What made you switch to Linux in the first place?

Garuda Community
21

Ya, my favorite Windows software gyp was Norton Anti-Virus with “free updates for life”. Of course the free updates sure didn’t last very long.

The sad part is that Linux programmers are now starting to adopt the Windows software rental model. Tiny Media Manager for Linux was a good freeware product that I liked and used for a fair while. If they’d turned it into a single purchase program I’d have paid the purchase price. However they switched to a yearly subscription model, and there’s no way I let blood suckling companies constantly bleed me. It just doesn’t sit right with me.

Single purchase, sure.
Rental, no friggin way!!!

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22

That part about Norton (you mean Norton Spyware Virus) actually remembered me another fact I dont like Win preinstalled devices.

They always come now-days with McAfee… My girl bought a new laptop and ofc McAfee was there. I run L4 and L7 FW at my home that stuff how it flooded the NW and tried to identify devices in a VLAN was just crazy :smiley:

Luckily I block such stuff on DNS an L7FW by default, cause this is worse than google based IoT devices…

OFC she on my request did uninstall it.

23

Well back in the day it wasn’t like that. I’m talking about the days when Norton AV came on floppy disks. :grin:

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24

That was indeed prior my time hehehe

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25
  1. I had played around with linux servers during college (around the year 2000), and since then I liked to play around with it whenever I got the chance.
  2. Over the years I had customized Windows XP exactly the way I wanted to, using tools like nLite to get rid of crap (including Internet Explorer) and Total Commander Ultima Prime as my centre of operations. At some point (around 2007) it became more common to use linux on the desktop. I used to visit Lifehacker a lot in those days, and it was heavily promoting Ubuntu. So I decided to install Ubuntu next to XP, and eventually got rid of the latter.
  3. A couple of years later I received my first work laptop (prior to that we were using desktops only). I decided to give it the linux treatment. Full disclosure: I did run my aforementioned favorite XP setup in a VM in order to build Windows tools.
  4. At some point during 2013 Ubuntu started to show Amazon ads, and around the same time it decided to ship its own desktop manager instead of Gnome 2. Since I didn’t like either of those decisions, I started to distro hop (using VMs), and was initially primarily focused on performance. Later on my focus shifted towards a fair balance between performance and usability. Eventually I ended up using Mint (Cinnamon flavor), and have done so for almost ten years (on both my private and work machines).
  5. A little over three years ago I had gotten a bit tired of having to wait for new packages, so Arch based distros became more attractive to me. I had tried Manjaro, and liked it quite a bit, but not enough to take the leap. While listening to the Linux Unplugged podcast a little over three years ago, Garuda Linux got mentioned. Now that’ is a distro that stuck. I installed it on my work machine at first (Gnome edition), and eventually on my private one too (first Cinnamon, eventually Gnome as well). Now I’m switching back and forth between Gnome and Cosmic on my private machine, mostly to keep an eye on the latter.

Hm, it seems I forgot to mention all the blue screens of death I had to endure from 2004 onwards, and the spyware plague that got hold of Windows users around that time. Perhaps this is still the case, but back then you couldn’t just plug your ethernet cable in your machine before installing Windows, since you would already be infected by the time the installation was completed.

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26

Manjaro broke my spirit for a time :frowning:

27

The writing was on the wall when I noticed in my former Comodo firewall how Windows started pinging my computer from Redmonds, WA every five minutes. :worried:This was around 2016-17. Then I found myself constantly in the services and task manager to disable and turn off processes and procedures I never directed to be turned on or installed. :angry: Very annoyed if I tried to change privacy read-write settings on files when logged in as admin (no other users used the computer) and the Windows system would tell me I did NOT have admin privileges. :rage:

Been on Garuda since 2020 but started with Mint. Garuda’s performance, aesthetics, & customization liberties reign supreme yet continue to improve! :dragon: :dove: :penguin: :dragon_face:

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28

I tried Linux out forever ago (late 90s?) but then got out of it as I spent tons of years in non-computer based science education.

But over the past year I got back into programming, which somehow lead me to linux again.

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29

honestly.cant remember it correctly and dont judge me lol.

any novell linux or openSuse any old one who has a TUX Pingu as startup image blurry and it worked to play CD images without game copy… no cd … =)

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30

I was in college and my laptop was stolen. Work had an extra HDD I could have. I was border line homeless between classes and work and the only laptop available was a broken dell laptop my mom had. HDD failed.

Linux mint was all I could afford.

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31

Not an interesting story …

I found about it in a computer book … when I was in 6 th grade and I wanted to try it out … and hence downloaded and installed it alongside windows … and have did it many times just in a month… but once while playing with partitions … because I was kid of 6th grade … and had a peanut sized brain … I mistakenly deleted the boot partition of widows (if I remember correctly )

after I had no other choice but to keep using linux … as I was afraid to tell my father that I did a mistake in my laptop … because I thought he will scold me … :sweat_smile:

Fun fact

And it was the best mistake of my life … :upside_down_face:

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32

And now you can flex with “btw I use Arch based Hyprland…”

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33

Well… I don’t do flexing … it creates burden … in hostel anyone will come to my room to see me how do I use linux … and as I always use terminal for everything with terminal multiplexer and neovim …

Ahh… it feels like hacker movie for others … :smiling_face_with_tear:
And really had destroyed my sanity … :grimacing:

So I most of the time prefer nowadays to be quite … :sweat_smile:

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34

Sanity is overrated anyways. :crazy_face:

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35

I am a dual Setup User.

1x Disk Windows for Gaming
1x Disk Linux for productivity
1x Disk Windows Data (games and windows specific applications)
1x Disk Shared Storage between Windows and Linux

Whole separate encrypted Notebook for work.
No work data will ever touch hardware that has Windows with kernel level applications running on it.
I don’t trust them.

Still use Windows almost daily, because I love to game. And some games are still locked down because of the proprietary anticheat.

I switched to Linux 40 % because of my job and 60 % because I hated the gilded cage of Windows and macOS.
As a developer and administrator it is pretty much “eat your own dog food”.
If you want to understand the system, you must live with it daily.

And an overwhelmingly annoyed personal beef with Microsoft / Windows.
Setting up Windows 10 or 11 these days feels like a hostage situation.

CREATE YOUR MICROSOFT ACCOUNT!!!
WE NEED TPM 2.0!
ENABLE SECURE BOOT!
GIVE ME YOU YOUR DATA, NOW!

NO! I WANT A LOCAL ACCOUNT!

To get that, disconnect the internet, restart the installer yada yada yada yada.
It is PAIN. Leave me alone!
Alone the fact, that the installer, already trys to FORCE me to connect everything to Microsoft directly and makes me jump through hoops.
Grrrrrr.

The update struggle. Please, compare any Linux distro updates with Windows.
If you still use Windows, do yourself a favor and use something like https://chocolatey.org/.

There is so much more.

I am looking forward for Valve to release SteamdeckOS / SteamOS (NOT THE OLD ONE!).
I must say, for pure gaming, the Steamdeck experience is GREAT.

BUT!
Garuda is still my go to for work and productivity.

Let me leave you with this image of the newest Windows 11 Installer:

image
image1920×2560 491 KB

Do you think they ever did any QA for this?
NO! You can never solve this captcha because of CSS styling issues and a non-scrollable browser window INSIDE THE INSTALLER!

:warning: TURN DOWN THE VOLUME! :warning:

You Have been warned!

TURN DOWN YOUR VOLUME! LAST WARNING!

https://youtu.be/wq6TKXrEZXA

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36

I started off just making a HTPC with a Raspberry Pi. Then I set one up with pihole. After seeing how much Microsoft was attempting to access my PC, and them texting me about locking my account, I decided I was done with them. My dad has a Windows laptop, so they are still trying to get in his computer. They send thousands of requests every day

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37

I dabbled in Ubuntu, then Debian, then listened to the DevOps at work who was praising Linux.

But the final nail in the coffin was when Microsoft started scraping for AI my own Word content with a shadow update of Trust Center settings.

I nuked my gaming Windows PC to turn it into a gaming Garuda PC. I also got permission to switch to Linux in work too despite working from home often.

The strange thing is that I bought an NVIDIA Super Ti 4070 before considering Linux, but once I made the switch, I have had no unfixable issues on Garuda.

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38

Used to be an Operating System junkie, key reasons, windows crashed and care of feeding it is just too time consuming. Garuda is a really sweet version of linux, love Plasma! Seems very stable when performing daily tasks. KUDOS tot he Development team!

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39

When I had enough to pull my hair trying to make an internet shared connection between the 4 computers of my flat-share using Windows XP 20 years ago. Installed an old computer (2Go HDD, yeah baby !) with a Mandrake 10.1 to use as a gateway, took me a few hours to configure iptables (not even sure I’d know how to that again today…), and problem solved. Add that I loved the free software idea, and I never looked back.

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40

Me i swapped because windows 11 was breaking pretty bad around two years back. It had some bug that made the search really slow for instance. Every action had a delay to it like back when i was running a mechanical harddrive.

On top of that i started getting all sorts of weird issues with the AMD graphics drivers crashing when i was using the disney plus app. So i figured i’d give linux a test run on my old computer just to see how it’d work. I had been using it on and off at work for ages too.

In either case i found garuda, threw it on there and everything i tried worked pretty much with minimal tinkering, some things even performed better than on my newer machine. So i ended up backing my main system up and tossing windows in the bin completely. Swapped all my email and stuff from outlook to proton and nextcloud as well.

Haven’t gone back to windows since then, though it was close a few times when random things have broken. The jump to plasma 6 was pretty rough at first especially.

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