13 Comments

1. 

   Banjooie on August 12, 2007 at 5:46 pm

   I’d had Kubuntu and Knop­pix sit­ting on my hard drive in .iso form for sev­er­al months. I could­n’t con­vince myself to actu­ally try to install them. Six months pri­or to my switch, I was using Win­dows XP, and I’d bought an LCD mon­it­or. Which I still have to this day, it’s awesome.

   Any­way, I decided ‘Man, I’m tired of this tak­ing up my room, I’m burn­ing these Linux ISOs to CDs then nev­er look­ing at them again.” I real­ized I did­n’t have a CD burn­er, so I star­ted search­ing the net.

   In the pro­cess, I acci­dent­ally clicked a bad ad, and got a bunch of spy­ware and crap on my sys­tem. I could­n’t remove it, so I figured I’d just burn the stuff to CD, then hit up safe mode and fix it all. Besides, it’d been nearly a year since I’d had prob­lems with XP, so.

   Burn the linux CDs. Left ’em sit­ting on top of my com­puter, and rebooted into safe mode. My mon­it­or, my beau­ti­ful monitor…complains that it’s ‘out of range’. Oh, great. It was too high-end to handle 640×480 and 256 col​ors​.So I reboot back into nor­mal XP–and it’s gone. The whole thing is basic­ally a door­stop. Awe­some, I’ll have to rein­stall X–

   Wait a second.

   I just burnt two Linux CDs, and seen a very val­id reas­on why I should­n’t run XP on this setup. Oh /​hey/​.

   Reply
2. 

   Benjamin Carlye on August 12, 2007 at 6:26 pm

   My case was similar.

   I had a some­what mar­gin­al hard-drive. Hav­ing ini­tially inten­ded to dual-boot, Win­dows ended up trash­ing itself. That left me in a pos­i­tion where I had to rebuild the whole machine, and I thought: Why both­er with the dual boot?

   My (Lib­rary Tech­ni­cian) wife and I have been hap­pily using vari­ous forms of Linux ever since. Gnome and Fire­fox make it pos­sible to get real work done. Vista looks ugly, unfin­ished and dif­fi­cult to use by comparison.

   Ben­jamin.

   Reply
3. 

   Gasten on August 12, 2007 at 7:48 pm

   Well, the usu­al song with loads of spy­ware, vir­uses, and anti-vir­us pro­grams that take a butt­load of memory and don’t do their job. I were also using win­dows 98, since my com­puter (which is still my main com­puter) could­n’t handle XP (This was about a year ago). After get­ting a big bunch of new and fresh adwares, I star­ted to look for solu­tions. I remem­ber a geek-friend being very inter­ested in linux in the sev­enth grade, so that’s where I first tried.

   I had no iea what­linux, or OSS, was, so I just fired up my browser and went to what I excpec­ted to be the main site: http://​www​.linux​.com/. Hehehe.…

   Any­way, since I though that this was the linux-comapnies web­site, I looked for some­thing like a “install linux”-link. Could­n’t find it. I found out that linux is just the ker­nel of the os, so then I was off to ker​nel​.org to get a ker­nel. It was­n’t really what I expected.…

   I learned that I should get a dis­tro instead of a ker­nel. I don’t know where (but I think it was on Linux­Journ­al or some­thing) I got a list of the top 50 or so dis­tros. Heck man! 50 ver­sion of linux?! Which one is good fore me?! I decided to start look­ing at the first ones. I went through stuff like Red­hat, Suse, and sim­il­ar. I were dis­s­a­poin­ted by the fact that they had one enter­prise-ver­sion which cos­ted money, and one for home-users (“Hey, if they make money of one, and the oth­er is for char­ite, I know which one they’ll focus on most”).

   I gave up pretty soon. “Linux was­n’t ready for the non-geek user.”

   For­tu­nately, some hours later I talked to some guys at IRC about my dif­fi­culties with linux, It appeared that they were already run­ning linux. They poin­ted my to a dis­tro which I had­n’t heard off — and it had a goofy name: Ubuntu.

   After read­ing on the homepage, everything seemed fine. I had no idea weath­er I should choose Ubuntu, Kubuntu or Xubuntu, but I though “what the heck. Ubuntu is prob­ably the default con­fig, and is prob­ably gonna get the most attention.”

   12h and a memory-upgrade (to be able to run the live-cd) later, I was run­ning linux as m main oper­at­ing sys­tem. I was­n’t dual boot­ing (which had been my inten­tion) since I prob­ably did­n’t all of the “par­ti­tion-crap, whatever that means”

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4. 

   Harsh on August 12, 2007 at 8:01 pm

   For me it was the fact that i had been test­ing the vista betas for quite some while(1.5 years) and when it went gold and it still ran like crap on my pc… It pissed me off big time! So from that day on i star­ted using ubuntu full time, which i too had only been toy­ing around with until then. What helped me keep using ubuntu full time was that fact that i was too lazy to install win­dows xp on my oth­er par­ti­tion LOL. Which meant i was forced to fix any prob­lems i had with ubuntu instead of run­ning away to win­dows everytime i had a small prob­lem that i could­nt fix.

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5. 

   ND on August 12, 2007 at 8:27 pm

   I bought a small, light­weight laptop very cheap. It did­n’t have a cd-rom drive or floppy. After try­ing a lot to put Win­dows on it, it was not work­ing. I just thought to give Linux a try as any­way I would not solve my prob­lem soon. I installed Ubuntu and it just works fine.

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6. 

   Marius Gedminas on August 12, 2007 at 8:40 pm

   It was back in 1998, I think. I was dual-boot­ing between DOS (or Win95) and Linux at the time, but DOS was my primary OS. Then a friend helped me con­fig­ure my email (some weird UUCP setup) on Linux and I switched.

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7. 

   Trevor on August 12, 2007 at 11:20 pm

   I was run­ning Win­dows 98 at the time, on an old­ish machine. One day I looked at all the soft­ware I used reg­u­lar­ily (Fire­fox, Open­Of­fice, 7‑zip, etc.), and real­ized that the only non-free soft­ware I used was the oper­at­ing sys­tem itself. So, I figured it would only be right to switch to Linux.

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8. 

   Martin-Éric on August 13, 2007 at 2:00 am

   I nev­er liked Win­dows much to begin with and could not afford Mac, but what really broke it for me was how many times Word would eat a large doc­u­ment I was work­ing on or how it would man­age to crash the whole OS with it. Even­tu­ally, I issued an ulti­mat­um to upper man­age­ment that we either changed tools or they were loos­ing me. They lost me. The next job was some­what more accom­mod­at­ing in one’s choice of OS, but still man­dated Word for doc­u­ments, which meant point­less dual-boot­ing. The next job and this one were per­fectly happy with doc­u­ments pro­duced using Open­Of­fice, so I haven’t had to look back since 2001.

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9. 

   Rob on August 13, 2007 at 2:07 am

   My exper­i­ence was dis­tinctly less sud­den than most of these described here. I’d had a friend who had told me that she was tired of Win­dows giv­ing her blue screens of death, but she refused to change to a Linux dis­tri­bu­tion until it WINE could run SIMS II per­fectly, and advised me not to install it because I ‘would clearly be lost’. I kind of rolled my eyes at this, but thought noth­ing of it at the time. How­ever, when she and I began to fight for the first time, I went out and down­loaded Ubuntu (at the time, Dap­per beta) thanks to the help of anoth­er friend, and installed it, just to prove to myself that I was­n’t illit­er­ate, and that a per­son with no real exper­i­ence to speak about on Linux could learn it. I installed it that night, and spent about 8 hours just play­ing with it, straight. I was dig­ging the abso­lute cus­tom­iz­a­tion of it all.

   Unfor­tu­nately, because what I did at the time was mostly gam­ing, I wound up boot­ing Win­dows 2k most of the time. It was­n’t for a bit longer that I used Ubuntu again, but it was entirely by acci­dent. Grub sets up Ubuntu to boot first, and so I’d always sit there, punch escape, and change it to win­dows. Unfor­tu­nately, my RAM star­ted to go, and because it took abso­lute ages to boot up, I’d leave the room, and usu­ally when I returned, Ubuntu was star­ing at me.

   Well, it was up there, so I just used it. The real tip­ping point, so-to-speak, was when I migrated all my writ­ing over to Ubuntu, and when Amarok went through my massively iTunes-cloned music lib­rary and removed all the duplic­ates. That pretty much earned my loy­alty, but the real kick­er was when I was in Seattle, troubleshoot­ing for my girl­friend’s moth­er. Qwest­’s inter­net was­n’t work­ing, and after spend­ing about 5 hours on tech sup­port, I popped in an Ubuntu livecd that I happened to have with me (read: Carry every­where). Sur­prise, sur­prise — Ubuntu just works. The most amus­ing thing was that when I told Microsoft-through-Qwest sup­port that it was clearly an OS issue and not a modem issue because it worked on Ubuntu, they told me they could­n’t help and hung up.

   Now my moth­er-in-law uses Ubuntu, too.

   Reply
10. 

    CraigM on August 13, 2007 at 3:17 am

    Mine was a little more sub­lime. It was around ¹⁹⁹⁴⁄₅ when I decided that dual-boot­ing between Linux (Slack­ware) and Win­dows was too much of a hassle. I usu­ally wanted anoth­er pro­gram in the oth­er oper­at­ing sys­tem, so I decided to remove that prob­lem by remov­ing Win­dows. Its been both a joy and a pain, but I’ve nev­er fully regret­ted it.

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11. 

    David Tremblay on August 13, 2007 at 4:37 am

    Was using it on and off, since 2002, I decided one day that was over, and that was over, early 2004. Some­thing like, how can you be “advoc­at­ing” it but still not using it full time ??

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12. 

    Kevin Dupuy on August 13, 2007 at 7:14 am

    Yes, basic­ally it’s 2003 and Red Hat 8, my first experi­ance with Linux, and I was too dumb to fig­ure out how to dual-boot with XP, so I just took the plunge and replaced XP. I only rein­stalled XP when I needed to get an app on there that I could­n’t get work­ing on Wine. But I am back to a non-Win. laptop.

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13. 

    John Carlyle-Clarke on August 13, 2007 at 7:19 am

    I had a sim­il­ar exper­i­ence. I’d tried dual boot­ing Man­drake a few times in the past, and had also set up Debi­an on a spare 486 in the mid ’90s. I’d also run an old box as a leafnode serv­er on Man­drake at work for a while. Dual boot­ing nev­er worked for me, and all my hard­ware was non-linux friendly back then, so I nev­er stuck with it.

    I installed a new CPU on my main box back in Novem­ber, and star­ted get­ting all kinds of weird prob­lems — lock ups, blue screens, file cor­rup­tion, strange errors. Took me a long time to fig­ure out that the CPU was at fault. In the pro­cess, I installed Ubuntu to try and rule out OS prob­lems. The file cor­rup­tion hosed my XP par­ti­tion, but left the Ubuntu one. I decided it was a sign, and re-installed XP on VMWare on Ubuntu to ease the migra­tion (still needed Out­look, Word, Visu­al Studio).

    I now only fire up the VMWare for Visu­al Stu­dio work, and the occa­sion­al Word doc­u­ment that Open­of­fice does­n’t like.

    I spent about three months where at least twice a week I’d swear tomor­row I’d give up and go back to XP, but now I love using Linux and would not go back unless I had to.

    I’m still grate­ful for that push I had from faulty hard­ware to make me take the pain and convert.

    Reply

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