Your Experience with Linux, BSD etc

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!

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.

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.

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

Now on Fedora Kinoite 40 it works like a charm.

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

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.

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 and 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.

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)

AMD GPU just works, no fussing about, get straight to fragging on Xonotic and Counter Strike

Unless you have a monitor that requires HDMI 2.1 to get full resolution/refresh. Then it only works partially.

Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, and I've been using it on my desktops/laptops for almost 30 years at this point.

But there are still issues to deal with on a regular basis, same as Windows or OSX.

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 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.

I was entering my teens in the early 2000's. My memory is terrible but my family got a pentium 3 desktop PC and I remember I had some versions of SuSE, Ubuntu and Mandrake (or was it Mandriva by then) on that PC at one time or another. My family never knew how to use it because it was different all the time. Heck I didn't know how to use it.

When I built my first PC, a pentium 4, I dual booted windows and some flavour of Linux for a time, but I got into PC gaming so I only casually checked out new releases of Ubuntu over the years. Once Proton arrived though it was finally time to make the switch.

I'm not a developer, I made a pong clone with python once because I wanted to learn for the sake of it, but I support a few projects financially that I enjoy, I try to submit bug reports best I can. For the most part the community is great, and yes I use Arch btw.

Linux is my primary OS. I have no experience with Windows. Therefore, I cannot compare Linux and BSD systems with Windows. When I started using Linux, it wasn't very functional, but I didn't want to pay money for something as glitchy as Windows was in 1998. But for my needs at the time, Linux was sufficient. The PC usage pattern in 1998 was a bit different from today's PC usage pattern. Mail, primitive messenger (IRC), primitive games. Torturous WEB. I'm back in the days when an html page would load within a couple minutes and I didn't consider that unusual. I remember times when I would spend all night downloading a 5 megabyte package. The Internet connection would glitch and break and the price of the connection was no fun for anyone. Then FreeBSD 5 came out, and after the glitches of Linux it was pure bliss. I even considered switching to this system completely, but unfortunately FreeBSD quickly began to lag behind the capabilities of desktop PCs and I had to abandon this idea. I could tell IT tales for a long time, but I will say that Linux became a digestible OS relatively recently, around 2015. I currently use OpenBSD and Fedora. I'm happy with all of them.

Linux has been the biggest rabbit hole I've been in. There are too many distribution for me to choose one without testing as much as I can. It made me change what I wanted/needed. I went from "I don't want to use CLI at all" to "man, GUI is too slow for that".

I tried many Debian children and grand children distributions, Fedora based ones (Nobara, atomics bases,...), Opensuse, NixOS, Solus, arch based distributions...

Now, I'm on cachyOS, that seems to be the good balance I need (for now), between GUI/already configured and "I can do it the way I want".

One year after starting using Linux, I've switched from a 3060ti to a 6700xt, just because it made hopping easier.

If you exclude me not being able to settle down on a distro, Linux is a funny experience to me. My needs are not that big, as I just play some games, have a light need of an office suite. I can do anything I used to to in windows, but without Microsoft and his friends looking above my shoulder.

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

Ayyyy! Some recognition! Some people install linux and ask "where do I get apps from?", you show them the "store" and they go "wow, that's so complicated". That's when I question how they manage to survive in this digital world.

Keep on fraggin'!

Anti Commercial-AI license

tl;dr: if you think this is too long, don't read it.

near the end of 2004 i was given a computer that cost $100 at a garage sale. it had windows xp installed but it was not activated. i had also just gotten out of jail for amateur botany (growing weed) and was on probation. there were strict rules with probation and commiting any illegal act would have meant far worse sentences if i were caught. since i could not afford a windows key and did not wish to illegally pirate one as that put me at risk of prison (at least, in my head it did but this was unlikely) i looked for alternatives to windows. that led me to linux.

i should add that my memory of this time is not the best and any or all of this could be absurdly wrong but it's how i remember it, however incorrect that may be. my brain's memory does not work right.

at the time my only access to the internet was one hour at a time per day, through the local library. it was there that i tried to download linux onto a flash drive. i thought it could be installed like any regular windows program. i don't think there were linux distros that even had USB installation support back then, although that might have been a motherboard limitation. i used a 1gb flash drive and saved a .txt file to the drive which i had copied and pasted man pages into, like 'man man' among others.

i don't know what it was i downloaded for sure anymore but i believe it was a linux kernel, as in just the linux kernel source code. no DE or bootloader or anything else, i think it was a .tar.gz of source code in text files but i never figured out what to do with them. i didn't understand what a .tar.gz file was until years later. i believed they were linux somehow, that's all i understand. needless to say, i failed in my endeavor and that $100 computer ultimately became an oversized media player, forever in 'you need to activate this copy of windows' mode.

fast forward to 2009. i had completed my probation and finally was a rehabilitated citizen. i had established friendships with more tech savvy people than myself (but still not very tech savvy, they just played WoW a lot) and with their help, i built a computer from a tigerdirect barebones kit. one of my coworkers installed a copy of windows xp on it that did not need activation. i doubt it was a legitimate version but i was still too ignorant to care. i was reminded of linux at some point and to show off my newfound knowledge of computers, i decided to upgrade my system to a dual boot of windows 7 (courtesy of a local college) and linux mint. it was successful but i had also made friends with several gamers by then. linux gaming was fairly nonexistant at the time. i did log into the mint installation occasionally but i never did much with it and none of it involved the command line. i soon forgot about it entirely.

i built my second computer in 2012 and upgraded to windows 10, for free because i had started classes for computer science. i quickly learned that where i lived, IT jobs were non-existant unless you had military base security clearance, which was impossible for me due to my previous life of criminal gardening. i gamed heavily instead of attending classes and soon dropped out entirely. i spent a few years drinking heavily in a haze of depression. i quit drinking in 2016 and worked a minimum wage job a few years in a haze of depression.

by 2019 i had saved up enough to upgrade my computer. in the upgrade process i changed enough parts to trigger windows to believe i had an entirely new computer and it demanded i purchase a new copy of windows. i've learned since that there were ways around that and that i probably did not need to buy windows again but thanks to that and to my cheap, frugal nature, i decided to revisit linux once again. i installed linux mint. two days later my apartment was hit by 2 tornados, frying my power supply and bricking two of my three harddrives. one was a data drive with all my important personal files and the other drive had mint on it. i was left with a plain install of windows. this is when i learned how important backups are. it took me until nearly the end of the year to be able to afford a new power supply. early 2020 i spent a lot of time trying to recover accounts. because my landlord is a slumlord i was fixing a lot of my apartment as well.

in march of 2020 my mom gifted me my first smartphone. it was an android phone which reminded me of my linux journeys in days of old. i bought an SSD and a couple flash drives with a tax return. i started downloading distros while also downloading all the apps in the google play store. i rather quickly acquired malware on the phone which in turn spread to windows i think. within a couple days time, the pandemic lockdowns began, i became unemployed, my internet was shut off, my phone wouldn't work and all i had was a flash drive with a few iso files of 64 and 32 bit linux distros. without internet, i had to rely on man pages to learn things. i couldn't download anything. i couldn't search the internet for help. i had lost my drivers license back in 2004 and while i had gotten it back, i had not been able to afford a car so i couldn't drive to friends houses or the library for help. it was not a pleasant experience. there is no direction to the man pages. if i didn't know something, i probably didn't learn it. it did not help that i had an nvidia gpu.

i've been mostly using manjaro kde with moderate success since winter of 2021. i tinkered with a few other distros and made all the rookie mistakes. i really enjoyed puppy linux and always have a version or three on a flash drive and play with it from time to time. i've learned a lot and unlearned some bad behaviours. i quit videogames entirely as well as tv and movies, so i could focus more on learning. i still barely know what i'm doing and i make mistakes often. they aren't critical mistakes at least now and i have a backup system that's almost good enough.

last year it was determined that i am developmentally disabled. my memory, meaning the kind in carbon not silicon, doesn't like to work properly. i tend to use repetition to force it into long term memory. numbers don't process well either but i'm not counting that. the previous sentence should demonstrate that my sense of humor is also probably affected.

this became far longer than i expected. my linux journey has not been conventional. it has not been positive until recently but mostly due to my own mistakes and ignorance. if i could change something, i would have asked people for help more. i hope you enjoyed reading it and thank you for your time. have a nice day.

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

I've used Linux for decades but not for desktop usage. I work with Linux every day.

I recently purchased a high end workstation to act as a hypervisor for multiple desktop systems. The plan was to boot into a Linux system and then from there load up one of many desktop OS and work seamlessly within a VM. This has worked well on a Windows host with VMWare Workstation and allows me as a contractor to have separation of configuration between customers.

However I found Linux desktop to have too many glitches. From failed package installs, multiple monitor problems and some special keys being sent to both VM and host. I also found the user interface of some apps to be bad, which I can look past but with the other fundamental issues it added a bad taste to the experience. I really want it to work and I do go back every now and then to try again.

Used to tip my toes in Linux world circa 2011 as a kid. I found Ubuntu easier to set up than Windows, but the software catalogue was lacking (games, Adobe software).

Came back to it in 2021 when I read about Valve’s commitment to Wine/Proton and DXVK. Tried out Ubuntu once again but I found it unreliable - random lockups, UI bugs (AMD GPU). Whenever I had an issue my answers were featured on Arch wiki, so I thought “why not Arch then”. That and many memes about femboys/trans girls (haii ^^) using Arch made me try it out and.. I stayed with it. Would occasionally reboot to Windows for games with anti-cheat and VR, but over time I kept using Windows less and less.

Fast forward to this year, since April my PC is no longer tainted by Microsoft. All of the games I play work on Linux with no quirks to them, KDE Wayland supports screen tearing so I can play competitive games on it, SteamVR works good enough so don’t have to dualboot anymore.

Kinda glad I learned all of this, as Windows is going downhill with all of the hardware requirements and AI buzzwords

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 more efficient.

2025: plan 9 ???

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.