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.

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.

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 😉

I was in college at the time, I went to class, which I needed my laptop for. I believe it was windows 10? I opened the laptop to start my work, and windows immediately, unprompted, without permission, began an update - an update that took longer than the class lasted. This should never happen, and for me it never does on any Linux distribution I’ve used.

I was one of those people who switched during the early Ubuntu days of 2006/2007.

First heard about it and gave it a try in 1995 when a friend told me about it in college. I was/am a graphics artist so it wasn’t an option then. But I knew then that it probably would eventually get there and windows would keep getting more evil and that I would switch. So I started switching from proprietary software solutions to open source whenever possible so that it would be easier to do when the day arrived.

So… in 2006 I was hearing a lot of talk about linux finally being easier to use and setup with a lot of gui functionality. Which is required for graphics work. Although, I had adobe at work and was there most of the week, so I didn’t really care anymore about having that at home. And the stuff I played around with was blender and the like.

I was also getting out of the habit of gaming. I had been really into FPS. Mainly the half-life mod “Day of Defeat” where I was doing the clam competition thing. But I burnt out on it and didn’t really care as much. But I did dual boot for a while with gaming in mind. It was about a year later when I realized that I hadn’t booted into Windows for several months (and I needed the hard drive space) that I scrubbed it.

So here I am.

I still use Ubuntu variations mostly. Although I intend on switching to Devuan. I’ve been experimenting with it on a laptop to get it just the way I want it before switching my desktops. I’m still struggling with btrfs snapshots. I thought I had it recently, then I broke it somehow. I’m still not entirely clear what the whole snapshot thing is doing. But I look forward to getting there soon. I hope to make this my final linux setup for the next decade at least.

I upgraded from 7 to 10 right around when it released. Microsoft got me with the “Free upgrade offer”.
Problem is, I had a very shitty ADSL connection, so when Windows Update started doing its thing, it would make it almost impossible to do anything else on the web.
There were many times I would turn the computer on to do something, only to be unable to load any webpage because Windows Update was eating all my bandwidth.
And to make things worse, Pausing updates, Active Hours and other controls only came out much later, early Win 10 had none of it. When it wanted to update you had basically no control over it. There were some registry hacks to disable updates, but those didn’t really stick for some reason, so many times I applied one and thought the issue was fixed for good only to come back to my PC days later and face the same issue again.

Eventually I was like “Why the hell do I have to keep fighting my computer?”. You can imagine the shock it was coming from Win 7.
I had tried Linux before all of this (Ubuntu 14.04) and while I did enjoy the experience I didn’t stick with it, but I kept the idea in the back of my mind.
Some time later I setup a dual-boot, and year after year I relied less on Windows (and Linux kept getting better) until Linux became my daily driver. Fast forward to today: Windows isn’t even a dual-boot install anymore, just a VM I barely use :)

I had dabbled with Linux over the years, starting with Lubuntu reviving an old Dell 120L during college. When I moved to university they gave us all Macbooks to work with in the IT department. OS X never clicked with me, so I set up a VM with Linux to perform my day to day work. I instantly became the Linux guy because of that… so any tickets that came in for Linux troubleshooting got routed to me.

It just sort of made sense to try a Linux build after that, since I couldn’t afford a Windows license after I lost access to MSDN.

because windows removed focus stealing prevention

I updated to 11, didn’t like it. Switched to Pop, and then switched to arch couple weeks later.

…because I didn’t want to be a victim of the tech industry anymore.

Privacy and Foss philosphy

I first discovered Linux in middle/highschool back when Ubuntu was the hot shit and they had that awesome Gnome 2 desktop. I loved the vibes, but didn’t stick with it because I didn’t know what to do. Then just over the years I’d occasionally install it for a few days and give it a shot, learning more and more, even installing Arch Linux once (back when it was actually a challenge).

Switching to Linux was inevitable for me, I think. As the years rolled on, Windows got worse and worse while my understanding/confidence with Linux got better and better. I don’t remember what the final thing was that convinced me to finally go 100% Linux on all my devices, but I did around ~2017 or 2018 with zero regrets.

So I think that if there’s a path for people to learn Linux at a comfortable pace, without the trauma of going all in, they’ll also find it impossible to resist. The dynamic of Windows becoming worse while Linux becomes better is still holding strong.

I hated windows 95/98, it broke all the time. The dudes in the doom community in IRC were like hey Linux is cool, try that. Never looked back. From what I hear from my friends and family, windows still sucks all the time.

I grew up with my brother throwing used computer parts on my bed whenever he upgraded something, in case I wanted to reuse them. He also gave me a copy of Windows 98, and later XP that I reused every time I did a major hw upgrade. But one day the XP CD-rom was just too old, but I was too young to start working and had no money, and so Linux came into my life.

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.