was the first OS that made me realize that computers actually behave in deterministic ways when you get the ability to look at everything that is going on. And I also realized that given a proper OS you can actually automate most of the common tasks instead of doing the same things over and over again by hand.

The Linuxes are the bestest IDEs ever. They even let you run mini IDEs (vim, vscode, etc) inside them. Coincidentally, they’re also where a lot of server code gets deployed, so they’re a a good place to verify fresh coffee.

I’m sure other platforms have caught up, but when I started out, *nix was the most accessible dev platform I could find.

I use Linux for largely the same reasons I use Lemmy. While I’m still far from strictly using FOSS software, I respect the decentralization and freedom that comes with Linux. I have such a deep admiration and respect for everyday people that create/maintain platforms, as opposed to large companies that seeking to profit off their userbase.

While I have distro hopped a number of times over the past few years, I keep coming back to Pop!_OS. Everything just works right out of the box for me, but still gives me the freedom to tweak my environment however I choose. I love their tiling desktop feature and am anxiously awaiting the release of their new COSMIC desktop.

I made the switch at the start of the year out of curiosity. I had worked for QNX as a student and though that I should have had a better understanding of the system, so I started using WSL for all my programming.

Then joined Lemmy in the summer and that increased my interest in trying it out full time. I was also getting increasingly disappointed with Windows pushing updates for Win11 and features like onedrive.

I’ve been super happy with it so far. I’ve gotten way more familiar with my OS and it’s been such a huge shift in perspective for me to be able to shape the way the OS works to my workflow rather than the inverse.

Windows post 7 was and remains annoying and getting worse all the time. So I wanted an OS without telemetry and one that I could control the updates on. I also work with Linux a lot at work. I use Alma 9 for a LTS release. Don’t have to mess with it much.

Well … I first got into contact with OpenSource due to Gratis: OpenOffice, Firefox etc. Combining my knowledge of OpenSource with my tendency to break stuff (Reinstalling Boston for the nth time) led me to Linux which I first tinkered with and soon fully adapted.

I had a short hopping phase where I went from Ubuntu (my starter) via Debian (accidentally tried stable) to Arch.

Stuck with arch on my personal machines now run Ubuntu for my work machine and Debian for Servers.

My favourite distro is the right tool for the job (see above) but I’m pretty happy with Arch

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.

I quickly fell partly into the Linux and open source rabbit hole.

So far I have tried small amount of distros on VMs, and the only distros I’ve run outside of VM and outside of my IT classes I’ve gone through so far would be Ubuntu on a very crappy laptop, and MX Linux on my current laptop. So far, MX with KDE Plasma 5.x (don’t remember the specific version) is my favorite distro.

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.

It was and still is a few things: Mostly the cool factor. It’s different, does what I tell it (safety be damned lol ).

Security: Mostly sane defaults (like not making the initial user with full admin rights).

In the early days, a major factor was being poorer, constantly rebuilding Frankenstein PCs that would trip Ms activation crap. And with so many used parts, performance was better too.

Excel wouldn’t stop converting sku numbers to date formats. IT guy was excited to share an “easy fix” for that with Open Office…

When I saw his genuine excitement as he described Linux, plus the security it provided I realized, if I ran Linux I’d have the best support in the company. And I did.

I eventually had to move on from Linux at work after 10yrs or so but it’s all I run at home.

All because of Excel and those fucking date codes. Which yes, Open Office solved as advertised.

And yes I know you don’t need Linux for that but it was a long time ago.

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.

Mostly because windows kept bothering me by breaking or changing something every single dn update so I jumped ship and have been pretty happy. Now windows only gets used for certain things I don’t feel like configuring my normal system for.

I don’t care about Linux. I care about freedom. It just so happens that the best free software operating systems are built on Linux, so that’s what I use.

I use GNU Guix System on my desktop, laptop, and server machines. I use LineageOS on my mobile devices, although sometimes I wish I could use Mobian or even Guix System instead. I do have a Pinephone with Mobian but it’s collecting dust and the battery is swollen so I can’t use it anyway. I also have a router running OpenWRT.

I used to use Debian until 2019, Trisquel until 2014, and Ubuntu until 2010. When I was something of a kid I played around with a Knoppix live CD, which was my first taste of GNU/Linux.