What was the last version of Windows you used before hopping on over? This includes the Linux greybeards too.
I was on Win10 but moved over as the end of life cycle is drawing near and I do not like Win11 at all.
Another thing for this change was the forced bloody updates, bro I just wanna shut down my PC and go to bed, if I wanna update it, I’ll do it on a Saturday morning with my coffee or something.
Lastly, all the bloat crap they chuck in on there that most users don’t really need. I think the only thing I kept was the weather program.
So what’s your reasoning for the change to the reliable and funni penguin OS?
Greybeard here.
I worked for a company with a wild mix of DOS, Win 3.1, and Win 3.11. Then we got new PCs, some ethernet hubs and switches (instead of the damn coax cable with terminators) and started to move to Win95.
Win 95 was a beast. It came in a bunch of floppies. It took ages to install, and you’d find after one hour that the last floppy was corrupt. Also, on our cheap hardware (Siemens-Nixdorf Pentium PCs) sometimes the sound card or the ethernet card would go missing. Nothing short of a reinstall would solve it. Temporarily, of course.
The Win 98 came along. All our problems were solved. It was a 32 floppy install job, if memory serves. No, no CDs on our company. Still, it crashed a lot, and Microsoft Office had a tendency to simply destroy 100+ page documents when it was not crashing.
At home I used Windows, because how else am I going to play games, right? But I kept experimenting with Linux, and liked what I saw. There were many pieces missing (no USB for a very loooong time, for instance), but what was there was rock solid compared to Windows. And you could COMPILE YOUR OWN DAMN KERNEL, fer chrissake! How powerful was that?
Eventually, distros started to emerge that made some pain points go away. I remember Corel Linux, Caldera Linux, Mandrake, RedHat, etc. I settled with Debian because ‘apt-get dis-upgrade’, of course. Then Ubuntu came along and made Linux more pretty and usable for simple folk. They even sent you a free CD by mail if you asked them.
I got ever more tired of Windows nuking my boot sector, the viruses (virii?), the hunting around for drivers, the having to throw away good peripherals because windows thought were too old to support.
I made a choice and dropped Windows. I missed a lot of the gaming scene until Wine and Steam caught up with the state of the art. In the mean time I made use of emulators and had a good time playing console and arcade games.
Oh I was teased about it. Fellow IT workers (proper MSCE type people) would give me a hard time because “Linux has no future”, “Unix is dying”. I guess the future proved I was right. I now earn more that they do.
I remember thinking… Naaah, this is a gimmick, gimme 20 or so. Still have a few CDs laying around.
Working with linux?
Yes.
For me it would be harder to gather the same know-how on closed systems, because you need your company to back your training on the tools you need to do a job, spend money on the licenses, jump tool when the vendors decide to discontinue a product, etc. Where I come from, if you work for a small company you’d be expected to learn as you go. Maybe things are better now, I don’t know.
In my opinion Linux (well, FOSS actually) gave me a great big box of small LegoTM bricks and the freedom to build anything out of it. So I’ve worked with HW clusters, then virtualization was all the rage when CPUs gained more power, then containers, then container orchestration, then cloud… Complexity is increasing, but the knowledge I gained from knowing that in the end it is just a bunch of processes running on a Linux kernel makes learning the next big thing more manageable.
A friend showed me an early version of Debian, probably sometime around 1996, and it was immediately obvious that this was the way. It’s been Debian for me ever since.