Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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why did you switch? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey everyone,

I am exploring switching over to Linux but I would like to know why people switch. I have Windows 11 rn.

I dont do much code but will be doing some for school. I work remote and go to school remote. My career is not TOO technical.

What benefits caused you to switch over and what surprised you when you made the switch?

Thank you all in advanced.

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[–] hunte 1 points 1 year ago

I was studying software engineering so I knew about linux for a while but never went ahead to try it as a workstation OS. I started to really dive into it when Windows 10 came out. Win10 is now regarded as one of the "good" editions but that kind of wasn't the case at release time, switching from Win7 it was bloated with a whole lot of unnecessary new "features" and weird changes. Win7 got it's end-of life announced and having Vista and more recently Win8 in memory I just about had it with Microsoft's shenanigans so I started looking for an alternative. I never really ran a doal-boot setup, I had an old little thinkpad to experiment on and in the first year I ran it through basically all major and minor distros I could find. The hopping was real 😄

I was hooked, loved everything about the freedom and it was refreshing building my own OS from scratch so I settled with arch for a while. At first with arch based distros on my main rig as training wheels (Manjaro and Endeavour) and then plain arch with Qtile and then KDE.

Nowadays especially because of my work I rather much prefer more stable experiences, I switched to Fedora after a pacman -Syu borked GIMP in a particularly annoying time (still love you Arch, no hard feelings ❤️) and just now after about 2 years I installed debian with all the RHEL stuff going on. Kinda making a whole circle in this journey.

I was just thinking about this because I have to use windows sometimes at work that linux really brought back the fun for me in computing. Despite all the flaws and issues that we are dealing with like the whole packaging question and things like that, it is just so refreshing to deal with these issues knowing that I can deal with them, rather than waiting how Microsoft will make those choices for me. For me having Windows or a Mac is like having half of a computer where I just have no choice but accept certain things as a paying customer no less.