When I saw Windows 11.

Uni, around 2019! Had a professor on the web team who encouraged all students to do the entire uni education on Linux.

All tools and course material was tailored to work on Linux. Hand-ins, exams and anything related either functioned or had custom solutions built by the teachers, student and professors on the web programme.

Everything was open source and if we found any bugs we could just open issues on GitHub. Weekly hand-ins were done on the student server on your own instance of the web server.

In almost every aspect i think that programme was so well tailored for learning real web dev work.

As a FreeBSD desktop user from the mid 90s, I held out for a LONG time before installing my first linux OS in my home. I still don’t really feel comfortable on any of my linux boxes, but I guess it’s been well more than ten years now.

When I got frustrated with Windows around 2019 and I had spare time I decided that enough is enough and spent a couple of days to take the time to learn Arch Linux and all of its quirks.

Around 2020 I started tinkering with NixOS as well which culminated as my NixOS configuration.

Although at this point I’m going back to Arch Linux as I actually know how to fix and make modifications faster and better than I could on NixOS.

I’ve been using Linux since 1995, but had an on-again-off-again relationship with it for a while, because I wanted to play games. So it was usually dual boot. But in 2007 I bought a PS3 and have been gaming on PlayStation exclusively since then, which allowed me to go fulltime Linux. I also worked a lot with OpenBSD and still miss pf, which is such a lovely firewall. iptables is horrible shit compared to it (I am aware of nftables, but it’s too new to replace the long years of iptables).

It’s 1995!
Now that I’m older stress weighs on my shoulders
Heavy as boulders but I told ya

Last year sometime. Frustrated by Microsoft’s latest tomfoolery, I decided, “eh, might as well give Linux another shot, it’s been a decade or so since the last time.”

So I booted up my fifteen-year-old desktop computer as a testbed before I put it on my daily driver laptop. First I booted it into Windows (7, because that’s how old it is and it couldn’t hack Windows 10) to see if there was any data I needed to pull off of it, and predictably it was an awful experience. Slow? Try glacial. Constantly paging out of memory. I had to put it in safe mode without networking just to get it to boot all the way up. I grabbed everything I thought I needed and breathed a sigh of relief that I was done with that.

Then I put Linux Mint on it. And…wow.

Like, I knew Linux did a good job on older systems, but this was unbelievable to me. It was snappy and responsive in a way that it has literally never been. The thing ran like butter. I was flying around that OS, installing games, setting up backups, even trying my hand at a bit of light self-hosting.

But the real kicker came when I installed VirtualBox. See, I have one program that I still need Windows for; an Adobe program that some people I work with still use. So I installed VirtualBox and put Windows 10 on there, fully expecting to clown on Windows for a few minutes but just hoping I’d see enough to know whether it would be usable on my laptop.

But no. Windows 10—which, when I tried a decade ago, couldn’t run on that machine at all—ran almost flawlessly in VirtualBox on Linux. I mean, it wasn’t the quickest thing ever, but for a modern build of a more-or-less modern OS on a computer older than my marriage, it was honestly amazing.

So, when did I go full Linux nerd? When I discovered that it can run Windows better than Windows can.

There are a few other things, too. The software manager, the customizability, the lack of ads, the unobtrusive updates… And at some point along the way, I realized that it actually felt like my computer, which is a feeling I haven’t felt in ages.

It’s a great feeling.

I got my start with linux as a student looking to do astronomy. I didn’t have any issues with windows that got me to switch; just liked it more for its own sake. I think I went full nerd when I realized how to compile my own stuff and set environment variables. I also really liked having a package manager.

In 2004 grandpa gave me an old laptop from 1995 to play around with. I wanted it to be faster so I tried using g.ho.st. That was a terrible experience, too slow of internet, cloud computing was never gonna work. After that I tried suse. They had this fancy iso builder at the time that let me pick all the packages I want from the repo and have them present on my ISO.

That’s started my journey, outside of school I’ve had Linux exclusively since.

I’ve been running 99% Linux for ten ish years or so. I finally got rid of the last windows vm a few months ago. The one hold out piece of software now runs in wine properly and I got to delete that vm.

Every few years since the mid 2000s I’ve dual booted Linux (often Ubuntu) briefly before removing it again and just using windows and then I stopped for many years. I’ve gradually become less happy with windows, increasing ads and tracking but then the announcement of recall made it clear I had to switch. I was going to wait but then windows 24H2 update broke my Bluetooth audio so that was the last straw.

I installed endeavourOS on a separate drive and really liked it. GNOME at first. Then I installed nixOS and for me was almost perfect but I couldn’t get a few things to work like PIAs GUI app and doing some software development was more awkward than I liked.

Now I’m back on endeavourOS but with KDE plasma and it’s great.

0.92

Some time after I went OpenBSD and then FreeBSD nerd.

When I “solved” teering on nvidia by installing i3 and started using only terminal, because any gui program was still freezing.