deleted by creator

You may want to dual boot, especially if your classes are online. I’ve seen issue after issue using a Windows VM for online exams. But, for me it’d be worth asking a buddy or using the computer lab to get around an invasive OS as your daily driver.

I don’t have ads within my OS or start menus, I can do whatever I want with it, I can customize it with different desktop environments, if I mess anything up and need to clean install I don’t need to worry about license keys.

Also chicks dig penguins.

Windows XP looked like such a downgrade from Windows 2000. Lacked stability. Wanted something more customizable. I liked the idea of community powered software so Linux was the solution.

I got into Linux after doing my first end to end build of a pc, I needed an OS, and I wanted to learn basically how to build a server for my own amusement.

Here are the benefits: literally ninety-nine percent of everything else in the world is or seems to be based on Linux or it and Linux dated at some point. The best programs for ripping/encoding movies are on Linux. If you want to build a home media server or do home automation: Linux. If you want an easy, cheap NAS: Linux. Network wide ad blocker: Linux. You can do all of these on the same machine at the same time and it will be ‘let’s go’ and it can do it on surprisingly lower resources than Windows ever will. Once you’re comfortable with Linux, there’s a massive range of things you wanted to do or didn’t even know you wanted to do but Windows made difficult or expensive or inconvenient that are ridiculously easy to do. Even something as simple as doing backups to your primary machine are suddenly low stress. This is why when getting my friends into it, I tell them to use an old PC or laptop and go: every time–every time–they’re like “I’ve been wanting to do X and it’s right here” and me “yeah, I know, welcome to a much less frustrating digital life”.

If you can’t or won’t for whatever reason transition fully from Windows; you don’t have to. It makes life with Windows monumentally easier as you can lower your expectations on what it will do and leave it for things that for whatever reason, it has to do. Linux fits itself into your life, you don’t have to carve out spaces and overthink way too much to make a space compatible with Windows.

For me, the biggest benefit: I have ADHD and depression and was and still am perpetually bored combined with low grade misery. I combat that with learning new things, setting up projects to do, anything to occupy my mind. Linux is amazing: there’s always something new to learn and to do, because it can do anything. I want to learn how routers work; flash a router to DD-WRT and go. Get into advanced terminal and command line: Ubuntu Server, Arch, or Slackware, let’s go… Home Automation looks interesting: there’s an entire OS for that or I can run it in a container on my primary machine. I know what a container is and how to use it: awesome. Media Server, NAS? I’ve built them on single board computers and run them or I throw them on the same machine: Linux can do that.

Here’s the funny part: I went back to school to get a degree in Software Dev and decided actually, I may get three; I was barely a mid-passing student the x decades ago I tried this education thing. Since I restarted, everything is just–easy. Someone gave me a scholarship, which is insane. I tutor people, for fucks’ sake; its weird. At work, I started getting much more advanced assignments: batch? Terminal, sure, send me the design documents, I’ll test that. SOAP: never seen it before, but not really worried, send the documents and give me a demo, I can do that, I"ll write everyone a tutorial afterward.

The most important thing Linux does is it teaches you–and keeps doing it–that your computer is not an unknowable force of nature you have no ability to control or anticipate, but a tool. A complicated, advanced tool, but a tool. It shows you and tells you how each part of the tool works and why and how they fit together and you have no reason to be afraid or panic ever again. Nothing will faze you anymore: hard drive error to cataclysmic failure, motherboard short to weird beeping that never stops: okay, you have experienced it (twice) or you read about that on that site when you were looking up sed statements, you can handle this. You may have checklists for it. You recompiled kernels, which at one point you were sure were some sci-fi thing; this is not even on the radar for upsetting.

You will have the extreme pleasure of telling Windows when it gets saucy with you 'You do know I can format you down to bare drive and reinstall everything in the next five seconds? My data is safely backed up on Watson Xubuntu and I have some free time; are you really feeling it right now?" And do it. And be annoyed for the next few hours you have to do it, but you can and if you have to, will, and it’s inconvenient but you’re not worried at all because this is not some unknowable wtf black box magic; Linux taught you this is just a tool, and exactly how it works and everything will be fine.

This has been my SepTalk on me and my feelings about Linux.

Private, Secure, FOSS. I want something that I know is my own and not a $200 license to a proprietary POS operating system that spies on me. Run a packet tracker on any Windows system and watch that guy ping to Windows with every bit of telemetry you can offer.

Windows XP was the last Windows that I wanted to use. When it became totally obsolete, I upgraded to Linux Mint. I will never go back to Windows. I did not even start off using Windows. MS-DOS was my first operating system.

deleted by creator

I really didn’t want to install Vista. I didn’t like how it looked or felt so I swapped out XP for Ubuntu. I stayed until Win7 and switched back to windows, but windows 8 rolled around and I went to Fedora. I’ve been here ever since.

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/

I got tired of forced system updates and my laptop switching itself on in my backpack - purchased a used Macbook, installed Linux and never looked back. WINE has bridged the gap for running some .NET Framework (not Core) apps I used that can’t run natively under Linux.

I was surprised with how things just “worked”, although I was admittedly prepared since I was using Linux on my HTPC for a while prior.

My desktop still runs Win 10 LTSC though, mainly down to having racing simulation games and a gaming wheel.

If you’re going to use your computer for coding in school, it may be best to stick to whatever they’ll be using? Just so you don’t get left behind in a session by just trying to figure out getting a required software stack installed on your machine

It was when the third or fourth thing ended up persistently broken after an update and the whole system became too much of a pain to use. I honestly don’t recall if it was XP or Win 7.

I had used a couple of Linux flavours before for a short periods and originally planned to dual boot, but this time, just never got around to putting a new Win partition on and found that I had no need for it anyway.

When my last PC‌ died around 2019, I had to use a spare, hand-me-down laptop that could barely run windows 7. I was already exposed to Linux back then, and that I was counting on its reputation to run on a potato. I installed Ubuntu (kind of a bad choice, perhaps) on that ancient laptop and it ran surprisingly well! I didn’t look back at that point, even after that laptop died (of old age) and I got a new PC.

I got tired of windows pretending it knew better than me what i wanted, whether that was updates or security scans or fuck knows what else.

The final straw was when they shitted up the start menu with garbage and tried to shove their app store down my throat. At that point i was done.

The telemetry and ads baked into windows. I’m so sick of ads creeping into every corner of my life