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.

r/unixporn got me interested, but the FOSS philosophy is what resonated with me.

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.

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.

There was a ton of software sourcecode posted to the comp.sources.unix usenet 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.

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.

I got sick of windows being an abusive pain in the ass.

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.

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.

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 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.

Well if I remember correctly I was actually first told to use Solaris (Unix) because I knew just a teeny bit of HTML and had done some programming on my TI calculator. I had to use a Sunray workstation and learn ssh and emacs.

My boss took pity on me and bought me a computer (to be paid off with some extra hours). I attempted to install Debian on it, and failed. I tried Ubuntu and it worked (somewhere around 2005ish). It was all downhill from there. I did try some other distributions like arch but by that point I had a laptop and while I technically did get WiFi working and it was fun, I preferred the better out of the box hardware support you got from Ubuntu back in those days.

I’ve stuck when Ubuntu for the most part ever since. Even though the Linux guru at my university called it “Linux for office rats”. I’ve tried some other variants like Mint and while I liked them more eventually I’d have to deal with the fact that the trickier stuff I want to run like CUDA just seems easier to get working. Pre built packages usually target Ubuntu.

I’ve played with alternative window managers like i3 here and there but once again I find it hard to make sure the real basic WiFi/sound/etc works the way I want it to and end up writing my own i3 status scripts or running with some sort of gnome-session thingy.

At the moment by desktop is basically “I don’t care but there are shortcuts for my browser, graphical emacs, and the kitty terminal”.

I’m not an evangelist because let me tell you from experience: your in-laws will not actually thank you for installing a low resource xfce based distribution on their computer. They will be unhappy and you’ll get support calls. They want windows, just free.

But for me personally it’s the most productive environment for what I do. I do not find macOS to be more stable or frankly to be more coherent. I love their font rendering and hidpi support though.

My employer trying to force spyware on our work computers (that was only available for Win and Mac)

I went full Linux over a decade ago, because it was obvious that Windows would become Spyware shit. It all started with Windows 8.

I don’t want any big tech company inside my computer, thanks.