Linux

I have shity low end laptop. It was fine for w10 at first but each update made it worse. I tryed cleaning, reinstall... But then I installed Mint. It was amazing from unusable to snappy. I still use it and it is enough computing for me (browsing, office, watching movies...)

I’m late to the party but windows Vista forced me off of windows. Not 5 minutes into setting up a new laptop and it told me even after clicking yes for admin privileges that I didn’t have the right to uninstall mcafee… I threw Debian on the laptop and never looked back. Ended up running FreeBSD for years on that thing and have mostly stuck with them since.

For Linux as others have stated lack of crashes and clear ways to customize/fix things was incredible.

FreeBSD doesn’t support all the newer standards yet (looking at you wifi6), but it is beyond rock stable. A month plus of 24/7 uptime between reboots for years and it’s just as snappy as when I first installed it. And even better they push hard to keep things more or less the same. The things I learned setting up FreeBSD 8.0 are still the same for FreeBSD 13. The biggest changes have been upgraded hardware support and quality of life tools that interact with the systems I was already using.

As a note FreeBSD does not come with a graphical interface. They have imo the best manual (handbook) for setting it up and getting going, and have native zfs for software raid arrays.

My risky two cents here is FreeBSD is great for learning all the ins and outs of Unix-like systems but is missing some things linux users take for granted like docker for servers (they use jails you set up yourself) and no cuda libraries for ai. If you have the time and want to learn how these systems operate from the ground up I find it’s better than arch. Easier to install, no compiling everything like gentoo, and an incredibly clean manual that has always made sense and worked exactly as expected. For just getting a desktop and easing into things there’s also nothing wrong with say Linux mint or any of the other recommendations others have said either.

The glory of Unix-like systems is they’re yours, and once you get used to how they run they’ll be rock steady for years and run faster than windows on the same device.

Long time ago my dad bought a few netbooks and they came with Xandros pre-installed. It wasn't much of a choice to be honest (all my friends, school, every other PC was running Windows). And I never give it a chance because there was a desktop with Windows so I used that instead.

Times goes buy and the Xandros version was not going to keep up with my needs and I've switched to Ubuntu Remix (very cool at the time) and then I've got to experience Ubuntu 09.10 with Gnome. And that was a game changer for me (I learned a lot on how Linux works under the.hood) but I kept Windows machine just for gaming (until last year).

I switched in June 2021. I was a fan of libre software before the switch (I still am! Love me Krita, Kdenlive, LibreOffice, VS Code if you can count that...), and I saw that many people in that community, plus programming communities, use Linux. I heard that there were lightweight distros (my computer was fairly low-end), and a lot of customization options. I also wanted to try something new, so I ended up dual-booting W10 and Linux Mint, after trying LM in a virtual machine!

Now I have a new computer. It's dual-booting W11 and LM 21.1 Cinnamon. I rarely boot into the Windows partition.

I switch to Kubuntu in 2020 because Microsoft discontinued Windows 7. Then I switch to Debian to learn more about how Linux work, and after that I moved to Siduction to get the up-to-date packages. I still rice KDE to look like Windows 7 to this day :P

Only real option if you want to tinker

I decided to switch when windows xp went end-of-life, because my pc was a mid-2000's era relic that would surely catch fire if it was forced to handle the windows 7/10 bloat. Naturally, I installed Mint on bare metal without doing any research beforehand. Not the best idea, but sometimes it's fun to jump headfirst into a completely foreign landscape. That said, Cinnamon (the desktop environment of Mint) shares much of its design language with windows, so it's not really that foreign, as far as the graphical interface is concerned.

What surprised me was just how different the underlying system was, how much more transparent and accessible it was, and how incredibly efficient and versatile the command line could be. Then there's the broader OSS community, which I think is a fantastic thing to participate in even if you don't use Linux, but using Linux is certainly a gateway.

I'm not saying Linux is perfect, and it's probably not for everyone, but it is nice to not be held captive by some monopolistic corporation, who continuously engages in ethically questionable anti-consumer behaviour, in the name of increasingly monetizing their user base. Linux gives power back to the end users, and that's what makes it worthwhile and important.

I was learning OpenGL at the time and I was frustrated that I could not play a game using OpenGL (When I use a technologie in programming, I love using software that use it) because none of the games in my library supported it. So I discovered Ubuntu 16.04 and I immediatly loved it. I also reinstalled it seven times because every time I broke it and I didn't know how to fix it.

What realy chocked me at the time is how easy it is to install C++ dependencies for your project. You just use the package manager and boom, you link it to your project and your done and if for whatever reason the package is not available in your package manager, you can build it manually very easely.

However, there where some downside too. VSCode didn't exists at the time (or I didn't ear of it) and the only proper IDE was kdevelop which I never liked. Hopefolly, when VSCode came it was realy cool, but not as cool as when I discovered NeoVim. The gaming too was bad, Proton didn't exist, Wine was not as advanced as today and DXVK was not a thing yet. You could only play games that where 5+ years old and only at 15/20 fps with a lot of glitches.

Linux nowoday serve all my needs, I only need to start Windows when I deploy and test some program to it or when I play a game that is not well supported on Linux and I only do it in a VM with single GPU Passthrough.

Wanted a new adventure to go on and a chance of pace from Windows 10 at the time. Benefits were a less bloated system and more customizability and a way to strengthen my command line skills. I was surprised by how light weight and overall polished the experience was.

Download a linux distro iso file

Burn iso to usb using rufus

Restart computer with usb plugged in

Get into bios by pressing your system's specified key to get into bios while booting

Go to the boot settings

Select your usb

Linux should pop up after a minute with install menu

If you configure the settings right, you can have a dual boot setup with both windows and linux

After linux is installed you no longer need the usb

The easiest way to try linux is to install it from the Microsoft App Store — not joking, windows officially supports running Linux now. Here’s a random tutorial: https://adamtheautomator.com/windows-subsystem-for-linux/

Because it was mandated by our communist party!