How did you switch to linux? (Page 1 of 4)

I dual booted for about a week before installing only Mint. After I tested everything I wanted to use and got comfortable with Linux, I dumped Winblows. I was sick at home for about 2 weeks, so I kind of sped things up a bit, due to a 24/7 Linux haze.

Having an Xbox360 (and actually playing constantly) and only a laptop with limited gaming capabilites was a definitive factor in the decision.
Now I have an excelent desktop computer but have it running #! 9.04 also. Been Windows free since August 2009.

Last edited by deh (2010-04-08 21:07:51)

Very briefly:

Used Windows for a long time.

Vista came along, needing over a gig of RAM just to run. Thought that was ridiculous so dabbled with Linux (Suse, Mandriva, PCLOS). Dual-booted for a while due to games and then decided that I wasn't interested in games so went 100% PCLOS. Did a bit (OK, a LOT) of distro-hopping and ended up at CB. I've not had an urge to hop since.

When I got my laptop with W7 on, I dual-booted "just in case" but haven't used it. I actually find Windows difficult to use now, and not very intuitive.

I still have Vista on my PC for one reason alone: Sopcast (for the footie)

If anyone...ANYONE...can help me install Sopcast on CB, I'll say "Аста Ла Виста" to Windows Vista. *ahem*

Last edited by zengrapefruit (2010-04-08 22:06:10)

I've been using  a variety of platforms for a number of years. I started with Macs in 95 and then started using Windows as well in 1997. That was the time when I bought my first PC and being a compulsive fiddler it wasn't long before I noticed my first Linux CD on a mag. This was Caldera (I think) but my first proper install and dual boot was Red Hat 5.0. This eventually lead to Mandrake which frustrated the hell out of me and made me wipe Linux altogether a number of times. One day I discovered SuSe (8.1 I think) and my faith was restored in Linux. It was about this time that I first started spending the majority of my time in Linux. First with KDE then eventually Gnome.

Frustrated with SuSE's gnome being one release behind all the time I stumbled across a new startup one day called Ubuntu. Ubuntu happily existed on my machines from Warty and I used it pretty much fulltime until the Dapper release. I was quite involved with the Ubuntu community and became a forum moderator and full member of the project. At this time though the forums weren't seen as necessary by the main development community and some nasty internal bickering over them left me with a sour taste in my mouth about Ubuntu. I left the forums staff at this time.

This was okay because I'd already moved onto Arch which was like a breath of fresh air. Complete control of my system setup and just the way I liked it from the get go. Arch was great until one day an update broke X and Gnome badly and hosed my system completely at a time when I needed it urgently for a deadline I was working on. A friend suggested to me that Zenwalk might suit my needs better so I installed it and have never done an Arch install since. Zenwalk is a really nice distro with a great community. They have a great system where anyone can take up development of packages which are really simple to create. I no longer use Zenwalk but keep tabs on each release in a virtual box. It's is a personal favourite. I was quite happy with Zenwalk although I still dual booted XP for the rest of my family who were unable to move on (despite my encouragement).

At some stage prior to the release of Mac OSX (10.3) I found myself in a change of work environment which was completely Mac focused. I'd always used Macs since my first Performa 5200 but this time I moved to it full-time and gave away Linux altogether. I still kept my Zenwalk/XP dual boot at home but rarely used it as I now had Macs at work and an iBook for my personal use. Then in a strange twist of fate my work environment changed again back to a mainly PC environment.

This was around the time of Ubuntu 8.04. I really liked how far Ubuntu (and Linux) had come since I'd last used it productively but previous negative experiences of it didn't sit well with me. Linux Mint seemed a nice compromise and I really enjoyed their extra touches and Mint Apps. Mint was the first time I really started getting into themes and wallpapers for distros and is an interest I still enjoy. There is nothing like a pretty desktop that you are proud to share. I still fluctuated between Zenwalk and Mint, used Linux full-time but still had that dreaded dual boot arrangement at home.

Then along came Crunchbang What a refreshing change it was. Openbox was a revelation. I missed using Xfce but it was so fast and snappy that it seemed to compensate. I guess my story here goes without saying and I've really enjoyed this wonderful community ever since. That said there has still been a few times when I've wandered back to Zenwalk particularly when it looked like we weren't going to get a 9.10 release. I shared corenominal's frustration at the time with where Ubuntu was heading and actively looked for alternatives. Zenwalk and Xfce was serving me well but it's repos are not as extensive as other distros and I found it time consuming to maintain some of the packages it was missing. These were shared with the main project so needed to be kept up to date and bug free.

Frustrated again I went looking for an Xfce based distro that had a extensive package base like Ubuntu's. I dabbled with Fedora but was frustrated by its RPM package management which to this day I still can't get my head around. Then came an experiment with Debian. I had always considered it to be a bit to stable and out of date and was pleasantly surprised by the Testing/Squeeze repos. They are a perfect balance for me of stabiltiy and relative package currency. My first instinct was to create a CrunchBang style setup using tint2 and conky. I liked it so much I started developing my DTX install scripts. Knowing that corenominal was also using and developing his  own Debian Xfce setup made this a particularly enjoyable experience.

Of course we now have Statler. It is everything I was trying to achieve with DTX and more. These are exciting days ahead for our community

As for my dual boot situation, this was alleviated earlier this year with a compromise purchase in our house of a new iMac. It's a classy machine and my family have coped well with the transition away from Windows. It means we are finally free of Windows at last... well virtually. I have had to keep an XP virtual box install on the Mac because the Tax Office here in Australia has a Windows only solution for submitting online returns ...sigh. It exists for this purpose and to occasionally open Publisher files that some work colleagues insist on still sending me. Apart from this I consider myself Windows free. I still have to interact with XP at work to maintain their networks but use Linux as much as is possible in this world as well.

So there you have it. A little long winded and off the track at times but an explanation none the less of where I stand today regarding various Os's. I admit freely to enjoying my Mac (I type from it now) but I always find myself tapping away and developing my Linux interests. I've never used Vista or Windows 7 and hope it will stay that way. It's a comfortable place to be.

For years I wouldn't go near a computer - knew I'd get sucked into an evil vortex, and so it has turned out to be...
Swore I'd wait till the interface was as easy to use without any special knowlege as a motor car's, and around 2001 someone told me with new Macs and Win98 that point had been reached. (They lied.)

Anyway got a 2nd hand 16MB P1 Toshiba that had been sold with W95 and upgraded to 98. Paid way too much, it ran like treacle but I learned to put up with it till a kind friend permanent-loaned me a 192MB 266MHz Fujitsu laptop. Much better (just about to try Statler on it!) but going up to Xp wasn't on with that hardware. Around that time (2005/6) Microsoft dropped support for Windows 98, and a helpful security mailing list I'd been following said if upgrading to Xp wasn't an option, then the only thing to do was switch to Linux! Just then I got another desktop from a different friend - a 450MHz P3 this time but only 128MB RAM - so OK let's try Ubuntu on it.

Amazingly, Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy actually ran on that machine, but very slowly. Tried Xubuntu which was much lighter but missed some things I needed: desktop icons, detection of usb sticks and the like, so the whole project sort of stagnated while I plugged on with W98 on the laptop. A couple of versions later, though, tried Xubuntu Edgy on the desktop and this time it had everything I wanted
Basically, since then it's been our main machine at home, gradually paring down Xubuntu to Ubuntu-cli + XFCE, till this IBM took over a couple of months ago with #! 9.04.01.

Windows 98 is still on a partition of that laptop, but I never use it. Basically keeping it so I can check web pages with Internet Explorer for nasty IE6 bugs before uploading them, but I haven't done much web stuff lately (Linux is addictive ) and anyway there's IE6 on Wine.

So I was sort of forced into Linux by MS's pulling the plug on 98 and not having the hardware (or money ) to upgrade, but now I'm here I'd never dream of going back to Windows. Right now Crunchbang seems to be the perfect setup for me, and my totally non-tech wife has no problem at all with it for mail and web-surfing. Happy!

Last edited by johnraff (2010-04-09 16:26:27)

I started playing around with various versions of Mandrake years ago, had numerous problems and went back to M$.

Fast Forward 5 or so years and decided to give Ubuntu 9.04 a try and almost everything worked perfectly out of the box. Upgraded to 9.10, then got the itch and the feeling to try a less bulky distro. Stumbled upon CrunchBang and have been extremely happy with the results. Looking forward now to a final release of Statler.

In '98 I bought my first pc. It came with win95 which I upgraded to win98. For two or three weeks I played around with it (kind of a graphic adventure) before I became bored with it. Went to a local book-shop and bought Redhat 5.1 in a box including an update cd, after a mate, who knew so much more about Linux/Unix than I did, had recommended me the Red Hat flavor. Up to then, my only experience was sitting on HP-UX machine, typing some shell commands, surfing with lynx and compiling simple programs, I had written in c. With Red Hat 5.1 on my home box (installation went surprisingly well, but in those days, I didn't have many peripherals connected to the computer), I stayed with the command line for some 2 months or so. Problem was, my at that time quite potent 3D graphics card was not well supported in X, so I ended up browsing directories with midnight commander reading text files. It didn't get better, after I managed to start a GUI. Hours and hours were wasted tweaking my .fvwmrc.
[c & p'ed from this thread: http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic … xperience/

  i wonder how many other threads will be inspired by that podcast.   i just made a star trek thread inspired by their mentions.

i've kinda shared this story here in other threads... but the basic jist of it:

much thnx to winxp for being such a massive heafing bloater, it inspired me to go off searching for something else, still reluctantly clinging to 98.   a few months of reading up on bits n bobs about it, and gnu.org/philosophy , and the gpl, it all kinda sealed the deal for me.   the way i realised it... a handful of payed developers cannot compete with a world full of enthusiasts.    not to mention the other deep rooted flaws in the "for profit" software development model, like where that which is more profitable is not always the best end product.  so there i was, a head full of ideas, and a load of gusto.  i got back from a holiday, and dove in with both feet.  made an epic backup of all my stuff, and removed win98, and installed suse9.1, over 6 years and hundreds of distros later, and here i am, telling people about those days of my own personal revolution.  what a difference its made to my life. 

I have switched tree times for tree different reasons. First time some years ago I tried Red Hat, just for tech curiosity. I got a cd with a magazine. I tried it for a while just for fun. But it was too much problems with it so I switched back to xp.

Second time was when I build me a computer from waste parts from the kids gaming computers. Buying an OS to use on machine built waste spare parts wasn’t a alternative, so I installed Ubuntu 8.10 instead. For “free” as in “free beer”. I am still running Ubuntu on this machine.

Third time I was in need for a lightweight OS to an old laptop. Ubuntu was like Win XP, too heavy to be convenient, Lubuntu Alpha and U-lite too buggy, but Crunchbang was just perfect.

I am using Win XP at work due to company policy, but at home it’s just linux for the moment.

Last edited by skates (2010-04-09 09:57:37)

being a non-tech guy myself never really cared for the software running on my laptop...until 3 years ago or so i went to a squat to hear a talk by richard stallman and thus decided to give it a try.
and so my linux adventure began...debian 4.0, kubuntu 7.10/8.04/8.10, archlinux [tried it, never got it to work] and finally crunchbang [where i'm still at].
still forced to dual-boot with xp because of professional related software only existing for windows [and never got it to work under wine...but thats another story!

WinXP was all I had ever known before trying out Linux - one year ago (wow, I've had my first "Linux birthday" now! I'm so proud of my little self for sticking with it for a whole year!). I was frustrated by "Windows rot," and by the costly updates to software that wasn't meant for me to use, but for Windows to use - to keep itself healthy and happy. To me, that's the very definition of "bloat" - ever-expanding software intended only to maintain and feed the operating system. But all the scanning, updating, defragging, registry cleaning, etc didn't prevent WinXP from getting inevitably slowwwer and ssslllowwwwwwerrrrrr until a re-installation was the only option. That had to be done twice, and I had to pay to have it done.

The last time it needed it, I couldn't find my Windows installation disks and couldn't afford to buy Vista (which needs more resources than my machine had anyway). I Googled "alternatives to Windows" and found Linux. "Omygosh, the price is right, but I couldn't possibly! It's all gobbledygook commands typed on a blank screen..." but a bit more Googling brought me to Ubuntu. Wow! Graphical, simple, and as fast on my poor old Dell as when it was new. But updates routinely disabled one part or another of a system that worked perfectly before. "Wait... updates are s'posed to make it better, not break a perfectly good working system. Oh noes!"

So I started "hopping." How cool! My first hop was to PCLinuxOS. Superb! Very Windowsy and stuff. But surprisingly slower than Ubuntu had been. And all those K applikations took a bit of getting used to. But I did learn a lot, and became fascinated that Linux had multiple desktop environments to choose from! I said so in some forum or e-mail somewhere, and someone suggested, "you'd be amazed at what you can do with no desktop environment at all!" Intrigued but nervous, I tried the ultra-geeky, bare-bones, black, mysteriously sinister-looking distro with the equally scary name: Crunchbang Linux. Whoa. The disclaimer, the blackness, the Conky stuff, the complete lack of icons to click on, ohmygosh, what have I done?

Right-click. The world opens. My computer purrs and apps open with such speed I can almost hear the electrons taunting each other: "I win, I win! You gotta go faster than that to beat me!"

But I want to share my amazing discovery with the other kids at school and especially the dance studio. Lots more Googling, lots more experimenting, a little more distro-hopping for the right combination of speed and kid-friendliness, and Robin's Remix was born. It was minimal Ubuntu (a CLI install of Jaunty) with LXDE on top. Very XPish-looking, as fast as Crunchbang, but it has (to this day) some persistent, annoying bugs. It didn't work on top of Crunchbang either (and I thought for sure it would, because it uses Openbox and LXDE components like PCManFM). Nevertheless, it was wonderful enough to actually win a couple of kids from the dance studio over to Linux! One of them even wrote an atricle on Linux Forums about it (here) after a month or two on "Robin's Remix" and the two of us learning to deal with some of it's bugs. She's on Xubuntu now, I think. Which is cool - I might not have even bothered with Xfce if not for her enthusiasm for it. Xubuntu is getting better and better - unlike it's older siblings, I think. Now Xfce is my "home" as well. It rocks on both Linux Mint and in Statler!

One year old,
Robin

Every year since 2004 I had downloaded new versions of whatever distro sounded promising at the time. Always with the intention of installing on my computer, but never getting around to backing up my stuff (being poor meant that big external hdd's were out of my price range)

So year after year my pile of Linux cd's would grow.

When the first eeepc came out end of 2007, I figured it's a good opportunity to pick up a cheap little machine to finally get a chance to install some of those bastards.

I tried the included Xandros, installing Fluxbox right away for my crappy Celeron processor, but Xandros itself was rubbish even compared to live cd's I had run previously.

Fluxbox at that point was linux for me because, in my limited experience, I equated KDE to a fancy Windows ripoff, Gnome to a mac-wannabe, and XFCE to Windows 98 (which I think was fair at the time, XFCE has improved a lot over the last few years).

I tried a few of those eee-specific ubuntu based distros, but people had already started offering eee drivers for regular distros and I saw no point wasting my time with them anymore.

Then I got Arch. After spending a week just trying to get it to work, I finally had an Arch with Fluxbox. But then I couldn't make it recognise my wireless, everytime I plugged in a USB I had to enter commands to make it work. This all got annoying pretty quickly and I never had time to sit down and work my way to fixing it.

By this point my Windows computer was on it's way out, so I had picked up the more recent eeepc 1000H as a desktop replacement (which it has been ever since).

Around the end of 2008 I went back to the eeeuser forum and started asking around for any good Fluxbox distros that worked well with eee hardware. Snowpine directed me here and Cruncheee was exactly what was needed. Everything worked perfectly straight away.

I still keep Windows partition specifically for ConvertXtoDVD. I do a lot of DVD's, and I'm not sure that DeVeDe is as good. If anyone can vouch for it let me know.

Last edited by PoliticsOfStarving (2010-04-09 23:47:19)

I was your fairly basic, domesticated, routine household Windoze user for years. It was all I really knew other than hearing about "Linux" and
ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the Macs that were out of my $$$ reach. Until my last deployment to Iraq from 2008-2009.

It started with getting into 'modifying' my WinXP setup on a Toshiba laptop. Went through learning about unlocking uxtheme.dll and grabbing some
really fancy-shmancy visual styles, then swinging the complete opposite and going with minimalist styles (several of which, surprisingly, have been
ported to gtk+ and even OB!). Then a period of using LiteStep in conjunction with VS's... And then various things like docks, OSD's, basically any
nifty little app that made my usage easier and more visually appealing or corrected a shortcoming in WinXP. But it was still Windoze, and broke
frequently.

The final straw would have to be shortly after purchasing an HP Pavillion 'Gee Whiz Oh My' higher end laptop, a DV5-1183 with all the bells and
whistles and muscles to do just about everything I could want it to do near Christmas 2008 while in Kirkuk Iraq... Until I figured out how much of a pig Vista was, had hardware issues on a "Vista 64 Ready!" computer,  was assaulted by viruses several times despite a  paid anti-virus software subscription, and figured out that paying for software to either fix an inherent OS problem or do something the OS should do out of the box sucked. I had started reading about this "Ubuntu" thing, my interest really peaked, and after the frustration level reached explosive proportions, ordered a CD from Canonical. Oh it was an even more frustrating TEN WEEK WAIT for that CD to arrive from the US to my APO
in Iraq.

Haven't looked back since, except for (pardon my sin) occasional gaming on a Windoze partition. Did alot of distro hopping after I acquired a free and of course ancient Dell C400, trying to find something lite enough to run on it, finally settling on #! and then buying a Dell D420 from eBay. This combination has worked perfectly for the last year and only seems to get better! Really looking forward to the newest incarnation of #! based on Squeeze to
reach final release.

**Politics, have you tried Dvdrip?

Last edited by SmashedGlass (2010-04-10 03:09:47)