Switched to linux before it became mainstream

I use linux because, in the 90s, Redhat shipped with a Star Trek game. We are not the same.
- I use Linux because of compiz fusion cube desktop. We are not the same.
  
  We are not. When I want a cubic desktop environment I reach(ed) for BeOS.
- Tux Racer go brrrr
  
  Oh, I hadn't thought of Tux Racer in ages. I think I need to play that again.
  
  Tux racer go b.....r......r........r
  I only had access to ex-corporate office hand-me-down motherboards as a kid. This was about 1 potato per 3 seconds of rendering performance (I'm 34)
- It did? Which one?
  
  I've been trying to remember but it hasn't come back to me. It was a 2D, top down, space battle game. Its possible it wasn't named after Star Trek, but you pilot a grey ship with a saucer section and nacelles to fire torpedoes and phasers at green bird of prey looking ships so...
- Was it Empire?
  
  That all sounds very familiar. The one I played was full color but it must have either been a late version of Empire or something heavily "inspired" by it.
- I think my mother played that star trek game on a time shared minicomputer.

Linux gotta mainstream wen?
Time to switch to bsd
- It’s almost time to roll out your own OS, posix is becoming too mainstream
  
  There's always TempleOS
  
  Drew DeVault just did a Unix clone as a break from “real work”
  
  That's why I plan to move my servers into an L4 clone.
  
  Heard me out
  FreeDOS
- I've used FreeBSD for about a month in 2005, and still can't stop talking about it.
  
  I dual booted it as a desktop for about 6 months around the same time, but honestly all I did is use it as a desktop and browser. I could hardly figure out how to do anything else. I've forgotten everything about the experience, and anything I happen to accidentally remember I try to also forget.
- It's close to 1 in 20 PCs nowadays. It's growing very quickly, and has been adopted in non-irrelevant amounts for a few years already.
- Plan9 from bell labs?
- I am already learning to use FreeBSD. I definitely recommend reading the official handbook, it is even a pretty great introduction to Unix overall.
- Solaris tho
  
  shutters
- *when

I switched in the late 90s to attract women. I still think it's going to work someday.
- Any time now surely
- If you're also a woman, this may work!
- That’s not a bad strategy. Just gotta add some leftist politics to the mix.
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Women_Have_Better_Sex_Under_Socialism
- Well, theres been a push to get more women into Tech so that works in your favour.
  Your job is now to lure them away from the Microsoft bros
- "Come back to my house! There's no windows! No wait- not like that- don't go!"

Let's not repeat the mistakes of (some!) old Unix-Heads and just welcome all newbies, please <3
- the correct greeting is “I use Nix BTW”, Arch is so yesterday
  
  I use ubuntu by the way 🤓
  
  I recently tried switching from Arch to NixOS and the experience I had can best be described as apalling. I have not had a new user experience this bad since my first dip into Ubuntu dependency hell back in 2016. I'd like to preface this by saying I've been a Linux user in one form or another for almost half my life at this point, and in that time this may well be the most I've struggled to get things to work.
  Apparently they have this thing called home-manager which looks pretty cool. I'd like to give that a shot. Apparently I have to enable a new Nix channel before I can install it. I'm guessing that's the equivalent of a PPA? Well, alright. nix-channel --add ..., nix-channel --update (oh, so it waits until now to tell me I typo'd the URL. Alright), and now to run the installation command and... couldn't find home-manager? Huh?? I just installed it. I google the error message and apparently you have to reboot after adding a new nix-channel and doing nix-channel --update before it will actually take effect, and the home-manager guide didn't tell me that. Ah well, at least it works now.
  I didn't want to wait for KDE and its 6 morbillion dependencies to download, so I opted for Weston. It wasn't a thing in configuration.nix (programs.weston.enable=true; threw an error and there was no page for it on the NixOS wiki), but it was available in nix-env (side note: why does nix-env -i take upwards of 30 seconds just to locate a package?), so I installed it, tried to run it, and promptly got an inscrutable "Permission denied" error with one Google result that had gone unresolved. Oh well, that's alright, I guess that's not supported just yet -- I'll install Sway instead. Great, now I have a GUI and all I need is a browser. nix-env -i firefox gave me the firefox-beta binary which displayed the crash reporter before even opening a browser window. Okay, note to self: always use configuration.nix. One programs.firefox.enable=true; and one nixos-rebuild switch later, I'm off to the races. Browser is up and running. Success! Now I'd like to install a Rust development environment so I can get back to work. According to NixOS wiki, I can copy paste this incantation into a shell.nix file and have rustup in there. Cool. After resolving a few minor hangups regarding compiler version, manually telling rustc where the linker is, and telling nix-shell that I also need cmake (which was thankfully pretty easy), I'm met with a "missing pkg-config file for openssl" error that I have absolutely no idea how to begin to resolve.
  I'm trying to stick with it, I really am -- I love the idea that I can just copy my entire configuration to a brand new install by copying one file and the contents of my home directory and have it be effectively the same machine -- but I'm really struggling here. Surely people wouldn't rave about NixOS as much as they do if it was really this bad? What am I doing wrong?
  Also unrelated but am I correct in assuming that I cannot install KDE without also installing the X server?
  
  Nix just had internal politics. Reject Nix; embrace Guix!
  "I use FOSS btw"
  
  nixos is the greatest .config file
  
  Also, Arch is sort of bullshit. For everyone that insists the Arch wiki is the pinnacle of truth, I followed it to the letter and couldn't get some stuff working. To be fair this was maybe 8 or 9 years ago, but the wiki wasn't as magical as people acted like. So like... Why bother? Oh boy, I'm gonna save a bit of space because I'm not installing a desktop environment? Who cares! It's such over kill for the average user and you're not really getting much in return. It's sort of like buying a project car to work on. It should be viewed more as a hobby for folks super interested in creating the perfect setup for themselves.

You use Linux because of your superiority complex and need to be seen as cool.
I use Linux because I'm broke.
We are not the same.
- I use Linux because I don't trust windows, I don't like the direction Microsoft is headed, and I'm bored.
  We're not the same either, but that's ok. We can still all have each other's backs.

I mean, can't it be both?
- Not if you want to apply the "we are not the same meme" format. That... Like a sith... Only deals in absolutes.
  
  So, this meme is a sith?

Least contrarian Linux user.

yay gatekeeping!
- Yeah this post is pretty cringe lol
  
  I honestly hate this meme template. It’s barely ever used for anything smart and mostly just being a gatekeeper.
  The guy saying he uses Linux because of some ‘90s game is way better.

I use Linux because of the 3D desktop cube. Who doesn’t love the cube!
- And wobbly windows
- Beryl?
  
  Wtf is her problem with the cube?
- ahhh i remember being a bored teenager spending his life customizing his desktop too...
  Nowadays I just want a working system where I can get things done, haven't touched my desktop environment settings in a while and certainly don't use things like cubes or wobbly windows anymore.
- Sisko and Picard.

- Mmmmm fresh pasta.
  For me it is very weird, no one introduced me formally to Lemmy(no one I knew run or heard of it), it felt like it was a legend. I never really got to know how good it was and always felt Reddit and Twitter were lacking, never really in control of your memes, never happy with my content, always downvoting stuff. The years went by and my curiosity only became larger as Reddit and Twitter experience was getting worse and worse. I already had experience shit posting and trolling on 4chan since my school days, so last year I signed up to Lemmy and posted my first meme. Next thing I know my feed is breathing again, the grass was definitely greener here. So I switched for both reasons.

I use Linux because Hackintosh is a dying platform and it only takes about 800 hours to get it almost as good.
- This brought me memories. In college I had a Dell Mini with Intel atom 1st get. It was useless to run engineering apps like matlab or solidworks
  I installed OSx86 and those apps ran a lot better using parallels than running natively on Windows, I was even able to play some games on it

I liked that one band before they became popular. That's what you sound like.
- I listen to band's music because I like their music.
  You listen to band because you hate music.
  We are not the same?

You're absolutely right. Microsoft has systematically killed every reason I have for having their software on my pc. I'm not switching to linux because linux got better (although it certainly has). I'm ditching windows because windows now sucks more than I can bare.

My one thing I feel like I can brag about in tech circles is that I switched to Linux in 1995 (Linux kernel version 1.2.1), and I haven't looked back since. This was even before Windows 95 was released.
- Yeah, but, like, I use Arch btw
- ah, but did you use Stage 1 Gentoo? huh? huh?
  
  That was before Gentoo

Both? Both is good
- Stop stealing my brainwaves!!!
  But you are correct, nonetheless.

People used Linux because Windows bad in the 2000s
- Have you seen windows 11?
  
  Is it so bad? You can turn off junk like every other Windows. As for the anticompetitive behavior Microsoft has been doing that since DOS
  
  Not really any different than 10

I use Linux cuz I was bored one summer
- That'll probably be me this summer once I organize and backup my files
  
  I didn't even backup. I just went for it

It's interesting how the open source model and enshittification have pulled both OSes in opposite directions. I used to look forward to the newest version of Windows because it had cool useful stuff.

I use Linux cuz Linux looks cool

I've been occasionally giving Linux a shot since bubuntu 5.04 and it would never stick. I guess many things aligned at some point in 2017-18 when I just gave up on windows and microsoft in general. I've been sticking to my beloved gnome, fighting it to do things it wasn't built to.
And then came 2019 and sway 1.0 got released. It felt like reddit imploded. Decided to finally give this "tiling nonsense" a try. A week or so later it finally clicked and I've not been fighting my system anymore.
Fast forward a few years and I'm now a Gentoo, OpenRC, OpenRC-init and Hyprland nutter :)
- bubuntu
  That needs to be a real thing
  
  I thought it was! Didn't even second guess it.
- I am also an on/off Linux user since Debian. Windows 10 has been fine for me and I would live here forever in the blissful ignorance of OS apathy but when support for it stops in 2025 and I am force marched into the Windows 11 I may jump ship and run off into the wilds of Linux again.
- I'm laughing.
  Tiling nonsense!
  Tiling is ...the best.

I use linux because I love penguins.
We're not the same.

I use Linux because the Steam Deck convinced me that gaming on Linux is a thing. Before that i was hesitant to make the jump, even though I've used UNIX before Windows 3 even came out
- Windows 3? If you weren't so old you could have become a Masterjodler69
  
  Now get off my lawn, damn kids!
- It makes me happy to read this same basic message repeatedly. I've been a Linux enthusiast since the late 90s, but back then it definitely felt like it was never going to be a mainstream replacement for Windows due in large part to gaming.
  I know Valve isn't getting nothing out of their investment, but all the same I'm so appreciative that they didn't abandon their Linux efforts after Steam Machines didn't catch on.
  
  This is why I didn't switch until this year. Valve really did a great thing by driving this adoption and I feel like with Proton in the state it's in, there's really not much you're giving up by going to Linux these days.
  The list of actual pain points is ever shrinking now. I can't imagine switching back in 95. You had to put up with so much inequity for a lot of that time.

I use Linux cuz the IT & security folks at work gave us the OK for developers to dual boot.
Switching between the OSs makes windows feel so bad in comparison. Fortunately I basically only boot windows to make sure it stays in good standing with updates and network security. And this isn’t some hand crafted lightweight install. I threw Mint on there and it’s worked perfectly since day 1.

¿Porque no los dos?

I use Linux because it's great and better than windows

Wow, you have won Linux congratulations you are the most Linux

I use BSD ‘cause it’s not Linux.
- I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as BSD, is in fact, FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD, or as I've recently taken to calling it, BSD-based operating systems. BSD is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning BSD-based system made useful by the BSD kernel, libc, and other essential components of a complete OS.
  Many computer users run a modified version of the BSD system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of BSD which is widely used today is often called "FreeBSD," and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the BSD system, developed by the FreeBSD Project.
  There really is a BSD, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. BSD is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. BSD is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with BSD added, or GNU/BSD. All the so-called "BSD" distributions are really distributions of GNU/BSD!
  
  This is a spicy retelling of the lore. I hope it catches on.
  
  New copypasta just dropped
  
  That was great, up until the part about GNU. GNU hasn’t had anything to do with BSD for over a decade. Maybe use POSIX instead. 😊
- To each there own
- Sorry about Wayland users

I use linux becuase slackware is pretty easy.
- I've been using Slackware since 1994, saw redhat and Debian being born.
  
  Back around 95/96 I once untarred a etc directory from a Slackware install over a redhat etc directory. It booted and worked perfectly. It was really hard to update though. Redhat started out as Slackware.
  I keep one machine with slackware installed. I use it for various purposes include light desktop use. I occasionally compile a kernel. Just to keep the skill. My daily drivers are Debian and Ubuntu machines though. These pretentious new users(arch, cough, cough) probably wish they had the patience to keep a Slackware installation going full time.

I use Linux because it plays games better.
We've come so far for there to be truth in that statement
- cries in VR

I only switched this week, and I kinda disagree with the meme.
It's both.
I'm only dual booting because I'm a gamer and some games only run on Windows.
- some ~~games ~~only run on Windows.
  some app only runs on wondows
  
  Yep, I know. I have to log into Windows to manage the files on my Huawei tablet.
  That's okay. I can do 99% of what I want on Linux without Microsoft snooping on me.
- I had that attitude for a while too. Eventually you realise that having to reboot your system for a handful of games isn't worth it. Nowadays I just don't buy games that don't run on Linux.
  Eventually we will reach a critical mass where game developers will actively develop for Linux, rather than being reliant on compatibility layers.
  
  Yeah, about half of my library already runs on Linux.
  The problem I have now is that, soon, I'm gonna want to do a reinstall so Linux can have more disk space. :) My PC's pretty fast, so the reboot doesn't really bug me all that much.

I use Linux because I care about privacy.
You use Linux because you want to rice.
We’re not the same.

I use linux because I can make it look like Vegetable Valley from the Kirby games.

You use Linux because cuz Linux is good.
I use Linux because the BSDs are less popular. I want to get paid and have corporate applications on my desktop.
We are not the same. 😂

I left for Linux because Windows bad, stayed on Linux because Linux good.

Hey long as you get here on Linux it is all good lol.

I use Linux cause I wanted to prove I can, I hate both Linux and windows for different reasons but I at least can use both!
- Based FreeBSD user

When was it not mainstream? First there was computer then Linux.
- You misspelled Unix.
  
  Linux predated Unix in my book

One of the biggest reasons I switched was of all the MS telemetry bullshit. That and I don’t know if I ever legally paid for a copy of Windows and I was tired of playing the key gen / cracked ISO game.
I’ve used Debian flavors of Linux for servers before so switching to it as my full time desktop OS was not hard. That, and, I don’t really use my desktop for stuff that uncommon. Most of the stuff I need I can get out of the box from the software center.

linux is not mainstream 😂
- You're clearly not running servers.
  
  if we are counting servers linux was never not mainstream
- What does that even mean?

Switched in 2002...because I wanted to fuck with web dev and IIS sucks donkey nads. LAMP stack good, IIS/ASP/MSSql bad.

I use linux because it looks better
We are not the same

While I did switch to Linux because Windows 3.11 (or more specifically MS Word) sucked, I never found the need to go back, even back then. So there's that.

Plot twist Windows has always been bad.
- I disagree. In a business environment it is actually really good, or at least was pre-Azure. I dislike that they are trying to push people to Azure instead of on-prem.
  For home use it's been pretty poor since Windows 8 and seems to be turning to shit since Windows 11.
  Windows 11 did one good for me though. It's been enough to push me to properly give Linux a try again. Proton has been a major step forward as gaming has been the main reason I never stuck. I'm currently spending more time in Arch (btw) than Windows.
  
  Microsoft has always been good at catering to businesses and hooking them on windows+office+etc.
  But there has always been better alternatives around, OS/2 was so much better than windows 3.x, and WordPerfect was better than word. I'm sure there are countless other examples.
- Windows has always been good at making the non-experienced feel comfortable and taking advantage of them.
- yes, but now it gets more obvious to more people
- It has always been

Aren't we, though?

I use Linux because Docker doesn't run natively on Macs.
I don't give a shit about our relation because I have a life.
- Docker on macos runs in a virtual machine, for some people that might not be desirable.
  
  what do you mean?
- Suction stays winning

Great to see the hipsters who switched before it was cool still need help fixing their permissions. Gives hope to the folks, like me, who just want to learn about computers but came to Linux after it was mainstream. Like an idiot.

It's true, but I do I good Linux?

I use windows cause I play on vrchat a lot

wow, bravo.... BRAVO!

Linux is a great server OS. It's an okay desktop OS.
- To be fair there is no good desktop OS

How do you get to the level where you think Linux is good.
- By not being a depressed cynic who only sees shite in everything
- By using it
  As it turns out its all subjective
- By remembering that Linux is not Windows is not MacOS. It is a different operating system and different way to do thing.
- By abandoning the transcendent dream of the Hurd in favour of earthly solutions.