I moved to Linux from OS/2 in the 90’s.

My father used opensuse all through the 2000s when they still delivered CDs, so I always saw them laying around. I tried out Linux my first year of university (mint back then) because my mediocre laptop would take an insane time to startup windows 7. Battery life was significantly worse though. Maybe a part because my father used it because of unresolved feelings after he died.

I first got on it because Windows Vista ran like an absolute pig after a few years and I got tired of it - downloaded Ubuntu and I was off to the races with it. After that laptop I built my first PC which I'm proud to say has never so much as had a windows USB stick inserted into it.

Tbh I find it requires much less tinkering now - I ended up putting Fedora Atomic Cosmic on a Chromebook this weekend (first time w/ jailbreaking a Chromebook, and w/Fedora) and it took all of an hour to get it done - the only command-line stuff I needed to do was because Fedora Atomic is immutable so adding non-flatpak apps is a slightly more involved process. Beyond that OS setup/software installation was entirely via GUI and straightforward.

Gnomes workflow fit me a lot better and I like the idea of flatpak trying to bring mobile-like samdboxed apps to the desktop. Windows just killed its sandboxed UWPs

Why? Because DOS and Windows 3.11 kind of sucked and I wanted to learn and experiment.

Even though I started out working mostly with the console, it was amazingly refreshing. X came a year or two later, when the web made it worth it. OS/2 Warp 3 also slipped in there for a while. Great times.

Curiosity and fate. I was perfectly happy on windows but I was listening to the WAN show and they were talking about their 30day linux channel. About 2 weeks before the first ep my windows install completely bricked itself after an update and I couldnt recover the key so I was forced to either pay for windows again or stay on the free version. I ended up installing linux mint and it was an awful experience. Out of the box mint is pretty crap hardware compat wise. I tried a few other distros before settling on Manjaro where everything worked out of the box and from there i started learning linux.

I plan to keep moving distro's every few years just to see different ways of learning linux. Im currently on Nobara and fedora on my laptop. I think its probably the best linux distro out there(fedora). I've tried gentoo but I did not get it working to the same standard as nobara. I do plan to try gentoo again because I liked being able to pick all the stuff on my system and compiling it. I didnt like selecting all the useflags tho.