I’m curious—what’s been your best interaction with Linux? Whether it’s a specific distro, a killer feature, or just a moment when Linux impressed you, I’d love to hear your stories!
Which Linux distro were you using?
What feature or aspect made the experience stand out?
Did it change the way you use Linux or tech in general?
Looking forward to your responses!
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My story is a simple one.
I turned on my computer I logged in, did some work, played some games then I turned it off.
No one tried to murder me (force updates), or put me in a potato (notification ads), or feed me to birds (change my defaults). I had a pretty good life.
The speed of transcoding video using FFMPEG on a non-GUI installation of Debian, on an old small-form-factor PC - 2nd-generation i7, 16GB ram, 240GB SSD.
is this irony?
When I fully switched 2 years ago, I thought I’d try doing all my gaming in Linux and was really anxious wondering which and how many games I wouldn’t be able to play. Imagine my surprise when all of them ran. I haven’t found a single game I couldn’t get running. Hell, I even beat one I couldn’t get running in Windows! That being said there’s a bug preventing VR from working that I’m a little sad about. Apparently Steam only supports Ubuntu, I use Endeavour.
I’ve just bought a custom PC.
Impossible to make the darn network card to work on that Windows.
I installed Void from the Network…
I “lol” 'ed big time on that one.
Build it yourself next time. It’s not difficult.
Did my PhD on a like $500 Linux box 20something years ago. My lab was dysfunctional and I was a WFH pioneer of sorts.
It’s been my daily driver for 26 years. 40 years or so if you include Unix before.
I worked tech support for a software company. In the summers things were slow and they allowed a little leeway for working on personal enrichment projects.
I was aware of a room near IT that was filled with outdated computers and hardware. I asked if I could play with them. A few 100 hour weeks later and a coworker and I held a demonstration for IT and management. We proposed using all the old hardware as PXE boot thin clients (8GB RAM + Small HD + PXE NIC) using a modified Debian that would run all the tech support agent software via Citrix. It went off without a hitch in the demo setup.
Management loved it as they could see the cost savings. IT loved it as they’d get another ProLiant Server to house the Citrix and VMWare tooling. It also meant significantly less time dealing with Windows issues on all the agent machines. Ended up rolling it out to 50 agents that year and it was a success. They eventually moved to HP Thin clients, which built on the original idea.
For a lowly tier 2 tech support agent with a passing knowledge of linux, it was a proud achievement and got me noticed in the company.
Project 2.0 was an Asterix box. We were spending a ridiculous amount of money on international calls. Was able to route all the international calls in the office with logic routing on the primary Tadiran PBX (which ran OS2/Warp…lol) to a little Dell workstation with a Digium telephony card and FreePBX. Costing actual pennies on the dollar. It was like magic!
Linux was the wild west back then.
It makes me feel like I own my PC.
Bend to my will, silicon golem, for I am root!
Installing Fedora Cinammon on my 81-year-old Grandma’s PC and her having no problem using it.
Everything. Software, usability, customization, community, you name it. Using Linux has advanced and keeps advancing my computer literacy skills. This would have never happened if I kept using Windows. There’s also the “activist” angle. By using Linux and other FOSS software, I feel like I’m disengaging the worst parts of modern life and society and taking power away from the corpos even if it doesn’t have huge impact.
When I can just work on my thing and the OS is invisible
Right now.
I’m running Dietpi (Which is pretty much a “tweaked” debian) on my orange pi 5 max and arch linux on my x86_64 pc. Both are bare metal installations, so the “killer feature” is, er… whatever I want, pretty much. I also have a orange pi zero 3 running dietpi serving me nextdns under docker… and another orange pi zero 3 serving as my “Theres a blackout going on in town and all I have to do is to play retropie” pc.
It’s all been good, since I gave up on NeXTSTEP around '97, but it got next level best with rolling distributions. Arch has been game changing. I’d used Redhat, CentOS, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, Gobo - all for one or more years - but until Arch I never felt I’d really escaped dependency hell. I still occasionally will have a hiccup, but it’s more like a dependency heck, not something that turned into something that consumed an entire day to resolve. And it’s the only distribution that hasn’t (yet, knock on wood) screwed up grub so that my machine wouldn’t boot. I’ve screwed it up, by e.g. migrating SD’s and getting the UUIDs wrong, but never has the upgrade process screwed me over.
Finding out that it’s nowhere near as difficult as I supposed and is amazingly flexible. This is in 2004 when compiling drivers (kernel modules) for display and Wi-Fi was a normal thing for my laptop.
