My story is a simple one.

I turned on my computer I logged in, did some work, played some games then I turned it off.

No one tried to murder me (force updates), or put me in a potato (notification ads), or feed me to birds (change my defaults). I had a pretty good life.

The speed of transcoding video using FFMPEG on a non-GUI installation of Debian, on an old small-form-factor PC - 2nd-generation i7, 16GB ram, 240GB SSD.

is this irony?

It makes me feel like I own my PC.

Bend to my will, silicon golem, for I am root!

When I fully switched 2 years ago, I thought I’d try doing all my gaming in Linux and was really anxious wondering which and how many games I wouldn’t be able to play. Imagine my surprise when all of them ran. I haven’t found a single game I couldn’t get running. Hell, I even beat one I couldn’t get running in Windows! That being said there’s a bug preventing VR from working that I’m a little sad about. Apparently Steam only supports Ubuntu, I use Endeavour.

Everything. Software, usability, customization, community, you name it. Using Linux has advanced and keeps advancing my computer literacy skills. This would have never happened if I kept using Windows. There’s also the “activist” angle. By using Linux and other FOSS software, I feel like I’m disengaging the worst parts of modern life and society and taking power away from the corpos even if it doesn’t have huge impact.

Did my PhD on a like $500 Linux box 20something years ago. My lab was dysfunctional and I was a WFH pioneer of sorts.

I worked tech support for a software company. In the summers things were slow and they allowed a little leeway for working on personal enrichment projects.

I was aware of a room near IT that was filled with outdated computers and hardware. I asked if I could play with them. A few 100 hour weeks later and a coworker and I held a demonstration for IT and management. We proposed using all the old hardware as PXE boot thin clients (1GB RAM + Small HD + PXE NIC) using a modified Debian that would run all the tech support agent software via Citrix. It went off without a hitch in the demo setup.

Management loved it as they could see the cost savings. IT loved it as they’d get another ProLiant Server to house the Citrix and VMWare tooling. It also meant significantly less time dealing with Windows issues on all the agent machines. Ended up rolling it out to 50 agents that year and it was a success. They eventually moved to HP Thin clients, which built on the original idea.

For a lowly tier 2 tech support agent with a passing knowledge of linux, it was a proud achievement and got me noticed in the company.

Project 2.0 was an Asterix box. We were spending a ridiculous amount of money on international calls. Was able to route all the international calls in the office with logic routing on the primary Tadiran PBX (which ran OS2/Warp…lol) to a little Dell workstation with a Digium telephony card and FreePBX. Costing actual pennies on the dollar. It was like magic!

Linux was the wild west back then.

• NixOS and its declarative approach irreversibly changed the way I think about system configuration and maintenance. Home manager and flakes are really important puzzle pieces in that as well.

• The steam deck is an amazingly well thought-out Linux computer that just anybody can use intuitively.

• From a UX standpoint, I love being able to remap keys on the system level with Interception Tools. (e.g. CapsLock is Esc if pressed and Ctrl if held on all my hardware for all users.)

bazzite in general has been great as an all purpose os including gaming

i did disable almost all the gnome extensions it installs but apart from that it’s been super reliable

I’ve just bought a custom PC.

Impossible to make the darn network card to work on that Windows.

I installed Void from the Network…

I “lol” 'ed big time on that one.

It’s my daily driver since University and I like Fedora best. What I really love about Linux, is that it empowers you to manage your PC (and even your phone) on your own and without BigTech. No Microsoft, no Apple, no Google … that is invaluable!

After getting fed up with Windows I finally returned to Linux desktop as my daily driver. I have used Linux for servers and to keep old computers usable just a little longer, but I couldn’t make the switch because I used Adobe and played games.

So, with I finally had enough and switched to Fedora, arguably a boring distro, I was pleasantly surprised how well my games run on it. The killer feature is that it gets out of my way and it just works.

I owe Valve a lot of gratitude for putting all that work into making gaming work on Linux. I could not have switched without it. I hope the trend continues.

Boot times - I have an old and weak laptop, but it still works fine for some purposes. Boot times are so much shorter with Linux and I don’t sit around waiting anymore :)

Installing Fedora Cinammon on my 81-year-old Grandma’s PC and her having no problem using it.