my first time "trying" linux was like 20 years ago. i got laid off from a job when a company was liquidated and they let us buy our janky ass windows workstations for $10. i installed slackware on it, some desktop environment, and attempted to set up web hosting services (apache). i got stuck at some part and just sort of gave up.

a few years ago i tried again with an old busted ass laptop that was shitty even when it was new, but had grown to be about 12 years old. it was a "spare" machine i kept in a maker space to look shit up. of course, every year i would have to go through some heinous block of mandatory updates and serial reboots. every few years i would wipe it out entirely and reinstall the OS, firefox, and a few utilities. even when it was all ready to go, the thing crawled just trying to watch youtube, navigate the local network share, search the indexed file system, and browse. it's battery had long since shit itself, so i had to keep it plugged in. a device destined for the garbage, as i assumed it struggled due to hardware problems.

i decided to install mint on it, because why the fuck not. the process took no time at all, like probably 10% of the setup time of a windoze install. not to mention, the thing worked like it was new. the features for the linux desktop environments have come a very long way, to the point that they are superior for UI customization. also, all kinds of shit was automagically recognized native. it was suddenly fast as hell for youtubes, browsing, exploring the network shares, whatever. and it was stable!

that experience has led to a slow, steady compartmentalization of computing processes and resources away from the windows OS. from basic browsing/email, coding, word processing, text/voice/video chat, to geoprocessing/map making and visual design. i am currently in the process of moving all of my home media to a DAS RAID setup on a dedicated box that will run media services and a few other services i've been meaning to tinker with.

within 6 months, i expect to only have 2 systems with windows. my work issued computer and a sketchy frankenstein i use to play janky games and sandboxed windoze apps acquired from the high seas.

every time i make the effort to shift over something i do in windoze to linux and start actually getting into it, i think, "jeez, i should have done this years ago". things just work, features are FOSS, and it doesn't fight me or act possessed after some critical security update, nor does it constantly try to trick me into upgrading. it also doesn't randomly remove features and call it an upgrade.

honestly, the experience of using a free, unshittified OS to do things has reminded me of why i got into computers in the first place as a kid. not to mention, the times i am forced to do something in windoze for whatever reason only strengthens my resolve to get everything i want to do away from it.