Curiosity, followed by realizing how good it is for development.

It all started with my own Minecraft Server and an an offer on V-Servers at my Hoster at the time. Started to learn what SSH is, how to install Java and run my own Minecraft Server. And now I am running my Homelab on Kubernetes and do it for work. Life is funny

I tried Linux when I was younger. I decided to try Gentoo on underpowered hardware with zero Linux experience. I credit that uphill battle for teaching me Linux! I used that until I got into dependency hell and switched back to Windows for a while. I needed PowerShell and stuff for my old job, before it went cross-platform. It was fine.

A few years later, I was dual-booting again. Then, Windows 10 began blue-screening randomly. I couldn’t figure out why. Reinstalling didn’t work. So I started using Linux full-time and I’ve never looked back.

Even when I found out that one of my memory sticks had been half-inserted for months, and that’s probably what made Windows crash all the time. How did Linux handle it? Obviously, because it’s better.

Back in 1999 I came across a copy of this book. Not a great book, I wouldn't recommend it even if it weren't decades out of date at this point. But it came with a CD-ROM with Red Hat Linux 6.2 which I installed on the family computer and never really looked back. I haven't had a Windows install since 2004ish.

I've never really been an evangelist about it, though. And I would say that I was obsessed at one point but that's waned quite a bit in the last few years. I'm still Linux only but messing about with computers generally quite a lot less.

The Odin Project

My computer's hard drive began to be less-than-reliable. And only Linux can be ran from the USB drive. I have got MX Linux, and save changes, updates etc. by remastering the image.

Canonical was giving free CDs when I was a teen and it looked cool. Later versions of Unity DE were so good, I liked older Ubuntu so much. Now I run it on older devices to give them some life back

Apple.

I uses to be a huge Apple fan pre-2010. Everything worked, was smooth, wasn't Windows, and it was fun trying out the terminal despite it being pretty useless for most things on Mac.

At the new decade is when it felt like Apple was becoming what it is today: a walled garden with priority of mobile devices at the detriment of Macintosh. Started to really look at Linux as an alternative (only tried Ubuntu in a VM around the time of Unity coming out) early 2010s, but didn't make the full leap until around 2013 when I installed Linux Mint and got a Raspberry Pi to begin to mess around with. Now I solely run a mix of Debian and Void on all my machines and I couldn't be happier.

I've been running Linux in some form since 2012 - I installed Ubuntu 12 on my old laptop and played around with it - was a pain so I dropped it for Windows until like.. 2015? Then I went full into it as I started getting into programming and whatnot.

Sco xenix way back when was required for work. I decided to run it on my desk Then i had to work on sun machine for a few years. So ive really never been a windows person except for games. Once wine then proton atrted letting me game even a little then i got rid of every windows install i had and replaced with linux

Godot engine broke with windows on my hardware, Simeone suggested me to try out linux, went with ubuntu 18.10 i think. Have been using linux ever since

I've always run Linux on my laptops. Now however I've switched on my gaming desktop as well, after W11 started randomly waking from sleep. Haven't had an issue yet. Sure, not everything gaming wise is entirely perfect (though tbh you could almost believe the games were built for Linux) but I figure that if I don't switch why would anyone else do so?

The desire to be alternative and different, and now I can't use Windows for too long

We had to do a presentation on whatever in computer class in the first year of secondary school, and I chose Linux for no apparent reason. I just kinda knew that it existed and thought what the hell.

My 'researching' led me to see what Linux offered, to learn about FOSS, listen to Stallman, and I loved tinkering so I made a dual boot (and thus learned about partitions, boot flags and such) and never looked back. ~~Even when I installed linux on my newly acquired PC a few days ago and found out that since the kernel version 5.13 some motherboards receive failure on all USB 3.0 ports and I have to fuck around with that why can't you just fucking work right away for once~~

It was love at first sight when I saw xeyes in a desktop environment with multiple workspaces, then the colorized terminal was a cherry on top. DOS and windows 95 were the other main options at this time around the mid-90s. Needing the boot disk and root disk to bootstrap the system was a real adventure for teenage me. The adventure continues almost 30 years later.

Tried it out cause of curiosity and the allure of not being subject to a corporation's whims. Discovered package managers, aur, how customizatable the whole experience is and never looked back

I still dual boot Windows for a select couple games that don't run on Linux (anticheat) but I try to use it as little as possible cause it just feels gross.

I was running XP at the time wanting a change. Meanwhile, a neighbor moved from Window ME to Vista and asked for help setting it up. I had never been SO irritated at an OS in my life.

Enter Debian LTS, which I’ve been running ever since.

Got an entry level job as a network engineer at a large ISP that everyone has heard of, six months later I'm taking the RHCA and the rest is history.

I had dual boot with Win10, which I used for almost everything, and Arch, for SSH-able stuff for work and university. One day Windows decided to nuke both the EFI partition and Arch, which made Windows itself unbootable, so I just wiped the entire disk and installed Manjaro. Now I'm a sysadmin and I don't think I could do my job if I had to use Windows.

programming. It's just a really big IDE.

Early 2000's I took a class in highschool called "What's in the box". A buddy of mine and I would hangout after school just talking and building computers. He showed me Lindows. I specifically remember looking at the clock in the dock, and thinking... "Wow!!! Look how you can customize the clock so much!"

It stuck with me. Shortly there after I dabbled with Suse. Then moved to Ubuntu. By 2005 I was almost exclusively using Linux on all my machine. Had one machine running windows for gaming, but the other machines I had were all Linux.

Used to use Windows 98 SE. First introduced to Mandrake Linux around 2000. Had no Internet, got the install media from a friend of my father. Barely got it working and couldn't read English. Went back to Windows XP. Ubuntu came. Began to use it around 2008 for a few years. Back to windows briefly and then Raspberry Pi was launched. Switched to Linux permanently.

Almost went back in 2013 due to Lightroom, gaming and a few work related medical software.

Began to grasp FOSS maturely in 2014 and switched to alterbative software. When Steam launched Proton there was no turning back.

I was obsessed but it has come and gone. Now I'm a bit of a nuissance to friends sllwly switching them to alternative software. My partner gets the worst treatment. Now she uses hardware security keys, assymetric keys auth etc

I started using Linux many moons ago when the LAMP stack was common for web development. (Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP). But that was only on servers. It's only in the last couple of years I've switched to seriously using Linux on the Desktop. I finally got fed up of Microsoft writing software as if using their OS meant they owned my machine and they could do what they liked with it. So I've switched. While windows still sits on a partition due to a couple of games, I find I'm going months without needing to touch it. I suspect I'll be rid of windows entirely in the near future.

Windows kept getting in the way of my productivity (I constantly needed to find workarounds for problems that didn't exist or were much easier to solve on linux, and I couldn't customize the ui to my liking) + it lacked basic things like a tabbed file-manager (before win11) and my hardware was getting slower so I jumped ship.

Mainly this stuff:

https://youtu.be/IT4vDfA_4NI?si=u1V76Mxjq8s6iAFI

Kinda just ideological commitment. I sorta just started using Linux right off the bat, the only time I wasn't a Linux user was way back when I was using the family Mac. Linux has gone quite far over the years, in quite a positive way.

Laptop wasn't running smooth anymore. Tried a bunch of stuff in Winxows, nothing helped. Formatted the drive, installed linux, ran buttery smooth for years until some graphics shit died. Did the same to a thinkpad back in 2018 or 19. Still up an running like a champ but the thing went crazy on the original windows it came with (2nd hand. I'm also cheap...)

I first heard of it in the early 2000s, with my dad talking about replacing our buggy Windows ME with Lindows. Eventually, that computer died without us ever attempting to install it.

In college, I hung out with someone who used linux and thought it looked cool. I successfully dual booted Ubuntu on my PC around 2005 or 2006, but could never get the video drivers working properly (it was stuck at the lowest resolution) and eventually gave up on it.

I started adminning a web forum around 2014 or so, and the previous admin talked me into dual booting Fedora rather than only using Putty. So I started using it intermittently whenever I started working on the forum, though I never really got into GNOME. He also told me about raspberry pis, so I picked up a pi 2 and started tinkering with it.

When my wife moved in (2018), she (a software developer) was working on a project and asked me if I’d heard of raspberry pis, as she was recommended to use one but hadn’t looked into it yet. I pulled my pi 2 out of storage and she fell in love with it, so we started buying loads of pi 3s and zeroes, with me testing out different distros and setups for her while she was working on the project code.

Finally, somewhere around 2018 or 2019 my laptop started running like shit on Windows. I tried out Xubuntu and fell in love with it. It ended up becoming our go-to distro, getting slapped on old desktops she brought home from work and a used laptop I bought for our daughter. So that became the daily driver on my laptop, even as she moved onto Alpine with i3wm.

And now we both have Pinetab 2s, so I think it’s fair to say we’re full on linux nerds at this point. We still have Windows on some of our desktops, though, so we’re more pragmatists than linux proselytizers.

TL;DR: I heard about it young, and that interest grew into dabbling, until I finally got addicted to it.

first just messing around with it, then starting selfhosting and then i started to dualboot just for fun, and one day i by mistake nuked my windows installation, so now i'm a full time linux user

Windows 8 being unusable on my shitty laptop I had back then, IIRC it would bluescreen 9 out of 10 times on startup (this same bug still persisted when eventually Windows 10 came out). I essentially switched to Linux full time after that.