Back in 2003 my sister needed a computer of her own to do schoolwork on. We couldn’t afford a new computer and the only other system we had in the house other then the laptop I had just bought was still running Windows 98 on a failing hard drive and the Windows install disk we had was borked.
I replaced the hard drive, started looking for options and found Ubuntu. And it made sense to me. Once I wrapped my head around the idea of the console, everything made sense in a way that Windows and DOS before that didn’t. And I had the freedom to modify anything I didn’t like, a freedom you don’t really have in Windows or Mac OS.
And it was fast! This ancient computer (AMD Athlon, 256 MB Ram, Ubuntu) was running circles around my new laptop (Pentium 4, 1 GB Ram, Windows XP).
I wound up switching my laptop from XP to Ubuntu and ran smack into why some people complain about linux being hard to use. Some of my brand new hardware just didn’t work in linux. WiFi, no go ever (proprietary firmware), audio, ditto. I liked Ubuntu well enough that I decided to work around the nonfunctional hardware with usb WiFi and a audio expansion card until the next update to Ubuntu when the built in audio just started working.
Since then I have been using Linux as a primary OS for most of the systems that I use on a daily basis. When ever I am using something else I constantly find my self missing the flexibility that Linux based OSs offer me.
And, yes, the hardware situation has gotten considerably better since then, as long as your not running bleeding edge hardware.
I'm running Arch with dual Nvidia cards. It's nice to have a distro that actually updates it's Nvidia driver on a regular basis without having to manually do it and breaking things. Any rolling release should work just fine.
At a certain point I’ve heard that being a developer on Linux just feels more comfortable, and I’ve decided to give it a shot. Never looked back since then. My enjoyment of using a computer skyrocketed, and it gave me flexibility to do a lot of things I couldn’t do properly before
If using steam, there’s a steam snap project that also aims to upgrade mesa stack more, so that can use newer stack to play with 22.04 host installation.
I am disappointed in the direction RH has moved in, but what makes it evil? I am certain that a good portion of their work will make its way into open source projects. So it seems to me that it is a good thing that we all hope would be better. And I thought you had to opt into the Fedora telemetry. Is that not the case? If they are using it for design improvements it’s all to the good. If Fedora is selling the information and they force or trick users into it, then yes, Fedora will deserve its inevitable demise.
Not making their sources generally available for download is NOT the same as closed source. The only ones subject to their new licensing agreements are their paying customers. They are very much pushing against the spirit of FOSS licenses but there is no potential for some Joe on the street to get sued for looking at their source code.
You think you are talking to a very different person than you actually are.
Not making their sources generally available for download is NOT the same as closed source. The only ones subject to their new licensing agreements are their paying customers. They are very much pushing against the spirit of FOSS licenses but there is no potential for some Joe on the street to get sued for looking at their source code.
Yah I don’t get it. I don’t think people realize how much of the stuff they run is developed by Red Hat. I think people still think its coders in their free time contributing but alot of the kernel and other big projects are done by people who are paid.
For me it was the philosophy behind Free (as in freedom) software. Call me a Richard Stallman fan, but I would love to live in a world were everyone is free to:
Run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
Study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
Distribute copies of your modified versions to others.
I’m actually interested too; are you looking for a desktop or laptop? My biggest hurdle is laptop availability and finding decent places to start shopping. How have you approached it? I know it’s not ideal but I prefer laptops for work.
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.
Ubuntu 22.04 has ray tracing support for AMD RX 6000 graphics cards, but the performance is terrible. You can install Mesa 23.1 from a PPA and it will work much better. Be sure to take a backup in case something breaks and you need to revert to the stock version. I had some trouble getting the 32 bit Mesa libraries to install, which are required for Steam.
I can run Quake II RTX at 50-60 fps in 1080p on my RX 6700 XT using Mesa 23.1.3 and Linux kernel 5.15.
I switched for two reasons. First, I don't like how Microsoft is trying to attach everything to an online microsoft account. I prefer local control of my OS. I know there is a workaround for this, but it isn't worth the effort.
Second, I am Cheap. My latest hardware is a decade out of date, and linux makes better use of the limited resources that I have.
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.
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).
My AMD graphics card had atrocious driver support in Windows, and every time windows forced the half-yearly big update on me, my PC would go into a BSOD loop and I would not be able to run windows. It was becoming a massive annoyance and a humongous time waster.
So I switched to Linux Mint. No hardware problems at all. With the graphics card working, I played a video game that literally worked better in Linux than Windows.
Then I bought a new laptop and dual booted different distributions. But every time I log into Windows after doing something in Linux (Fedora KDE spin), my windows clock would get messed up. There are professional softwares I have to use that only work on Windows, so completely switching to linux was not an option, and windows boots up Much faster than linux.
So when I needed some space for an online multiplayer game, I got rid of the dual boot. Now I run everything using WSL2.
Windows remains the default platform for small developer teams, and large video games. So it takes a large incovenience to abandon it. And just a little bit of friction is enough to make me switch back to windows. Sorry if I disappointed you guys.
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