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.

Privacy and Foss philosphy

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.

Learning web development and did not like Apple devices. Didn’t take too long to also start gaming on Linux and abandon Windows completely.

w10 support ending and w11 being spyware thats also an operating system

Lots of programming and server use for jobs at work. I spent whole days in WSL (just one window) or putty / cygwin and it was stupid. About that time, since I was using different hosts pretty frequently, I started to learn Vim and it was a gateway drug.

It was maybe 2 weeks into vim I made the switch in the office. When I switched to Linux at work, I switched to Linux at home for consistency (and because I wasnt really gaming at the time so no big deal). At that job I frequently would just remote in from home so it made sense. Once I learned the ropes I switched to arch and dwm and never looked back. I guess I’m an nvim guy now so I’ve evolved a little in 15 years or so.

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 used it for a few things in uni, then a few more, then a few more, and eventually realised that my workflow had become

• Boot windows
• Turn on VM
• Use Linux the whole time
• Shut down

So I decided to cut out the middle-man

Mostly because I don’t like gaming on windows and I want things to work without having to tweak every single security feature and all the junk I turned off every single time there’s an update. I’m also tired of MS breaking things with updates and generally using the public as free beta testers to the detriment of their products.

Also, fuck 365.

Microsoft said they were going to start tracking everything I do, to, you know, help me or something.

Fuck that.

NTFS shat itself on newly bought hard drive, from what I remember in event viewer it said something about filesystem corruption. My steam library of 500+ GBs was gone, as well as my ripped music collection (at least I had that copied to my phone beforehead)

In other instance, a family computer. It was late 2023 and some buggy update happened that made start menu and taskbar unusable. Not clickable at all, couldn’t hide it either. Numeruous throubleshooting attempts later not even update supposed to fix the issue worked. I caved for linux for this PC too

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

A little over a decade back, I had a laptop that came with Windows 8 but didn’t actually meet the specs for it. I installed Ubuntu back then to get the thing to run reliably, and it performed really well that way.

On my home computers I kept using Windows, but with the trend toward less ability to control your system, more ads and AI nonsense being baked in, and just general bloat, when they announced the end of life for Win 10, I decided I’d switch to dual booting Linux Mint at the start of the summer. (I’m a teacher, and it seemed like the best time was when I could deal with my computer being on the fritz for a while if I messed it up.)

I set it up as dual boot because I figured here and there I’d still need to go back to Windows for some specific reason or other but that was back in early July and I’ve yet to encounter a reason why I really need Windows, so I genuinely haven’t booted to Windows even once since the time I originally setup the dual boot and made sure it was working.

Honestly, so much of what we do these days takes place in browser windows that it barely feels different, other than it runs a little smoother and I occasionally have to run an old windows app through Lutris. (Had it installed anyway for games from GOG, and it turns out it works just as well for non-gaming apps.)

because windows removed focus stealing prevention

Windows 95 got a click of death virus and fucked up my drive from freshmen college years. All my photos on my first digital camera too. That day I decided to try Linux.

I installed Gentoo first. Mostly because I’m and idiot.

Soon after I tried red hat but it was uptight. Then I jumped to Mandrake and I kept using mandrake for many years until it died. I tried a bunch of others until I tried Ubuntu. I’m going to stay on Ubuntu until enshitification dictates that I need to change. Moving to Mint soon probably. Ubuntu still feels okay enough to stay but it’s showing signs of enshitification.