Reading this KernelTrap article, I came across an interesting quote from Linus Torvalds:
“Really early on when I was making Linux, one of the things I was really doing was reading Internet news from the university computer. I was dialing up to the university, I usually got a busy signal, so I programed an auto dialer. It would dial and if it got a busy signal, it would wait a minute then redial. I wasn’t using Linux full time yet but was still using it. By mistake, I auto dialed my hard disc and basically I overwrote the operating system with the dial strings. So I had to decide if I would reinstall the OS I was using or start using Linux full time. I said OK, that’s a sign, I’ll start using Linux full time.”
This rekindled memories of what prompted me to use GNU/Linux full-time, back in 1999. My 12GB hard drive decided to cark it, and at short notice I was able to borrow an 850MB unit. Being far too small to comfortably accommodate two operating systems, I was faced with a dilemma: should I stick with what I knew (and hated), or take the plunge and go all the way with the OS that I had only been toying with by that stage? I chose the latter, and have never regretted it.
What are your experiences? Was there a single incident that ‘broke the camel’s back’, or was it more of a gradual process? Let me know in the comments section.
LotD: The definitive dual-booting guide: Linux, Vista and XP step-by-step
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 colors.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/.
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.
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 kernel.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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ??
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.
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.