Windows.

I installed Linux and the feeling of freedom and privacy hit me so hard that I immediately began committing crimes, knowing that the FBI could never track me. Piracy, sexual assault, trademark infringement, petty larceny, tax fraud, you name it. I also own several fully automatic firearms even though I live in the state of California, but it doesn’t matter. Ever since I removed Windows 10 from my computer and replaced it with Arch Linux, and began using a PinePhone as my daily driver phone, police can’t even stop me in traffic. Windows may have a lot of video games, but the benefits of Linux should not be understated.

I was on windows and I was forced to update and then it bricked my computer and I had to reinstall windows except when I did it asked me for a windows license key. I tried everything to recover my license key but wasn’t able to.

This was around the time linus texh tips was teasing his upcoming month on linux series so I was like fuck it I’ll give it a go. Spent a week on mint and wifi was broken then tried Endeavor, Garuda and fedora and settled on manjaro. Manjaro was amazing to me. Everything worked out of the box and kde plasma looked so clean and I could set it up exactly how I wanted.

Then I watched linus tech tips video on linux and I was like wtf how did he have such a bad experience is he dumb?

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I was fucking around with my windows pc.

And then i found out that you can fuck more around in linux, and that was the story of my first ubuntu iso burned on a cd.

I had no clue about anything but was blown away by something “different”

Windows kept doing things I didn’t want it to.

The last straw was when I had a 24 hours render running, and Windows decided to update and reboot 1 hour before it was done. I was using the computer at the time, RAM, CPU, and GPU were all at max, the mouse was being moved, I clicked “later” every time the update pop-up appeared, and it still rebooted.

Linux does what I tell it to, and doesn’t do what I tell it not to do. I didn’t think that was a big ask until Windows.

I joined the Fediverse and it seemed like everyone was using it!

I’m unable to fully convert at the moment, but boot it up every so often to experiment.

Windows Telemetry at first. Then Windows browbeating various products - “Edge please download Firefox” - Edge: “Why, I am better than Firefox” Me:“Do as I say” Edge: “But -blah blah nah” and so on. I know there are ways around it, but if someone can force an update against my will on my machine, it is not my machine. This leads to questions of what else can they do without my permission. Linux is my machine. I control when and how and what. Also customization.

Microsoft anti-consumer shitfuckery. I’ve never had any problems with Windows on a technical level. It has its share of annoyances, but so does Linux. But the ever increasing drive to take away control from the user in order to squeeze out the last penny of revenue just got too much.

Windows 10/11 happened.

I use Linux for about 2 years

Up until February this year, I was still using a 14 year old DDR2 desktop. Windows 10 started to get quite slow and had some annoying crashes (mainly the fault of my goofy old hardware, of course)

I learned about Linux as an alternative through a Linux Tech Tips video about gaming on Linux, and Valve’s announcement of the Steam Deck, I was also interested in FOSS apps as alternative to proprietary ones.

Decided to try Linux Mint. With no prior experience with Linux, lack of luck finding good tutorials, and some weird thing happening with my games not launching, I had a very rough start.

But thanks to Mint, suddenly my DDR2 desktop got a lot smoother :D also, all of my drivers worked out of the box, and I got very surprised with Linux’s plug-and-play hardware capabilities.

So I decided to learn how to use it, tinkered alot with my system, and broken it alot! It was kind of frustrating, but fun at same time.

And without noticing, I had already learned lots about Linux from a more technical, and then, philosophical point of view.

Now I’m a great fan of Linux and FOSS, and have been helping friends to move to it by giving support with issues I had in the past.

Windows 95 crashing for the 5th time that day corrupting another high school paper.

I knew nothing about Linux, but bought a red hat 6 cd and installed it. I never dual booted or ever went back.

This was in the day of getting a modem that actually worked on Linux was a PITA as everything had turned into software based winmodems. And it wasn’t like you could just order one online. You had better have hoped Best Buy/circuit city/compusa had something.

The Foss philosophy and being poor

I was learning C/C++ back then and although the nostalgia is strong with this one, Turbo C++ was obviously shit (and Borland quickly killed it later anyway), and while looking around for alternatives I found DJGPP which introduced me to the GNU toolchain and so the jump to Linux to have all of that natively instead of running on DOS was very natural. My very first distro was Redhat Linux 6.2 that I got as a free CD along with a magazine (also got a Corel Linux CD the same way that I was excited about given how their WordPerfect was all the rage back then but I was never able to install it, I don’t remember what the issue was) and it looked like this (screenshot from https://everythinglinux.org/redhat62/index.html ):

For me it was all the frustration I had trying to disable Win11 telemetry and other non-essential distruptive things like adds in the start menu.

Switched to Debian with GNOME. I have been super happy ever since. Seamless transition and awesome experience using a OS that is not adversarial.