ad and annoyance-free

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.

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.

Basically Intel graphics on windows broke. Hopped to Linux, no such problems here.

Tried (hopped) almost every mainstream distros, some niche ones too. Due to some issues with trackpad, I am forced to use arch based distros. Currently rocking EndeavourOS.

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.

The Linuxes are the bestest IDEs ever. They even let you run mini IDEs (vim, vscode, etc) inside them. Coincidentally, they’re also where a lot of server code gets deployed, so they’re a a good place to verify fresh coffee.

I’m sure other platforms have caught up, but when I started out, *nix was the most accessible dev platform I could find.

Well … I first got into contact with OpenSource due to Gratis: OpenOffice, Firefox etc. Combining my knowledge of OpenSource with my tendency to break stuff (Reinstalling Boston for the nth time) led me to Linux which I first tinkered with and soon fully adapted.

I had a short hopping phase where I went from Ubuntu (my starter) via Debian (accidentally tried stable) to Arch.

Stuck with arch on my personal machines now run Ubuntu for my work machine and Debian for Servers.

My favourite distro is the right tool for the job (see above) but I’m pretty happy with Arch

For the philosophical reasons of free as in freedom and because it’s way more cool

Windows post 7 was and remains annoying and getting worse all the time. So I wanted an OS without telemetry and one that I could control the updates on. I also work with Linux a lot at work. I use Alma 9 for a LTS release. Don’t have to mess with it much.

I prefer Linux not for freedom, not for money, not for privacy.

I do it because I’ll be fucking damned if hardware I own is going to generate value for some large faceless corporation. It’s my computer. I paid for it. I’m not going to install Windows so it can send telemetry and show me ads in order to benefit Microsoft’s bottom line.

It’s like owning a car and letting Uber use it for free every once in a while. No thanks, not me.

It’s free, gratis and it’s fun to use and tweak.

I took a couple of in-person Linux courses when I was about 16-17. Teacher gave me a Kubuntu 6.06 CD to try at home.

A short time later I was using Ubuntu 8.04, 9.04, etc. and until last year I was on Ubuntu MATE 14.04 until I made a new MATE 20.04 install and I built a new main PC with MATE 22.04.

I really notice the difference in UI apps between Ubuntu and Debian, which I tried (and failed) to swich to several times already.

I’ve used and gave support to RHEL in a couple of jobs (graphical and non-grahpical)

It looked different

I switched probably 2010 or 2011. I think I was on windows 7, but it might have been windows vista and I never got to 7.

At some point I had made a realization that software I downloaded from sourceforge (this website has been terrible for a long while now, but I think it was decent way back) was heavily correlated with not being shitty. After making this observation, I was able to generalize it to open source software tends to be less shitty and I had a year or two of experiences afterwards that reinforced my theory, which led me to try experimenting with linux installs.

I started with dual-booting Fedora, I had no idea what I was doing and didn’t like the user experience as much as windows at first. I did a little bit of distro-hopping to see if there was something more appealing to me, but during that time I discovered the free software movement and that resonated with me a lot more than open source had, so I decided I wasn’t interested in going back to windows. Moved to Trisquel (originally an Ubuntu derivative, and fully-free to the point of being FSF-approved) and grew to love it.

After a couple years, I decided I was curious enough to learn more about how the system works, so I moved to Parabola (fully free Arch derivative) to force myself to learn. I really learned barely anything, but I got very good at getting things working by trial-and-error while reading documentation I don’t fully understand. I haven’t progressed very far beyond that point at all in the years since, but I got too comfortable to make a significant change.

In the past five or so years, I’ve to some degree dropped the free software philosophy in favor of a philosophy that the problem runs much deeper (no hope of a successful free software movement in a capitalist society, and software is not even close to the most beneficial consequence of getting past capitalism), and I’ve moved to legit Arch rather than Parabola.

I’ve basically gone ten years without real issues on arch installs, but I still have no idea what I’m doing, I’m just comfortable with it and don’t want to put any effort into a change. I feel like if anyone from the arch forums or anyone knowledgeable in general took five minutes to look at my pc they’d be like wtf are you doing. It’s whatever, it works well enough for me.

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.

Because compiz. No, seriously.

I got to know Linux back in 2006 in a hackathon-type-of-thing at uni and they gave me a Ubuntu 5.10 CD and my jaw dropped with the cube animation thing.

Ended wiping my hard drive trying to install it, finally could install it, tried XFCE for a time, went back to GNOME, was tired of Ubuntu and tried Gentoo and somehow could install it, with the GNOME3 drama moved to KDE, considered FreeBSD for a moment just to realize pkg/pkgsrc is absolute shit compared to Portage.

Oh and it seems KDE went back with the cube for Plasma 6! Alas it’s still masked in Gentoo and who knows when it would be ready, but it’s a bit great I’m not the only one for that cube nostalgia.