I've told this story on here before, but here it is again: I used to write for a very Windows-centric computer magazine, and after a couple of years I noticed that most of the content I was writing was about how to make Windows behave less like Windows. So I thought I'd give Linux a go, and I haven't looked back since. I've had phases when I tried convincing all my friends to make the switch, but I've realized that it's just not for everyone. I don't think I'm obsessed, I don't customize my desktop much, I just want my system to work smoothly.

I think it was world of warcraft. As a kid I had a very bad computer, so windows (Vista I think ?) Gave me something like 15 fps while Linux+Wine gave me 20. It already felt like wizardry that I had better performance while needing a compatibility layer.

I have also some memories of discovering a new land of freedom. When i plugged a CD from the library, Ubuntu's default music player had a popup "wanna install anti-DRM plugins & make a copy of those tracks?"

I borrowed an installation CD from the local library around 1998. It was RedHat 5.x, and I started messing around with it due to me being interested in alternative operating systems. Before it, I had OS/2 Warp 3.0 in our IBM Pentium 100 MHz family computer which didn't really do it for me to be honest.

It took weeks to get anything working with Linux. I went to the library, borrowing books. In our middle school we had an internet connection, so I utilized it to learn how to configure modelines correctly to get X11 running.

When it did finally run, the default window manager was FVWM95, almost like Windows 95!

I used OSX a few years in the power PC times, just to switch back to Linux around 2008.

Edit: my real love for Linux started when I got Debian running. RedHat didn't have anything comparable to apt those days. You needed to download RPM packages manually with all the dependencies, while apt just worked with one command.

As a young tech trying to get started, Knoppix live CD enabled me to clean viruses and recover data for clients.

After years of using it as a specific tool, I decided to daily drive it when an older machine stopped accepting Windows Updates.

I still run Windows on my big rig, but Debian on everything Else.

Windows 10. When your OS no longer respects your choices and you have to fight it every minute, there is something wrong. The creeping invasions on privacy have only cemented my use of Linux

Truthfully, I'm not sure if I would have ever switched over if Microsoft kept the Windows 7 paradigm. But I started my search for alternatives when Windows 8 - already too adventurous for me - came with the computer I bought.

Towards the end of my time using Windows 10 as my primary OS, the realization that the UI is not an inherent component of the OS sealed the deal. As a Windows 2000 fan, I fell in love with the way Chicago95 Debian replicated the look and stability that I had sorely missed.

It was PHP and Laravel.
I started doing fancier things with websockets, redis, cronjobs etc.
Anything "designed for" laravel hosting wasn't cheap. So, I learned how to get a VM going and set it up for webhosting.
Windows is still my daily driver due to Office, Visual Studio and gaming.
But I have a bunch of VMs and servers, and they are all Debian.
I enjoy Linux, but I haven't gone whole-hog into a desktop environment or whatever. Everything has been CLI based

Curiosity, back around 2010 before I was a teenager. No clue how I heard about it, but the concept of replacing the entire operating system was fascinating. I figured it must be really good if it was such a well kept secret.

A few years later, when I started to learn programming, Linux was the obvious winner. The online course taught C in a Linux environment, and I was amazed that the default Ubuntu build at the time had everything built in, whereas a Windows equivalent required visual studio and licensing adventures.

It really stuck as a daily driver after Windows 7, where a clear trend emerged: Windows got in my way, Linux got out of my way. Simple as.

I watched a video from the linux experiment and thought it looked cool, so I kept watching his videos, and now here I am.

Back in the distant past of 2008, a RuneScape player by the name of Icedpizza thought my complaints about driver problems on older hardware would be easily solved by this incredible thing I'd never heard of called Ubuntu. Downloaded 8.04 Hardy Heron and my life has never been the same since.

I got this incredibly busted hand-me-down that was having issues running windows, so I installed Linux mint on it and then distro hopped until I started daily driving arch on a new machine.

Username and password.

Interesting how there's so many answers here, but no mention of the one I came here for (and I thought would be most popular) : ricing.

I got into Linux when I saw screenshots of all the cool desktops people made with KDE, XFCE, and tiling window managers. Even Gnome looked sleek and minimal. After a while I got bored of ricing but I stayed for the ease of use as a developer

Probably like most people here, I just got more and more fed up with Windows. I tried Ubuntu a few times in the past, but it never really stuck, and at the time Windows wasn’t quite as bad (I quite liked Windows 7 in all honesty). But as time went on with Win10, it kept moving in a direction I didn’t want and I kept trying to customize it to my liking, and an update would just mess a bunch of stuff up and just make the whole experience worst. Recently it started having issues with my multiple monitors, shutdown and sleep/hibernate were basically broken, Bluetooth would randomly stop working, it was just a lot of aggravation.

I’m only a few weeks into my grand Linux adventure, but I’ve got almost all of the functionality that I need from Windows with none of the frustrations, and it’s way faster on top of that. Right now I can’t see myself going back.

I started using foss software for everything, and one day, I realized that all the software I used was available on Linux, so I figured out I could run a foss os as well, and migrating was just straightforward.

I wasn't happy with windows vista's prformance and wanted to try something different. Didn't make the switch permanent for a decade because I needed games in my life but I always ran linux on my laptops when I got them.

It was two decades ago, when someone gave us the CDs of Fedora. It was so very different than Windows XP. I came back to Linux when my school library had Ubuntu on their computer. I'm gonna ask someone to gift me Steam Deck upon graduating from college.

Im not into it yet.

But the answer is windows.

What caused you to get into it

The year was 2002. I was told about Gentoo Linux by a college. I saw it as a new, shiny toy and immediately wanted to try it out. I realized that it was better than Windows, so I stuck with it. (Not with Gentoo, but with Linux. I still use Gentoo sometimes today, but I also tried out many many other distros throughout the time and I don't use Gentoo exclusively nowadays.)

are you an evangel

Yes, I believe that Linux is far superior to Windows and I tell people about it

are you obsessed?

Absolutely

First real terminal contact (except for limited use in macOS) I had working at a company which now uses embedded Linux in their product. After that I got in a situation where I had no computing device with admin rights running anymore. iPhone, iPad, corporate locked windows. Once there was the day I needed admin again, so I went searching and found an old iMac lying around, macOS was barley useable (low spec) and I just managed to create a bootable stick with it. Fast forward 2 years, I now have the old iMac of my dad with better specs running tumbleweed with Gnome, and I love it, with the right extensions, this frontend is very fun to use.

It's really great for my work as a software developer. I used it for more than 10 years for work.

My entertainment PC is not Win11 compatible, so I'm trying to switch to Linux with that one too, but it's giving me a lot of grief.

Self hosting. I was using windows to host teamspeak and game servers. I first got into linux by switching my homelab to linux and running everything in docker containers and VMs. Then from there I started using it on a desktop and laptop as well. Started on manjaro for years. Then went to arch for a year or two. And now I've switched everything over to NixOS.

Curiosity pushed me to try Linux roughly 15 years ago. Today it's simply the best option for me. But I approach it as a user, I don't posses any deep knowledge about how it works.

Curiosity, mostly. And Ubuntu giving away freebies.

Took me a couple years to get out of the "Why change a winning team?" mentality and my baby duck syndrome.

I was massively obsessed with all kinds of computer tech in the late 90s to early 2000s, and read about Linux at some point. I tried a few distros* and enjoyed playing around with them, but a combination of them being a bit rough, and needing to run Windows for games and to support people for my work meant that I couldn't switch.

Over the years I tried out different distros, and even had home servers running before it was cool (obligatory 😎 ), but because I knew Windows inside out, the things that I was trying to do with Linux were much easier for me on Windows.

A few years ago I bought a few older laptops that ran like dogs even under Windows 7, so tried dual booting Mint. The laptops still struggled, so I had to switch my wife's back, but I persevered with mine. I upgraded to new to us refurbished laptops and put Mint on mine again. I also switched our media server to Xubuntu at some point over the last few years.

Windows 10 was getting slower and slower, even though it was a 7th gen i5 with an SSD and 32GB RAM, so I bit the bullet and wiped the Windows partition. I upgraded the RAM and added an SSD to my kid's laptop and did the same. My kid had to have Windows on their desktop because of the problems with Roblox, but the success of the laptops has lead to me dual booting my desktop and trying to switch full time. I've got a batch scanning job to finish under Windows because I can't get the colours to match under Linux, and I've got a few thousand photos to process in Photoshop, and then I'm hoping to switch full time.

I'm not an evangelist by any means, but I do wish that Linux had got to this stage a few years earlier, while I was the go to geek for so many of my friends, because I know loads of people who would have loved using it back then :)

*Hoary Hedgehog as an OS name still makes me laugh :D

Windows update that ruined 3 months of work.

Windows used to break all the time, Microsoft was evil, that Ubuntu thing showed up.

Worked as a computer repair tech forever ago. We ended up with tons of spare parts and abandoned computers. I took a few home and looked for things I could use them for. Quickly found Linux and gave it a shot. It was perfect, I didn’t need to spend $100+ for a copy, there were tons of options, and I could do anything with it. Spent the next 20 years using it on every computer except my main desktop because of games. At one point I was 100% Linux and all I played was WoW using WINE. Now I’m back to 100% Linux thanks to steam and proton making a healthy chunk of my library playable.

Any time someone comes to me with an old computer my recommendation is to throw Linux on it and get a few more years of usefulness out of it.

I'm a primarily Windows systems administrator with about 18 years of Iat field experience.

While I initially played with Linux to get war3 running back in the day of mandrake/mandriva on and off it was only a curiosity.

But during covid with work from home windows became synonymous with work. I couldn't sit and use my personal pc any more without a alert, a message, an email, a system in my tool stack (MSP employee). I couldn't relax.

Then I decided to buy a second ssd and I ran just some Linux, I think popOS. I administrate and use Ubuntu servers at work and in labs a lot, so it was familiar enough to get around and wine had improved a lot. New things like lutris showed me that running overwatch and starcraft2 was possible in a wizard.

Next I learned about proton and the upcoming steam deck and the compatibility modes in steam and except for some yakuza games almost my 400 title library was unlocked in Linux.

You know what doesn't work in Linux? Almost all my systems remote management tools. So now if I boot Linux I'm not working.

I'm not really a Linux advocate. I'm not a Windows advocate. I'm not a mac advocate. Right now I design solutions for companies and while I'm biased I'm tools to tasks minded. The right tool for the job for the workflow, that integrates correctly, and improves productivity and enjoyment of the task.

Linux fits that for my case for personal enjoyment, but can't possibly fit my use case for my job. It allows me to be disconnected and relaxed. It gave my personal pc meaning again in a covid and sometimes post covid world.

I’ve been using Linux off and on again for the past decade.

The original reason I used Linux was because as a kid I got stuck with whatever old laptop was laying around, so my dad would install Ubuntu to make it usable.

When I built my first computer a couple years ago and started using Windows 10, that’s when Windows stopped working for me. Nothing made me want to switch more than when the major Windows 10 updates broke my software every 6 months.

I needed something lighter than windows 7 basic on a cheap network my girlfriend at the time (now wife) bought me when we were in high school. Ended up using Ubuntu 11.10 netbook edition. After spending 5 hours getting my Broadcom wireless card working, I was hooked. Used it until that laptop died and during that time I slowly migrated all of my computers to Linux. Only kept windows on secondary drives or a different partition for the occasional time I need it.

Screenshots of x-plane and other games on the back of the Red hat 5.2 jewel case.

I wanted to update my family PC (technically, but I don't think anyone else apart from me used it). Windows XP licence was too expensive for me as a kid and I found a CD ROM in my library with a FOSS OS advertised on it.

Fast forward to now, and I have been using Linux almost exclusively for 15 years now (some Windows usage needed for work or gaming)

I was in 6th grade and wanted to know more about computers. I thought being a computer programmer would be a cool job one day. I'd heard Linux was difficult to install and use and thought hey, that'll help me learn. So I had my parents get me a copy of Mandrake 6. It was perfect because I had the free time to play with it and figure stuff out by making mistakes and fixing them without the pressure of having to do really important work.

I do preach the good word of FOSS, but only to those who are in a position to appreciate the suggestion and benefit from it.

PiHole and then Minecraft actually all through CLI.

Imagine my shock once I found out about screen and SSH. I didn't need to walk back and forth between my computer and the server.

I didn't touch a GUI for about 4 years.

Curiosity. I was a curious tweenager, and I was already a bit of a geek at the time. I read about Linux in computer magazines at the time, and decided to give one of the free CDs a try - with RedHat 5.2 on it. To be honest, wasn't really impressed with it. I especially disliked having to recompile the kernel, which took ages on those Pentium 3s. But it got me exploring other operating systems, and I found QNX, BeOS and NetBSD. I was really impressed with with QNX and BeOS in particular - Linux felt quite clunky and amateurish in comparison. I especially liked the multimedia performance of BeOS, and the lightweightedness, polish and desktop responsiveness of QNX, which featured a real-time microkernel. QNX felt lightyears ahead of it's competition at the time. My first run into it was a free 1.44MB demo floppy that the company mailed me directly, complete with a full developer manual (which was completely wasted on me as a tween, but I still appreciated it and tried to comprehend bits and pieces). I was already into making custom bootable floppy disks at the time, so I was extremely impressed that they managed to fit in a full fledged GUI desktop, complete with a browser that supported Javascript (along with network drivers and a modem dialer) - all on a 1.44MB floppy disk! Till date I've no idea how they managed that. Even the tiniest of Linux WMs are massive in comparison and look fugly (twm), but QNX's Photon microGUI somehow managed to make it good looking and functional. Maybe it was all coded in Assembly, I don't know, but it was, and still remains, very impressive nonetheless.

I digress, but all this started getting me into exploring POSIX systems and distro/OS hopping. It was only when I experienced SuSE that I fell in love with Linux. Finally, I had a polished Linux desktop, with a full-featured settings/control panel (YaST) that made it easy to use even for a tween like me. And that's when I switched to Linux as my main-ish OS, with Windows relegated to gaming duties. However, I didn't fully get rid of Windows until Windows 7. I was actually impressed with the Windows 7 beta releases and was prepared to buy it at release, but... I wasn't expecting that price tag. I was hoping I'd get a student discount, but it wasn't applicable where I lived (or there was some catch, I don't remember exactly). In any case, I couldn't afford it, and I was really disappointed and angry at Microsoft that they were charging so much for it here, compared to the US pricing. And so, on the release day of Windows 7, I formatted my drive and switched to Linux full time, and never looked back.

Job reason, early on my college, realize on my field I would be working on Linux a lot. I installed one on my laptop to get a head start. It was painful, Not being able to use the usual software, did not help that my university don't even use Linux. I had to keep trying to find workarounds.

Privacy and programming communities. I tried to stay at Windows at first, but when I was bith recommended GNU/Linux for privacy and had to use it for programming, I knew I couldn't keep the resistance up.

Three years later and I have 0 regrets. All games I play work, except for, recently, TF2 because of a weird malloc library issue on Arch-based systems. All apps I need just work, and whenever I need something Windows-only I have a VM setup just for that. Developing and managing your system on a Unix-like system is just so much easier.

Despite being an ECE major, I didn't really bother doing anything with Linux until two things happened at the same time:

1. I started having to work in several different build environments that were just easier to set up in Linux
2. I started running Minecraft servers/doing server modding (starting back in the days of Hey0's server mod and carrying up through Bukkit).

I wouldn't call myself an evangelist at all. If you're doing something that I think will be specifically easier to do in Linux (mostly servers and specific kinds of software development), I'll point out how... but I find that a lot of people's advice on "use Linux and X FOSS tool" ends up being akin to giving someone bike shopping advice on which welding torch to use to construct their bicycle frame.

I switched to Linux for two reasons:

1. I believe that it's always a good idea to support alternatives.
2. I prefer to use products and services that I actually support.

I do still use Windows occasionally because not everything works or at least has an alternative available but Linux is and will probably always be my primary OS. Even if by some miracle Microsoft, Apple or Google actually start listening to their users and make their OS and business models perfect, I would still use an alternative like Linux as my primary because there would be nothing preventing these companies from reverting their decisions.

My boss at the time (I was a writer for a tech magazine) asked me to review FreeBSD. I couldn't get it to install (at all) so someone suggested Linux (Slackware) which was an insane idea at the time around 1995 or 1996. Slackware sort of worked, no sound and I had to do various really annoying things to get it to see my modem (which never really worked). But something about it was interesting and I stuck with it.

I taught myself some shell scripting and unix commands after being gifted an iMac running 10.3. I then decided I wanted to fully immerse myself, so I dual booted that thing with OpenBSD.

The installer back then was pretty barebones; I used a scientific calculator to set up the partitions. After install I was dropped into a root shell and had to recompile the kernel to apply the latest system patches, then set up my user account, sudo, and bootstrap the package installer.

Getting the latest Firefox meant compiling it from scratch, which took about a week. Setting up flash involved configuring a Linux emulation layer. It worked on most sites, but not others.

I began pining for the binary updates, native flash support, and huge package libraries available in Linux, not to mention the cool wobbly window cube that compiz fusion offered, so I made the jump to Linux.

I've switched distros and even switched to other unix-likes, but in the end Linux won for me.

Red Hat Linux was the only viable option for me to use on the AlphaStation I'd just bought off of my former employer, and the rest is history.

Minecraft. I wanted host a dedicated Minecraft server so I rented a VPS and needed a free, lightweight OS. I've been tinkering with Linux ever since.

I love Linux and Windows, I wouldn't trade one for the other.