I’ve used linux for 20 years and was generally happy. I always used my main rig to play games, so I kept windows since my tries to switch to linux for gaming ended unsatisfying. Last October I decided to get rid of ms products and said goodbye to windows for good. Gaming on linux today works great. I am constantly amazed how great everything works and happy pretty much every time I turn on the PC. A big thank you to everyone involved in linux development!

I broke nearly every distro, may have been KDEs fault.

Now on Fedora Kinoite 40 it works like a charm.

In a nutshell,

Zorin > Ubuntu > Debian > Arch, while (always) pestering google about trivial stuff, “How do I install something on Linux?” – “Oh look! A package manager! Which package manager is the best?” – “Distros have their specific packages? Cool!”, etc.

the experience was wonderful. I learned I lot about computer, found new forums and IRC servers. It brought a new world to me.

I am still a newbie though. I don’t know much about Linux just enough to make it work for me.

Generally good, but fairly troublesome. I dualboot Pop_OS!, and the install was a nightmare. The live USB wouldn’t boot until I unplugged every USB device. Once it started, I could plug them back in. Then, when actually installing, the info about the various partitions I would need was apparently pretty out of date (recommend partition sizes were way off).

Once installed, though, it’s been really nice, albeit a fair bit more complicated. The only real issue I’ve had so far is that, in Unity games run through wine, video streamed in-game won’t play.

I started on Ubuntu if I recall correctly, then made the jump to Fedora at some point. I think Manjaro was in there too? That was my first exposure to KDE Plasma

At some point I installed Arch in a VM and then I was hooked. These days I daily drive Arch with Hyprland (apps and whatnot provided by Plasma)

Started on Arch Linux for some reason back in 2016, I just decided to throw out my Windows and install it (Don’t really remember what was going through my head, or why I wanted to install Linux, other than I was reading the r/linux subreddit wiki at the time). I was trapped in a TTY trying to install the thing for maybe a week, and after 9 reinstallations, I got Arch working and got a Weston compositor session running under Wayland. After realizing Weston was more a tech-demo than something I was actually supposed to use, I installed X11 and Gnome, which was cool for approximately 3 minutes before I decided to replace it with some minimal window manager instead. Can’t remember if it was i3wm or something else, but i3wm sounds right; and later I messed around with some tilers like StumpWM, ratpoison, and HerbstluftWM.

After about 3 months, something in Arch broke (systemd was not reaping processes properly was what I concluded at the time, no idea what the actual problem was but I ended up with a bunch of zombie processes), and I decided to install Gentoo as my second Linux distribution. After installing Gentoo, I entered a stage which is colloquially know as “config hell” where I overconfigured everything to the point of breaking something, and could never figure out what I actually broke because everything was so overconfigured. After recompiling the whole system, everything was still broken, so I reinstalled Gentoo, this time less overconfigured, but still somewhat overconfigured (It didn’t help I was also running a full self-made custom kernel config with 3 months of Linux experience, I surprised the thing booted at all).

I lived in Gentoo for around a year using HerbstluftWM, but eventually I grew tired of how much maintenance Gentoo required and just wanted some sane defaults. This led me to installing OpenBSD, which I guess was the right decision for me because I’m still using it to this day (7 years!), and is where I gained the majority of my knowledge about using Unix thanks to the wonderful documentation. Initially I didn’t like the ports system because it didn’t have as many knobs as Gentoo’s portage did (Gentoo’s portage is more modeled after FreeBSD’s ports than OpenBSD’s ports it seems), but I came around to enjoying hacking ports with my own patches instead of using preconfigured knobs. Eventually my porting skills got good enough that I now officially mantain a couple OpenBSD ports (games/stone-soup, www/pipe-viewer), and that list is likely to grow. I switched between some other window managers (ratpoison, JWM, FVWM2) before settling on OpenBSD’s in-house cwm. I purchased a VPS also running OpenBSD, and self host various things like email, git, ZNC, web/http, and IPsec/VPN. Eventually, I grew tired of not having games to play (OpenBSD doesn’t support WINE), so I bought a Steam Deck that I use as both my gaming desktop and handheld. I also bought a Pinephone from Pine64 which currently uses PostmarketOS (I hope to run OpenBSD on it some day though).

tl;dr use Arch as your first Linux distribution and you’ll end up as an OpenBSD ports maintainer I guess

I’m on Guix, so you tell me…

Hint: I can barely write any decent Scheme.

I guess it all depends on perspective.

I love that it’s free compared to those $10-20k licenses for similar systems.

I love that there are good package managers.

I love that it’s open source.

I hate that it’s GPLv2.

I hate how bloated the kernel is. I’d like it to fit into main memory.

I hate how it’s not POSIX-certified.

Fun fact you can join it to AD and access network resources

What’s this? A software app store?

It’s ironic how on Linux, my distro’s app repository is always my first stop when looking for software, while on Mac or Windows it’s my last resort.

Commercialized app stores are full of spam, and Microsoft and Apple both decided that app store apps should not have the full capabilities of normal apps. It’s the exact opposite on Linux.

Every year I upgrade to something better and found the past distros very disgusting.

6/2021: Ubuntu, Debian, Mint (for ~15 minutes), Kali Linux 2022: Ubuntu, Lubuntu, RHEL, Fedora (for some days), Arch 2023: Artix (for some days), Gentoo, Alpine (Alpine is the best distro I’ve ever seen), switched to OpenBSD in the end of the year!

2024: OpenBSD. Have a machine running FreeBSD but currently unplugged and haven’t learned anything from FreeBSD.

OpenBSD is so simple and I started reading man pages when I use it. I’m starting to learn tmux. Started to learn sed. Started writing some shell scripts. I can confirm I wasted time using all the distros above except Alpine. Except when I compile the linux kernel on Gentoo. I switched to OpenBSD without any problem. I quickly forgot the /dev/sda1 and learned disklabel. Not using vim without any problem, and I learned how to use vi efficiently.

OpenBSD is not too hard for any “newbies” that can read English. They can type “help” and it will open help(1). When they have read help(1) they will read afterboot(8). afterboot(8) is just comprehensive. It’s a pity that package management is about the end of this man page, but package management is just simple: pkg_add and pkg_delete package-name. They may read pkg_add(1) and pkg_delete(1) when they want to upgrade.

Default X11 window manager is fvwm. xterm is launched when X is started. You can move windows with mouse. Minimized windows also appear on the grey screen. But you have to double click much. This is usable. cwm is also available when you want a wm that can be used with a keyboard. It is much efficient.

2025: plan 9 ???

I use Linux servers on my job and I did a ton of research. I felt confident in moving from Windows to Linux and for the most part it went very well. Most distributions provide a live environment is the installer is extremely easy.

I had a ton of small little problems with Nvidia, Wayland, audio… I ended up fixing most of them, or at least apply some workarounds but it was a painful experience.

Gaming works really really really well, which I found surprising.

What’s this? A software app store? Swell! I no longer need to download stuff off from dodgy sites or numbingly installing everything manually!

In what year are you in? macOS and Windows both have App Stores. Windows has the built-in winget package manager, similar to apt that has open contributions on github and all the software in the world.

How was your experience with this Unix-like wonder? In a home user manner and/or a business use manner?

I use both Linux and Windows actively and macOS from time to time. Linux works really well it’s free and I love it and it is definitely great if your workflow is all browser-based and/or you don’t have to collaborate on a very specific industry with very proprietary tools as default that everyone expect to be used. If you’re in such industries and people expect to share complex MS Word, Excel, Adobe, Autodek etc. files then Linux isn’t for you, you’ll be in more compatibility pain than anyone should be in.