There was a ton of software sourcecode posted to the comp.sources.unix usenet group that I wanted to check out. The problem is all that software was in shar format, and there was no way to extract those files on msdos. I found Yggdrasil Linux on CD at a local software store and decided to check it out. Been using Linux in one form or another ever since.

The constant OneDrive ads. I could ignore the fact that W11 is essentially spyware, but it kept fucking annoying me with ads and I had enough of it. After programming in Linux, I don’t want to go back to W11. Troubleshooting is so much easier bc the CLI is heavily used. Package managers make my life easier too. Linux is good 👍

Vendors don’t always update hardware drivers for other versions of those proprietary operating systems. Linux doesn’t depend on vendors directly for updated drivers. Now I can use my old hardware without being stuck on an old OS version.

Well if I remember correctly I was actually first told to use Solaris (Unix) because I knew just a teeny bit of HTML and had done some programming on my TI calculator. I had to use a Sunray workstation and learn ssh and emacs.

My boss took pity on me and bought me a computer (to be paid off with some extra hours). I attempted to install Debian on it, and failed. I tried Ubuntu and it worked (somewhere around 2005ish). It was all downhill from there. I did try some other distributions like arch but by that point I had a laptop and while I technically did get WiFi working and it was fun, I preferred the better out of the box hardware support you got from Ubuntu back in those days.

I’ve stuck when Ubuntu for the most part ever since. Even though the Linux guru at my university called it “Linux for office rats”. I’ve tried some other variants like Mint and while I liked them more eventually I’d have to deal with the fact that the trickier stuff I want to run like CUDA just seems easier to get working. Pre built packages usually target Ubuntu.

I’ve played with alternative window managers like i3 here and there but once again I find it hard to make sure the real basic WiFi/sound/etc works the way I want it to and end up writing my own i3 status scripts or running with some sort of gnome-session thingy.

At the moment by desktop is basically “I don’t care but there are shortcuts for my browser, graphical emacs, and the kitty terminal”.

I’m not an evangelist because let me tell you from experience: your in-laws will not actually thank you for installing a low resource xfce based distribution on their computer. They will be unhappy and you’ll get support calls. They want windows, just free.

But for me personally it’s the most productive environment for what I do. I do not find macOS to be more stable or frankly to be more coherent. I love their font rendering and hidpi support though.