My intro to Linux was Google. Their chromebooks allow you to install Linux and I've played around w/ Debian. I never took it serious in terms of a viable alternative to Windows, but it was a great way to supplement the barebones ChromeOS over the last 4-5 years.

My desktop was from yesteryear (i7-2600) but could still get most jobs done outside of heavy gaming/local LLM, but I was not going to be able to upgrade to 11 which sucked since the desktop seemed perfectly functional. My plan was to ride out the Windows long-term support until 2028 and then buy a dirt cheap refurb desktop then.

On a separate track, about 3 months ago, I started my foray into front-end alternatives. I canceled YouTube Premium and started using Piped via redirector (redirects webpages to websites of your choosing) and then I found out about libredirect, which does a lot of the heavy lifting for you, and across multiple popular services including twitter, reddit, imgur, etc.

Initially I occasionally used the reddit/twitter alternatives, but as they became clearer bad actors, it became my defacto options. This nudged me to kbin and privacy-focused subreddits where Linux was not the red-headed stepchild.

The hype/reviews around Debian 12 made me curious to try the full desktop environment, so I decided to dual boot my desktop. I bricked it, bought a new W11-capable desktop and dual boot that with Debian 12.

Now, Linux my daily driver, and only use Windows 11 for workflows that are not optimized for Linux yet. The most surprising thing is the level of customization on things that I never thought about before. It can be overwhelming initially, but I'm finding the sweet spot over time.