The windows machine was keeping secrets and refusing to do what I tell it

I want to run some code, let’s have a discussion about admin privileges and finding the correct shell app and oh shit “something went wrong”

Linux just doesn’t say no, if I do something wrong it tells me exactly why it was wrong. So I guess visibility is why I jumped

My windows 10 install broke itself after running an overnight update. I tried to fix it using the Microsoft tools and stuff I read online and ended up needing to do a fresh install. I couldn’t recover the windows activation key.

At the time I’d been listening to the WAN show talk about their upcoming 30 day linux challenge. So I thought fuck it why wait until that comes out to see if linux is good. I shouldn’t have to re buy a license for an operating system that just killed itself.

And I picked mint. It was an absolutely horrible experience, nothing worked out of the box and I spent at least 5+ hours troubleshooting display, WiFi and drive mounting. I got it to s point where I was happy and I could do what I wanted. Then decided to try out some other distros. Tried endeavour, it was broken out of the box. Tried Ubuntu and realised I do not like gnome. Tried garuda it was ok but ugly and WiFi didnt work. Tried arch… Did NOT know enough to get a nicely working system. Then I tried Manjaro and it had a nice clean KDE plasma setup out of the box everything worked, updates were lighting fast so I stayed on that for a year and loved it.

When the 30 LTT linux video came out I was shocked by how bad their experience was. For me I had a working system minus a few bits of hardware not working and software was pretty easy to install and worked very well. I was also mad that Linus uninstalled his GUI and then blamed linux dude you ran that command without reading it. Thats day 1 shit you learn. You have some responsibility to know your system.

I’ve been purging all big tech from my life as much as possible. Meta was easy because they don’t really offer anything. It took quite a while to eliminate google. Once that was done, it was Microsoft’s turn.

I’ve also been absolutely fed up with Windows over the years. Each release somehow gets worse and more clunky and in my way of doing what I’m trying to do. So on top of being untrustworthy, using my data and generally being capitalist assholes, Microsoft’s product itself is shit.

I installed Mint and seen what innovation actually looks like. I also realized most of the things I love about android are actually features of linux under the hood. So I intend to jump on the linux phone bandwagon as well.

I’ve been using Photoshop for over 20 years. That’s been the hardest part. GIMP is impressive but for as long as it’s been around it’s still a little rough around the edges here and there. I’m learning to deal with it though.

A long time ago, there was this misconception that “linux” was terminal-only. You know, like the interface sysadmins and Hollywood hackers use.

A small long-defunct non-tech forum I used to be a member of had a tech sub-forum, and in that sub-forum there was a new post one day introducing “linux” and covering some basics. It was full of DE screenshots (GNOME 2 and KDE 3) specifically to dispel the “terminal-only” misconception.

That was almost ~20 years ago. And the rest is history. I never liked Windows or M$ anyway for both technical and non-technical reasons. So it wasn’t that hard to convince me.

I almost exclusively use the terminal for everything except web browsing now, and don’t use a DE. So you could say that I myself ironically became a perpetuator of the misconception 😉

I was in college at the time, I went to class, which I needed my laptop for. I believe it was windows 10? I opened the laptop to start my work, and windows immediately, unprompted, without permission, began an update - an update that took longer than the class lasted. This should never happen, and for me it never does on any Linux distribution I’ve used.

Mostly because I don’t like gaming on windows and I want things to work without having to tweak every single security feature and all the junk I turned off every single time there’s an update. I’m also tired of MS breaking things with updates and generally using the public as free beta testers to the detriment of their products.

Also, fuck 365.

A little over a decade back, I had a laptop that came with Windows 8 but didn’t actually meet the specs for it. I installed Ubuntu back then to get the thing to run reliably, and it performed really well that way.

On my home computers I kept using Windows, but with the trend toward less ability to control your system, more ads and AI nonsense being baked in, and just general bloat, when they announced the end of life for Win 10, I decided I’d switch to dual booting Linux Mint at the start of the summer. (I’m a teacher, and it seemed like the best time was when I could deal with my computer being on the fritz for a while if I messed it up.)

I set it up as dual boot because I figured here and there I’d still need to go back to Windows for some specific reason or other but that was back in early July and I’ve yet to encounter a reason why I really need Windows, so I genuinely haven’t booted to Windows even once since the time I originally setup the dual boot and made sure it was working.

Honestly, so much of what we do these days takes place in browser windows that it barely feels different, other than it runs a little smoother and I occasionally have to run an old windows app through Lutris. (Had it installed anyway for games from GOG, and it turns out it works just as well for non-gaming apps.)

because windows removed focus stealing prevention

I upgraded from 7 to 10 right around when it released. Microsoft got me with the “Free upgrade offer”.
Problem is, I had a very shitty ADSL connection, so when Windows Update started doing its thing, it would make it almost impossible to do anything else on the web.
There were many times I would turn the computer on to do something, only to be unable to load any webpage because Windows Update was eating all my bandwidth.
And to make things worse, Pausing updates, Active Hours and other controls only came out much later, early Win 10 had none of it. When it wanted to update you had basically no control over it. There were some registry hacks to disable updates, but those didn’t really stick for some reason, so many times I applied one and thought the issue was fixed for good only to come back to my PC days later and face the same issue again.

Eventually I was like “Why the hell do I have to keep fighting my computer?”. You can imagine the shock it was coming from Win 7.
I had tried Linux before all of this (Ubuntu 14.04) and while I did enjoy the experience I didn’t stick with it, but I kept the idea in the back of my mind. Some time later I setup a dual-boot, and year after year I relied less on Windows (and Linux kept getting better) until Linux became my daily driver. Fast forward to today: Windows isn’t even a dual-boot install anymore, just a VM I barely use :)

I grew up with my brother throwing used computer parts on my bed whenever he upgraded something, in case I wanted to reuse them. He also gave me a copy of Windows 98, and later XP that I reused every time I did a major hw upgrade. But one day the XP CD-rom was just too old, but I was too young to start working and had no money, and so Linux came into my life.

…because I didn’t want to be a victim of the tech industry anymore.

I was one of those people who switched during the early Ubuntu days of 2006/2007.

First heard about it and gave it a try in 1995 when a friend told me about it in college. I was/am a graphics artist so it wasn’t an option then. But I knew then that it probably would eventually get there and windows would keep getting more evil and that I would switch. So I started switching from proprietary software solutions to open source whenever possible so that it would be easier to do when the day arrived.

So… in 2006 I was hearing a lot of talk about linux finally being easier to use and setup with a lot of gui functionality. Which is required for graphics work. Although, I had adobe at work and was there most of the week, so I didn’t really care anymore about having that at home. And the stuff I played around with was blender and the like.

I was also getting out of the habit of gaming. I had been really into FPS. Mainly the half-life mod “Day of Defeat” where I was doing the clam competition thing. But I burnt out on it and didn’t really care as much. But I did dual boot for a while with gaming in mind. It was about a year later when I realized that I hadn’t booted into Windows for several months (and I needed the hard drive space) that I scrubbed it.

So here I am.

I still use Ubuntu variations mostly. Although I intend on switching to Devuan. I’ve been experimenting with it on a laptop to get it just the way I want it before switching my desktops. I’m still struggling with btrfs snapshots. I thought I had it recently, then I broke it somehow. I’m still not entirely clear what the whole snapshot thing is doing. But I look forward to getting there soon. I hope to make this my final linux setup for the next decade at least.

I kept disabling features and they kept getting re-enabled by updates.

I installed WSL to run gcc and it bricked my graphics drivers, requiring a full reinstall.

Requiring a microsoft account to access my own computer.

App recommendations (ads) in the start menu.

Maybe there were workarounds for this but I shouldnt have to trouble shoot that kind of stuff for a product that values itself at such a price. I just couldnt feel like an owner of things I have purchased.

Fed up with Microsoft. I had a windows 10 computer they said couldn’t update to windows 11, and they said Recall was coming, so I said fuck it. Switched to mint, and now I’m trying pop!_os.

Way back like 10+ years ago I ran Ubuntu for a while, but I play a lot of video games and support was lacking. Wine, proton, and other tools have come a long way since then.

I had dabbled with Linux over the years, starting with Lubuntu reviving an old Dell 120L during college. When I moved to university they gave us all Macbooks to work with in the IT department. OS X never clicked with me, so I set up a VM with Linux to perform my day to day work. I instantly became the Linux guy because of that… so any tickets that came in for Linux troubleshooting got routed to me.

It just sort of made sense to try a Linux build after that, since I couldn’t afford a Windows license after I lost access to MSDN.