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  • Honestly, the Reddit migration. I switched to Lemmy about 6 months ago. A few of the largest communities at that time were Self Hosting and Privacy related. Those naturally lead me to looking into Linux. From there I started minor self hosting on a Pi. Then, after a rather long walk through the Yongsan Electronics Market in Korea I built my own Homelab, and last week, I moved my primary desktop to Pop_OS. Honestly, It's been a blast. A few learning curves, but the ability to have near complete control over my setup, and the increased self reliance has been delightful.

  • There was a ton of software sourcecode posted to the comp.sources.unix usenet group that I wanted to check out. The problem is all that software was in shar format, and there was no way to extract those files on msdos. I found Yggdrasil Linux on CD at a local software store and decided to check it out. Been using Linux in one form or another ever since.

  • Well if I remember correctly I was actually first told to use Solaris (Unix) because I knew just a teeny bit of HTML and had done some programming on my TI calculator. I had to use a Sunray workstation and learn ssh and emacs.

    My boss took pity on me and bought me a computer (to be paid off with some extra hours). I attempted to install Debian on it, and failed. I tried Ubuntu and it worked (somewhere around 2005ish). It was all downhill from there. I did try some other distributions like arch but by that point I had a laptop and while I technically did get WiFi working and it was fun, I preferred the better out of the box hardware support you got from Ubuntu back in those days.

    I've stuck when Ubuntu for the most part ever since. Even though the Linux guru at my university called it "Linux for office rats". I've tried some other variants like Mint and while I liked them more eventually I'd have to deal with the fact that the trickier stuff I want to run like CUDA just seems easier to get working. Pre built packages usually target Ubuntu.

    I've played with alternative window managers like i3 here and there but once again I find it hard to make sure the real basic WiFi/sound/etc works the way I want it to and end up writing my own i3 status scripts or running with some sort of gnome-session thingy.

    At the moment by desktop is basically "I don't care but there are shortcuts for my browser, graphical emacs, and the kitty terminal".

    I'm not an evangelist because let me tell you from experience: your in-laws will not actually thank you for installing a low resource xfce based distribution on their computer. They will be unhappy and you'll get support calls. They want windows, just free.

    But for me personally it's the most productive environment for what I do. I do not find macOS to be more stable or frankly to be more coherent. I love their font rendering and hidpi support though.

  • Being able to actually own the operating system I use, and being able to research and understand anything pertaining to it if I wanted to. There are too many black boxes in computing as it is.

    I don't really know too much about Linux, I'm still using it fairly mindlessly as a workstation- oriented end user.

    I don't really go out of my way to recommend Fedora (for example) to other people unless they're already specifically looking into playing around with a distro.

  • I went full Linux over a decade ago, because it was obvious that Windows would become Spyware shit. It all started with Windows 8.

    I don't want any big tech company inside my computer, thanks.

  • I've always been curious, but I was working through The Odin Project earlier this year--it recommended to use Linux. Been using Windows less and less as the year has gone on.

  • It’s on my pi hole and my steam deck. While I’m not crazy into it I am thinking of building a pc with it in the not too distant future

  • Windows 8 taking away the skeumorphic, frutiger aero theme for a plain boring flat theme as well as going with a very anti-desktop look with the start menu. I still haven't gone back to Windows and probably never will for my personal computer (work computer is different) since I don't see them ever bringing back the fun Vista and 7 look.

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