cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/16098493
Text from original poster:
What caused you to get into it, are you an evangel and are you obsessed?
Microsoft.
Honestly, the Reddit migration. I switched to Lemmy about 6 months ago. A few of the largest communities at that time were Self Hosting and Privacy related. Those naturally lead me to looking into Linux. From there I started minor self hosting on a Pi. Then, after a rather long walk through the Yongsan Electronics Market in Korea I built my own Homelab, and last week, I moved my primary desktop to Pop_OS. Honestly, It’s been a blast. A few learning curves, but the ability to have near complete control over my setup, and the increased self reliance has been delightful.
Interest in alternative operating systems. I’m old so I got into it back when Windows 95 had just come out. Mandrake was my first distro, but I was also weirdly interested in BeOS and OS/2 Warp.
I guess we’re of similar vintage. I’m using Linux now because BeOS never quite made it to being suitable as a daily driver and Warp ultimately died.
There’s also the fact that I’m retired now. There is little to be gained in doing what anyone else is doing, so I might as well do as I please.
Too bad that lesson isn’t learnable at a younger age.
I think many try to some extent, but we don’t exactly leave a lot of room to manoeuvre. Classrooms don’t seem to work without substantial conformity, bills have to be paid, employers catered to, and even just plain social pressure to not stray too far off the beaten path.
r/unixporn got me interested, but the FOSS philosophy is what resonated with me.
There was a ton of software sourcecode posted to the
comp.sources.unixusenet group that I wanted to check out. The problem is all that software was in shar format, and there was no way to extract those files on msdos. I found Yggdrasil Linux on CD at a local software store and decided to check it out. Been using Linux in one form or another ever since.Started using it at a techno-necromancy job I had. Once I realized that you could use it to do things that Windows made needlessly difficult, I was hooked.
I got sick of windows being an abusive pain in the ass.
My first Linux installation was based on curiosity, which was short lived, because Linux (Mandrake) at the time was too challenging.
I moved permanently onto Linux after I could no longer use my SCSI card on Windows 7. I find Linux a joy to use even though I don’t do any programming, and rely on ChatGPT to create scripts.
based on curiosity, which was short lived, because Linux (Mandrake) at the time was too challenging.
Story of my life back in high school. Except it was Slackware, from the back of a magazine.
Wasn’t until I took Operating System Design in university that the whole linux/unix philosophy clicked.
I learned about package managers and updating everything with 1 command/click like I’ve been doing on my phone for a decade. Had a brainblast and thought “this is how computers are supposed to work” and distro hopped for a few months before landing on >!arch!<. Navigating to websites to install things seems so ridiculous now.
Windows Vista on a laptop with 2gb ram :)
Great suggestion by a fellow IT student to try arch, so I learn the system from the ground up.
Vendors don’t always update hardware drivers for other versions of those proprietary operating systems. Linux doesn’t depend on vendors directly for updated drivers. Now I can use my old hardware without being stuck on an old OS version.
I’ve been using Linux on my laptop and work/school computers for a while now, but what made me switch my desktop to Linux was emulator performance. Then I saw the progress Proton had achieved and news of MS putting ads everywhere and I doubled down wiping the windows partition for more disk space.
The stereotypical story actually happened to me.
My parents had the habit of disabling the wifi if I didn’t want to do chores.
So I looked up how to hack the neighbors’ wifi. People online told me it wasn’t possible, unless I installed “Kali Linux”. I tried it and failed. I looked up why and people told me I should start with a beginner distro, lik Ubuntu. So I installed that.
I’ve always been curious, but I was working through The Odin Project earlier this year–it recommended to use Linux. Been using Windows less and less as the year has gone on.
It was free and supposedly better than Windows? 😂
