Linux

Despite being an ECE major, I didn't really bother doing anything with Linux until two things happened at the same time:

1. I started having to work in several different build environments that were just easier to set up in Linux
2. I started running Minecraft servers/doing server modding (starting back in the days of Hey0's server mod and carrying up through Bukkit).

I wouldn't call myself an evangelist at all. If you're doing something that I think will be specifically easier to do in Linux (mostly servers and specific kinds of software development), I'll point out how... but I find that a lot of people's advice on "use Linux and X FOSS tool" ends up being akin to giving someone bike shopping advice on which welding torch to use to construct their bicycle frame.

What caused you to get into it

The year was 2002. I was told about Gentoo Linux by a college. I saw it as a new, shiny toy and immediately wanted to try it out. I realized that it was better than Windows, so I stuck with it. (Not with Gentoo, but with Linux. I still use Gentoo sometimes today, but I also tried out many many other distros throughout the time and I don't use Gentoo exclusively nowadays.)

are you an evangel

Yes, I believe that Linux is far superior to Windows and I tell people about it

are you obsessed?

Absolutely

Worked as a computer repair tech forever ago. We ended up with tons of spare parts and abandoned computers. I took a few home and looked for things I could use them for. Quickly found Linux and gave it a shot. It was perfect, I didn’t need to spend $100+ for a copy, there were tons of options, and I could do anything with it. Spent the next 20 years using it on every computer except my main desktop because of games. At one point I was 100% Linux and all I played was WoW using WINE. Now I’m back to 100% Linux thanks to steam and proton making a healthy chunk of my library playable.

Any time someone comes to me with an old computer my recommendation is to throw Linux on it and get a few more years of usefulness out of it.

Curiosity, mostly. And Ubuntu giving away freebies.

Took me a couple years to get out of the "Why change a winning team?" mentality and my baby duck syndrome.

Always dabbled, but working with Docker has really made me commit to learning it. Also the ease of spinning up linux on cloud systems is a joy.

I actually don't know how that happened. It was either a youtube video: when linux met r/unixporn or my privacy & freedom concerns that suddenly appeared in like the span of a week

I switched to Linux for two reasons:

1. I believe that it's always a good idea to support alternatives.
2. I prefer to use products and services that I actually support.

I do still use Windows occasionally because not everything works or at least has an alternative available but Linux is and will probably always be my primary OS. Even if by some miracle Microsoft, Apple or Google actually start listening to their users and make their OS and business models perfect, I would still use an alternative like Linux as my primary because there would be nothing preventing these companies from reverting their decisions.

Windows 8

I wanted to switch to Linux for several years because I was very sick of how Windows did things.

With Valve doing Proton and Windows 11 being a much shittier Windows 10... With rumours of it eventually becoming a FORCED update!... I decided to actually switch to Linux last November.

Haven't regretted it. Haven't used any other OS since.

I wasn't happy with windows vista's prformance and wanted to try something different. Didn't make the switch permanent for a decade because I needed games in my life but I always ran linux on my laptops when I got them.

Curiosity. I was a curious tweenager, and I was already a bit of a geek at the time. I read about Linux in computer magazines at the time, and decided to give one of the free CDs a try - with RedHat 5.2 on it. To be honest, wasn't really impressed with it. I especially disliked having to recompile the kernel, which took ages on those Pentium 3s. But it got me exploring other operating systems, and I found QNX, BeOS and NetBSD. I was really impressed with with QNX and BeOS in particular - Linux felt quite clunky and amateurish in comparison. I especially liked the multimedia performance of BeOS, and the lightweightedness, polish and desktop responsiveness of QNX, which featured a real-time microkernel. QNX felt lightyears ahead of it's competition at the time. My first run into it was a free 1.44MB demo floppy that the company mailed me directly, complete with a full developer manual (which was completely wasted on me as a tween, but I still appreciated it and tried to comprehend bits and pieces). I was already into making custom bootable floppy disks at the time, so I was extremely impressed that they managed to fit in a full fledged GUI desktop, complete with a browser that supported Javascript (along with network drivers and a modem dialer) - all on a 1.44MB floppy disk! Till date I've no idea how they managed that. Even the tiniest of Linux WMs are massive in comparison and look fugly (twm), but QNX's Photon microGUI somehow managed to make it good looking and functional. Maybe it was all coded in Assembly, I don't know, but it was, and still remains, very impressive nonetheless.

I digress, but all this started getting me into exploring POSIX systems and distro/OS hopping. It was only when I experienced SuSE that I fell in love with Linux. Finally, I had a polished Linux desktop, with a full-featured settings/control panel (YaST) that made it easy to use even for a tween like me. And that's when I switched to Linux as my main-ish OS, with Windows relegated to gaming duties. However, I didn't fully get rid of Windows until Windows 7. I was actually impressed with the Windows 7 beta releases and was prepared to buy it at release, but... I wasn't expecting that price tag. I was hoping I'd get a student discount, but it wasn't applicable where I lived (or there was some catch, I don't remember exactly). In any case, I couldn't afford it, and I was really disappointed and angry at Microsoft that they were charging so much for it here, compared to the US pricing. And so, on the release day of Windows 7, I formatted my drive and switched to Linux full time, and never looked back.

I was on a Microsoft systems admin/engineer path for a while and an opportunity opened for a KVM/XEN engineer and I was the one only person in my office to accept the offer. That was back in the RHEL/CentOS 4 days.

After playing around a bit I got hooked and haven't gone back down the MS path since then.

Windows update that ruined 3 months of work.

First real terminal contact (except for limited use in macOS) I had working at a company which now uses embedded Linux in their product. After that I got in a situation where I had no computing device with admin rights running anymore. iPhone, iPad, corporate locked windows. Once there was the day I needed admin again, so I went searching and found an old iMac lying around, macOS was barley useable (low spec) and I just managed to create a bootable stick with it. Fast forward 2 years, I now have the old iMac of my dad with better specs running tumbleweed with Gnome, and I love it, with the right extensions, this frontend is very fun to use.

Job reason, early on my college, realize on my field I would be working on Linux a lot. I installed one on my laptop to get a head start. It was painful, Not being able to use the usual software, did not help that my university don't even use Linux. I had to keep trying to find workarounds.

Privacy and programming communities. I tried to stay at Windows at first, but when I was bith recommended GNU/Linux for privacy and had to use it for programming, I knew I couldn't keep the resistance up.

Three years later and I have 0 regrets. All games I play work, except for, recently, TF2 because of a weird malloc library issue on Arch-based systems. All apps I need just work, and whenever I need something Windows-only I have a VM setup just for that. Developing and managing your system on a Unix-like system is just so much easier.

Curiousity, wouldn't say I'm obsessed but I'd hate to switch Windows now since I'm way more familiar on Linux. And I've satisfied (killed) any curiosity in Windows server and desktop in professional life

Sourtcut virus

MS Dos 5.0 on my first PC was a bit short on features and I had not enough money for Windows 3.1... I heard that American students were using something called Unix and that their was something close available through mail-order CDs. Yggdrasil CDs were cheap too!

Back in 1999 I came across a copy of this book. Not a great book, I wouldn't recommend it even if it weren't decades out of date at this point. But it came with a CD-ROM with Red Hat Linux 6.2 which I installed on the family computer and never really looked back. I haven't had a Windows install since 2004ish.

I've never really been an evangelist about it, though. And I would say that I was obsessed at one point but that's waned quite a bit in the last few years. I'm still Linux only but messing about with computers generally quite a lot less.

The Odin Project

My computer's hard drive began to be less-than-reliable. And only Linux can be ran from the USB drive. I have got MX Linux, and save changes, updates etc. by remastering the image.

Canonical was giving free CDs when I was a teen and it looked cool. Later versions of Unity DE were so good, I liked older Ubuntu so much. Now I run it on older devices to give them some life back

I've been running Linux in some form since 2012 - I installed Ubuntu 12 on my old laptop and played around with it - was a pain so I dropped it for Windows until like.. 2015? Then I went full into it as I started getting into programming and whatnot.

Sco xenix way back when was required for work. I decided to run it on my desk Then i had to work on sun machine for a few years. So ive really never been a windows person except for games. Once wine then proton atrted letting me game even a little then i got rid of every windows install i had and replaced with linux

Godot engine broke with windows on my hardware, Simeone suggested me to try out linux, went with ubuntu 18.10 i think. Have been using linux ever since

Tried it out cause of curiosity and the allure of not being subject to a corporation's whims. Discovered package managers, aur, how customizatable the whole experience is and never looked back

I still dual boot Windows for a select couple games that don't run on Linux (anticheat) but I try to use it as little as possible cause it just feels gross.

I've always run Linux on my laptops. Now however I've switched on my gaming desktop as well, after W11 started randomly waking from sleep. Haven't had an issue yet. Sure, not everything gaming wise is entirely perfect (though tbh you could almost believe the games were built for Linux) but I figure that if I don't switch why would anyone else do so?

We had to do a presentation on whatever in computer class in the first year of secondary school, and I chose Linux for no apparent reason. I just kinda knew that it existed and thought what the hell.

My 'researching' led me to see what Linux offered, to learn about FOSS, listen to Stallman, and I loved tinkering so I made a dual boot (and thus learned about partitions, boot flags and such) and never looked back. ~~Even when I installed linux on my newly acquired PC a few days ago and found out that since the kernel version 5.13 some motherboards receive failure on all USB 3.0 ports and I have to fuck around with that why can't you just fucking work right away for once~~

It was love at first sight when I saw xeyes in a desktop environment with multiple workspaces, then the colorized terminal was a cherry on top. DOS and windows 95 were the other main options at this time around the mid-90s. Needing the boot disk and root disk to bootstrap the system was a real adventure for teenage me. The adventure continues almost 30 years later.

I was running XP at the time wanting a change. Meanwhile, a neighbor moved from Window ME to Vista and asked for help setting it up. I had never been SO irritated at an OS in my life.

Enter Debian LTS, which I’ve been running ever since.

I found an Ubuntu CD room in the trash, searched about it on the Web, which led me to install it on a low-end PC I had

Got an entry level job as a network engineer at a large ISP that everyone has heard of, six months later I'm taking the RHCA and the rest is history.

I had dual boot with Win10, which I used for almost everything, and Arch, for SSH-able stuff for work and university. One day Windows decided to nuke both the EFI partition and Arch, which made Windows itself unbootable, so I just wiped the entire disk and installed Manjaro. Now I'm a sysadmin and I don't think I could do my job if I had to use Windows.

I was broke and my hard drive failed. I've heard/read somewhere that Linux can be booted of a live cd, something quite new back in the days(like 15 years ago?). So I made one a used my broken laptop with broken hdd for about 7 months, just from the live session without persisting anything. It was a pain to wait for everything since most things would have to be loaded from the dvd, but it worked!

Windows XP Pro was the last Windows that you could install on as many of your machines as you wanted without contacting M$. When I found that out, I knew that XP would be my last Windows and that I would inevitably switch to Linux. When XP became totally obsolete, I permanently switched over to Linux Mint. I've never gone back to Windows and I have zero reason to ever do so. I promote Linux whenever I can.

Windows 11 has a bug that when I'm in file explorer and a drag a file out of the window or drag to the file to list of folder or drives on the left side of file explorer. It will freeze file explorer for about one minute. This only happens once in a while. I was extremely frustrated with windows 11 bugs that I thought to switch back to Arch Linux for real this time and even if I bricked Arch Linux, I would reinstall. There is also that Windows 11 AMD CPU bug where it will start to hitch every once in a while, when I was on my desktop. I have been thinking of going back but I love customizability of Linux and bash.