I’ve used linux for 20 years and was generally happy. I always used my main rig to play games, so I kept windows since my tries to switch to linux for gaming ended unsatisfying. Last October I decided to get rid of ms products and said goodbye to windows for good. Gaming on linux today works great. I am constantly amazed how great everything works and happy pretty much every time I turn on the PC. A big thank you to everyone involved in linux development!

What’s this? A software app store?

It’s ironic how on Linux, my distro’s app repository is always my first stop when looking for software, while on Mac or Windows it’s my last resort.

Commercialized app stores are full of spam, and Microsoft and Apple both decided that app store apps should not have the full capabilities of normal apps. It’s the exact opposite on Linux.

In a nutshell,

Zorin > Ubuntu > Debian > Arch, while (always) pestering google about trivial stuff, “How do I install something on Linux?” – “Oh look! A package manager! Which package manager is the best?” – “Distros have their specific packages? Cool!”, etc.

I broke nearly every distro, may have been KDEs fault.

Now on Fedora Kinoite 40 it works like a charm.

Started on Arch Linux for some reason back in 2016, I just decided to throw out my Windows and install it (Don’t really remember what was going through my head, or why I wanted to install Linux, other than I was reading the r/linux subreddit wiki at the time). I was trapped in a TTY trying to install the thing for maybe a week, and after 9 reinstallations, I got Arch working and got a Weston compositor session running under Wayland. After realizing Weston was more a tech-demo than something I was actually supposed to use, I installed X11 and Gnome, which was cool for approximately 3 minutes before I decided to replace it with some minimal window manager instead. Can’t remember if it was i3wm or something else, but i3wm sounds right; and later I messed around with some tilers like StumpWM, ratpoison, and HerbstluftWM.

After about 3 months, something in Arch broke (systemd was not reaping processes properly was what I concluded at the time, no idea what the actual problem was but I ended up with a bunch of zombie processes), and I decided to install Gentoo as my second Linux distribution. After installing Gentoo, I entered a stage which is colloquially know as “config hell” where I overconfigured everything to the point of breaking something, and could never figure out what I actually broke because everything was so overconfigured. After recompiling the whole system, everything was still broken, so I reinstalled Gentoo, this time less overconfigured, but still somewhat overconfigured (It didn’t help I was also running a full self-made custom kernel config with 3 months of Linux experience, I surprised the thing booted at all).

I lived in Gentoo for around a year using HerbstluftWM, but eventually I grew tired of how much maintenance Gentoo required and just wanted some sane defaults. This led me to installing OpenBSD, which I guess was the right decision for me because I’m still using it to this day (7 years!), and is where I gained the majority of my knowledge about using Unix thanks to the wonderful documentation. Initially I didn’t like the ports system because it didn’t have as many knobs as Gentoo’s portage did (Gentoo’s portage is more modeled after FreeBSD’s ports than OpenBSD’s ports it seems), but I came around to enjoying hacking ports with my own patches instead of using preconfigured knobs. Eventually my porting skills got good enough that I now officially mantain a couple OpenBSD ports (games/stone-soup, www/pipe-viewer), and that list is likely to grow. I switched between some other window managers (ratpoison, JWM, FVWM2) before settling on OpenBSD’s in-house cwm. I purchased a VPS also running OpenBSD, and self host various things like email, git, ZNC, web/http, and IPsec/VPN. Eventually, I grew tired of not having games to play (OpenBSD doesn’t support WINE), so I bought a Steam Deck that I use as both my gaming desktop and handheld. I also bought a Pinephone from Pine64 which currently uses PostmarketOS (I hope to run OpenBSD on it some day though).

tl;dr use Arch as your first Linux distribution and you’ll end up as an OpenBSD ports maintainer I guess

the experience was wonderful. I learned I lot about computer, found new forums and IRC servers. It brought a new world to me.

I am still a newbie though. I don’t know much about Linux just enough to make it work for me.

I use Linux servers on my job and I did a ton of research. I felt confident in moving from Windows to Linux and for the most part it went very well. Most distributions provide a live environment and the installer is extremely easy.

I had a ton of small little problems with Nvidia, Wayland, audio… I ended up fixing most of them, or at least apply some workarounds but it was a painful experience.

Gaming works really really really well, which I found surprising.

I started on Ubuntu if I recall correctly, then made the jump to Fedora at some point. I think Manjaro was in there too? That was my first exposure to KDE Plasma

At some point I installed Arch in a VM and then I was hooked. These days I daily drive Arch with Hyprland (apps and whatnot provided by Plasma)

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Generally good, but fairly troublesome. I dualboot Pop_OS!, and the install was a nightmare. The live USB wouldn’t boot until I unplugged every USB device. Once it started, I could plug them back in. Then, when actually installing, the info about the various partitions I would need was apparently pretty out of date (recommend partition sizes were way off).

Once installed, though, it’s been really nice, albeit a fair bit more complicated. The only real issue I’ve had so far is that, in Unity games run through wine, video streamed in-game won’t play.

I guess it all depends on perspective.

I love that it’s free compared to those $10-20k licenses for similar systems.

I love that there are good package managers.

I love that it’s open source.

I hate that it’s GPLv2.

I hate how bloated the kernel is. I’d like it to fit into main memory.

I hate how it’s not POSIX-certified.

AMD GPU just works, no fussing about, get straight to fragging on Xonotic and Counter Strike

Unless you have a monitor that requires HDMI 2.1 to get full resolution/refresh. Then it only works partially.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Linux, and I’ve been using it on my desktops/laptops for almost 30 years at this point.

But there are still issues to deal with on a regular basis, same as Windows or OSX.

Linux is my primary OS. I have no experience with Windows. Therefore, I cannot compare Linux and BSD systems with Windows. When I started using Linux, it wasn’t very functional, but I didn’t want to pay money for something as glitchy as Windows was in 1998. But for my needs at the time, Linux was sufficient. The PC usage pattern in 1998 was a bit different from today’s PC usage pattern. Mail, primitive messenger (IRC), primitive games. Torturous WEB. I’m back in the days when an html page would load within a couple minutes and I didn’t consider that unusual. I remember times when I would spend all night downloading a 5 megabyte package. The Internet connection would glitch and break and the price of the connection was no fun for anyone. Then FreeBSD 5 came out, and after the glitches of Linux it was pure bliss. I even considered switching to this system completely, but unfortunately FreeBSD quickly began to lag behind the capabilities of desktop PCs and I had to abandon this idea. I could tell IT tales for a long time, but I will say that Linux became a digestible OS relatively recently, around 2015. I currently use OpenBSD and Fedora. I’m happy with all of them.

Linux has been the biggest rabbit hole I’ve been in. There are too many distribution for me to choose one without testing as much as I can. It made me change what I wanted/needed. I went from “I don’t want to use CLI at all” to “man, GUI is too slow for that”.

I tried many Debian children and grand children distributions, Fedora based ones (Nobara, atomics bases,…), Opensuse, NixOS, Solus, arch based distributions…

Now, I’m on cachyOS, that seems to be the good balance I need (for now), between GUI/already configured and “I can do it the way I want”.

One year after starting using Linux, I’ve switched from a 3060ti to a 6700xt, just because it made hopping easier.

If you exclude me not being able to settle down on a distro, Linux is a funny experience to me. My needs are not that big, as I just play some games, have a light need of an office suite. I can do anything I used to to in windows, but without Microsoft and his friends looking above my shoulder.

• What’s this? A software app store? Swell! I no longer need to download stuff off from dodgy sites or numbingly installing everything manually!

Ayyyy! Some recognition! Some people install linux and ask “where do I get apps from?”, you show them the “store” and they go “wow, that’s so complicated”. That’s when I question how they manage to survive in this digital world.

Keep on fraggin’!

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