I began using Linux as my daily driver in 2001. I was 21. I think my story is pretty unique.

I lived in a house with 5 roommates, of which I was the second oldest. The others were 17, 18, 19 and 43. Except for the 43 year old we were basically all friends from Waldorf School (which is a fucking cult disguised as a liberal arts school, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise).

There were only two computers in the house. Mine was the only one with an ethernet card. I got a Cable Modem. No one else thought they needed fast internet.

It was a kind of disaster of a living situation… like the 17 year old was an emancipated minor who was stripping using a fake ID, the 18 year old was a stoner who worked at the local bagel shop and sold weed. The 19 year old was a kid who immigrated from Mexico City when his mom married a American and was into a BUNCH of sketchy shit. SUPER nice kid, but his friends were like, in retrospect, obviously a bunch of gangsters.

Before the 43 year old we had two other roommates. The first was a girl who was 20 who we knew from school, but then she left and went to college out of state. The second was a girl our stripper roommate knew who was ALSO a stripper and had an inoperable brain tumor. Poor girl was 19 years old and was told she had 18 months to live. She quit school, became a stripper and dedicated her life to sex, drugs and partying. She was a complete mess and her friends + the gangster guy’s friends turned our house into an absurd party flat that got the cops called on us (for noise or trash or sketchy people hanging around) like once or twice a month.

(yes… this IS the story of how I became a Linux user, I’m getting there).

So terminally ill stripper girl just disappeared one day. Never came home, never showed up to work, we never heard from her again. We needed to pay rent and we were all poor young people. Gangster guy has a legit job as a dish washer at a Mexican restaurant and he’s like “Hey, this dude who’s a server there needs a place to live.”

Enter the 43 year old who is a TOTAL creep ball (imagine that). Just to cut straight to the chase, one of the first things he does is start regularly fucking 17 year old stripper girl’s 16 (or possibly even 15) year old best friend from middle school, who starts spending the night at our house almost every night (and also ditching school all the time). They don’t just fuck in his room, they fuck all over the house and don’t clean up. Like I had clean up their used condoms and cum tissues from all over the house.

The other thing 43 year old creep ball does is fucking use my computer to download a shit ton of porn while I’m not around. Here’s how we caught him.

Some friends and I are messing with my computer and we notice that… for some goddamn reason… AOL has been installed. Why the FUCK would AOL be there? I have a goddamn cable modem! So my buddy, who’s also a computer nerd and is starting to get into Linux himself and I uninstall AOL and it asks if we want to save local files. When we say yes, it dumps… a bunch of AVI files of the hairiest 90s porn you can imagine onto my desktop and all I can think about is this creep ball who’s used condoms I’m cleaning up sitting in my chair in my room when I’m not there jerking off.

SO… my buddy and I nuke my OS and install Debian. I leave the house and leave the computer logged in leaving a virtual console running.

Creep ball comes in to watch porn on my computer and is faced with the linux terminal. He typed (I’m not kidding)

• dir
• win
• win.exe
• windows
• start windows
• motherfucker!

That’s the 100% true story of how I became a Linux user.

I chose it for development reasons. I kind of fell into a decent career but one I didn’t enjoy and was tied to a specific geographic region. So, I was learning to code and my coworkers who wrote code were using Linux and all our servers were CentOS (or maybe WhiteHat or whatever it was called then). So, I installed Fedora Core 4 — I’m old — and liked it better than Windows. I loved being able to customize everything.

Eventually, I learned the philosophical reasons for open source after I got into it but they matched my personal beliefs so that was no issue.

I used to distro hop frequently and I’ve probably tried all the major distros at least once but after awhile, I began to just stick to Fedora or Ubuntu LTS for servers (and I guess Arch on Steam Deck, Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi, etc.). I like Vanilla Gnome nowadays and when I want to see a new distro, I just check it out in a VM.

I think Chrunchbang (R.I.P.) was my favorite distro when I was all-in on distro hopping and customizing everything. But at some point for a developer, your OS becomes more of a tool for opening an IDE and/or terminal and you value stability over customization or having the very latest software. In the Flatpak era, that’s even more true since you can run the newest versions regardless of the system.

I quickly fell partly into the Linux and open source rabbit hole.

So far I have tried small amount of distros on VMs, and the only distros I’ve run outside of VM and outside of my IT classes I’ve gone through so far would be Ubuntu on a very crappy laptop, and MX Linux on my current laptop. So far, MX with KDE Plasma 5.x (don’t remember the specific version) is my favorite distro.

Partly for freedom, partly for free software, partly for tinkering opportunities. I broke some installs before I started thinking of Linux as my daily driver.

I’ve tried Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Puppy (and then Fatdog), Knoppix, Rasbian, Xandros, Damn Small Linux, Tiny Core, Arch and Endeavour, but Mint is my favourite. It’s never failed to just work.

It was and still is a few things: Mostly the cool factor. It’s different, does what I tell it (safety be damned lol ).

Security: Mostly sane defaults (like not making the initial user with full admin rights).

In the early days, a major factor was being poorer, constantly rebuilding Frankenstein PCs that would trip Ms activation crap. And with so many used parts, performance was better too.

Mostly because windows kept bothering me by breaking or changing something every single dn update so I jumped ship and have been pretty happy. Now windows only gets used for certain things I don’t feel like configuring my normal system for.

I first got into Linux because I was a kid with an old hand-me-down laptop that was meant to run Windows 98 but I somehow stuffed Windows XP on there (it had a 4gb HDD and it was filled to the brim, I’m shocked in hindsight that it actually installed). Then I discovered Ubuntu (I think version 6.06?) and installed it, and it ran great! Once I got newer computers I ended up using Windows primarily but usually had a Linux PC kicking around. In college I started dual booting my main machine since Linux proved to be useful for my courses (Computer Science). Then I built a PC and just installed Windows 10 on it, but now that my 7th gen Intel CPU is “too old” to run Windows 11, I said screw it and installed Linux again. Plus I just really like having a bash shell natively, and a proper package manager is really nice.

Excel wouldn’t stop converting sku numbers to date formats. IT guy was excited to share an “easy fix” for that with Open Office…

When I saw his genuine excitement as he described Linux, plus the security it provided I realized, if I ran Linux I’d have the best support in the company. And I did.

I eventually had to move on from Linux at work after 10yrs or so but it’s all I run at home.

All because of Excel and those fucking date codes. Which yes, Open Office solved as advertised.

And yes I know you don’t need Linux for that but it was a long time ago.

I don’t care about Linux. I care about freedom. It just so happens that the best free software operating systems are built on Linux, so that’s what I use.

I use GNU Guix System on my desktop, laptop, and server machines. I use LineageOS on my mobile devices, although sometimes I wish I could use Mobian or even Guix System instead. I do have a Pinephone with Mobian but it’s collecting dust and the battery is swollen so I can’t use it anyway. I also have a router running OpenWRT.

I used to use Debian until 2019, Trisquel until 2014, and Ubuntu until 2010. When I was something of a kid I played around with a Knoppix live CD, which was my first taste of GNU/Linux.

Probably a combination of free/libre and gratis. Thing is,I was amazed at the speed of it compared to Windows (at the time I had XP).

My first incursion was with Puppy Linux circa 2010, then Ubuntu circa 2012, and now I want to hop to another distro but don’t know which.

Being a geek, I have tried many linux distros (I’ve been using Linux since 1998, on and off). Curiosity was what was driving my usage of it.

In the early 2000s, when I used to write for OSNews.com (second only to Slashdot for OS tech news back then), I really didn’t find any distro polished enough to be a daily driver for me. Red Hat was big at the time, but even when ubuntu came around, it was still not as polished as it is today. These days, I’m using Debian-Testing mostly, however I concede that the best distro for newbies (and for me really, I’m too old now to be tinkering) is Linux Mint (flagship version). Mint really is well-thought out for daily usage. It might not have the latest tech innovation in it, or be bold with its choices, but it just works 99% of the time.

As time has gone by, and seen corporations taking everything for themselves (via enshittification), I have stopped using Linux because it was the geeky/cool thing to do, but I started using it because it frees me from all the spyware, and corporation agendas. Back in the 2000s, when I was a news editor for foss matters, I was mostly siding with the BSD license side of things (and mit/apache/ etc). I felt that the GPL was too restrictive, and that we should allow innovation take its course as it wants to. Now, that I’ve lost all my faith in corporations doing the right (smart) thing, I’m now a GPL3/AGPL type of a gal. The more “restrictively open” something can be, the better. Don’t allow anyone to manipulate you, or use you, or take away your data etc.

I think I originally checked it out after watching an LTT video on a gaming distro, because i liked computers and I was pretty good at them. Not sure if I was the problem or the distro but it was pretty bad. Still fell in love.

Now I appreciate the open source aspect, but I still like it because I can do more with it and learn in the process.

It was mostly just a skill issue, I don’t know how anyone uses developer tools on Windows. Building tool chains on Linux just make sense.

Yes, I did it for freedom. Here’s my battlestation:

Libreboot Gaming Desktop

• Dell OptiPlex 9020 MT Motherboard
• i7 4790K
• 32GB DDR3 1600Mhz RAM
• 9TB (1TB M.2 NVME, 2x4TB Hard drives) RAID 0 with LUKS and LVM (/boot stored on SD card)
• NVIDIA 2080 SUPER 8GB VRAM
• NZXT S340 Elite Case
• EVGA 700W BR
• Kicksecure GNU/Linux

Libreboot Server

• Dell Precision T1650
• Xeon E3 1275 V2
• 32GB DDR3L 1600Mhz RAM (ECC)
• 8TB (2x4TB Hard drives) RAID 1 with LUKS and LVM (/boot stored on SD card)
• AMD RX580 8GB VRAM
• Proxmox VE / Learning to use YunoHost inside VM

Libreboot Laptop

• Lenovo Thinkpad T440P
• i7 4810MQ (Recommend i7 4700MQ for better battery life)
• 16GB DDR3 1600Mhz RAM
• 1TB SSD (/boot encrypted with Argon2)
• 100% Free BIOS (LibreMRC), Intel Management Engine is still present but neutered
• Intel AC 7260 (Can run without blobs when running Linux-libre kernel)
• AR9271 USB for WiFi (100% FOSS)
• Kicksecure GNU/Linux with Linux-libre kernel (Removed all non-free-firmware with vrms)

Libreboot Laptop 2

• Dell E6400 XFR
• Removed WiFi Card
• Removed Mic/Camera
• 100% Libre Init - No blobs in BIOS

GrapheneOS Phone (100% FOSS in the OS layer)

• Cheogram / JMP.chat for Calling / Texting
• Mint Mobile for Service (Cash)
• Ported number into JMP.chat
• F-Droid

LibreCMC Routers (100% Free Firmware/Software)

• ThinkPenguin R1400 Ethernet (1Gbps)
• ThinkPenguin R1300 WiFi Router (100Mbs)
• Running under MullvadVPN (Paid in XMR)

OpenWRT Network Switch

• D-Link DGS-1210-28MP
• VLAN Support

I was born into it. I stayed with it for some mix of gratis and libre. I’m not rich or dumb enough to buy an Apple device or Windows licence, and I like having a computer that won’t turn on me.