How Many Years Did You Try to Move to Linux?

[famicommander]

I tried Red Hat way back in the day when Windows ME turned out to be a disaster, but I was in grade school at the time and Linux was a bit too much for me. Eventually XP came out and we used that happily for many years.

Then we got Windows Vista, and that was another unspeakable disaster. I tried Ubuntu 7.04 and it worked great out of the box, so I've been using Linux as my primary OS since then.

Over the years I've used a ton of distros: Mint, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Fedora, Manjaro, Mageia, Puppy, Xandros (came on a netbook, horrible little distro), Antix, MX Linux, Sabayon, etc. Also briefly dabbled in PC-BSD but I didn't see any advantages to it over Linux.

I stuck with Ubuntu as my daily driver until the Unity trash enveloped it. I hopped around for a bit but I generally stick with something *buntu based due to the abundance of software and support out there for that family of OSes. I like traditional desktops like Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce, and LXQt. I have always hated KDE, Unity, GNOME 3 and later, and similar.

For the most part Mint is my distro of choice these days, but sometimes I'm forced to use something else. When I first built my current desktop Mint didn't support my AMD Ryzen APU out of the box, and rather than trying to fiddle with it I just installed MX Linux and used that until the next version of Mint dropped.

I also recently bought a used laptop and Mint kept crashing at the media codecs section of the install. Seemed like a fairly common problem but there were half a dozen different solutions I found and the first couple didn't fix it for me, so I said screw it and installed Ubuntu MATE. Worked fine out of the box so I did a bit of customization and now it's up and running the way I like it.

I'm too lazy to do much troubleshooting anymore. Just downloading a different distro until I find one that works seems to have a higher success rate than trying to fix stuff.

[Portreve]

How Many Years Did You Try to Move to Linux?

I had personal data going back probably 25 years or so, maybe even a few things dating back 30 years, that I had to migrate over to Linux. The oldest data were fonts.

[Moem]

I had personal data going back probably 25 years or so, maybe even a few things dating back 30 years, that I had to migrate over to Linux.

How does that relate to the question? Were you trying to move to Linux all this time?
I had about 20 years of personal data when I moved to Linux, but I sure as hell have not been trying to make the switch for 20 years.

[Portreve]

I had personal data going back probably 25 years or so, maybe even a few things dating back 30 years, that I had to migrate over to Linux.

How does that relate to the question? Were you trying to move to Linux all this time?
I had about 20 years of personal data when I moved to Linux, but I sure as hell have not been trying to make the switch for 20 years.

I was trying to answer the OP's question.

[iliketrains]

Started with Mint 18 near it's EOL and it became my main OS from the get-go. I was never a Windows power-user so there was less to 'unlearn'.
My hardware is kind of generic desktop and the same with peripherals (printers etc) so for sure that dodged some potential headaches.
My main computer still has the option of booting Windows but Windows is most often booted just to get updates, then straight back to the comfort of Mint.

re: Mint being a "suitable for beginners" distro, that's no bad thing. Recently I've installed Debian for a very specific software suite. I won't say it's better or worse than Mint but it sure has far fewer built-in conveniences and I'm glad it wasn't my introduction to Linux..

[Petermint]

Did or did not. There was no try. Linux worked for servers so I used it on servers but the Ext3 file system was a real pain compared to NTFS. NT Server edition was better for unattended operations. I used NT Server for a while on my desktops as Microsoft kept giving me free DVDs.

Ext4 fixed the Linux file system problems and Microsoft infected NT with Internet Exploder. Linux was better than NT. Went from server only to Linux everywhere.

[MikeNovember]

Hi,

In terms of operating system, I am "agnostic": I use now Linux Mint 20, Windows 10 Pro, MacOS (various flavours) and iOS (various flavours).

In the past I have used several mainframes (including ones with punched cards), Vax VMS, several versions of Apple DOS and PRODOS, DRI GEM, CPM, almost all versions of Windows from 2.0 to 10 (including Nt and 2000 versions), several versions of Knoppix, several versions of Ubuntu, several versions of Linux Mint... (In the past means from 1975 up to now).

The use of an operating system is just a question of opportunity (at home) or obligation (at work, years ago).

I bought the laptop I use now with Windows 7; I used it until Windows 7 was abandoned by Microsoft; I made some tests to conclude that Windows 10 had some drivers incompatibilities. So I installed Linux Mint (19, then 20) and I have two virtual machines running with VMware: a Windows 7 32 bits one (running old programs, some even made for Windows 3.1) and a Windows 10 Pro 64 bits one (for programs not existing with Linux, or ones that I prefer to run with Windows).

My wife and my daughter have MacBook Pro / MacBook Air, that I administrate for them (updates, backups, cleanups etc.). Same for the iPhones of the family.

With time, I don't see any significant differences between operating systems, just some "bells and whistles" that differ from one system to another, some differences in GUIs, some syntax variations when in CLI... Once you understand how a computer works, there is no matter of headache.

Of course, Full OpenSource may appear a better choice, specially for privacy / security: source code is supposed to have been reviewed by lots of users and be more reliable. However, OpenSource history is full of big bugs having lasted more than 10 years without being discovered.

So, give me a computer, any, I will use it; my religion is not an operating system but computers!

Regards,

MN

[Pjotr]

One year. From 2005 to 2006.

Tried Ubuntu 5.04 in 2005, tried hard but couldn't quite get it into my grasp, finally fell back to using Windows XP.

In 2006 I tried again, with the unforgettable Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake. The only Ubuntu ever released in June, and the first LTS edition. I never looked back.

[Crito]

I was actually fan of Windows ME as it still ran all my old MS-DOS games. XPee gave me nothing but trouble as a desktop OS, so that's about the time I bought a box of Red Hat Linux and installed it from 3.5" floppies. I had to administer a few NT and Novell NetWare boxes and Linux just wasn't mature enough for server use, so that's also about the time I started using FreeBSD as a file server. I really didn't use Linux as my main desktop OS until Mandrake 9.2 came out. Internet connectivity was still pretty slow and Mandrake's Power Pack subscription provided the entire RPM repository on discs, no modem required. After that I switched to SuSE 9.3 (ascending version numbers are just a coincidence) and it was Kubuntu 8.04 that finally got me using a DEB-based distro.

[twerq]

Zero. I switched in 2015 and there was no trying involved.

How did you get there? I mean, what drove you to perform the switch?
Why in 2015? Thanks to a person or event?
I believe we would be happy if you could tell us a little more

[Moem]

How did you get there? I mean, what drove you to perform the switch?
Why in 2015? Thanks to a person or event?

Thanks to Windows 10, which did not appeal to me. Many of my friends use some form of Linux; my partner has been using Linux distros for years.
In 2015, the switch to Windows 10 seems unavoidable, unless one could manage to move sideways instead of forward, and head in a different direction.
So one day, I did a search for 'Linux beginners' and Mint was mentioned most often in the results; I also found a tutorial on installation. Following that tutorial, I installed Mint 17 on my spare machine (a Lenovo netbook that I used for travel). It was easier than I expected and I liked it a lot.

When my partner came home that day, he was pleasantly surprised. He had never pushed me to move to Linux, but he was very willing to answer questions and help me resolve 'teething troubles'.
He said: so you're finally ready for Linux? I said, no! Linux is finally ready for me!

A month later, I installed Mint on my daily driver laptop as a dual boot with Win7. And a year later, I removed Win7 and went 'full Mint'.

[twerq]

Thanks to Windows 10

ahh, win10, well of course. Lucky me, encountered win 10 in 2019 when it became more stable. But GUI! Well, it questionable. And I believe someone has been payed to make people go look for alternative solution for their daily digital activities =)

He said: so you're finally ready for Linux? I said, no! Linux is finally ready for me!

A month later, I installed Mint on my daily driver laptop as a dual boot with Win7. And a year later, I removed Win7 and went 'full Mint'.

great story, i like it. Thank you!

[coffee412]

I went full cold turkey and switched to linux in about 1998. I remember rolling my own kernel as you had to do that to run it. Also needed a creative SB card with cdrom drive.

My first experience with linux was with slackware back in the 90s or 2001. I cannot remember. At the time I was a co-sysop helping a friend of mine run 'The lighthouse bbs' up in Holland, Michigan. We wanted to provide more connections from callers. Windows was not going to do this. So, We started experimenting with linux. I then moved to Kokomo, Indiana because of work and started 'The Kokomo Club'. I used linux to run it and I think it was Redhat. When windows98 came out I was upset that it was just bug fixes and they charged for it. So, I decided to just go full bore on linux. I stuck with Redhat for a long time and then transitioned to Fedora when it came out. When I finally shut down the bbs I went over to Ubuntu and ran that until the Unity deal. I left Ubuntu pretty quick when I found Mint. Since then I have ran Debian and really enjoy debian a lot from a server stand point. For my daily driver and VM's -- Linux Mint all the way!

[MiZoG]

It took me only... 17 years (true) to switch (in the sense of using Linux as my main OS) since the day I started to experiment with it

[Dark Owl]

I don't see how I'm ever going to make the switch, unless you count the possibility of running Windows in a VM.

I thought I would be able to, but I find so much of my general work unreproducible in Mint that actually my ancient Pentium notebook running Win7 still takes the daily strain while my 6-core Ryzen tower just gets used for archive, Open Office (which I also use in Win7), and a bit of browsing. Casual stuff (like email, diary, notes, and most of my web browsing) has been almost entirely subsumed by an interloper: the iPad.

My experience of attempting to switch has revealed several road-blocks:

• Lack of directly equivalent application programs in Linux;
• Difficulty of adapting current skills to Linux alternatives;
• Unavailability of Linux versions of existing applications;
• Inability of Wine to run the more demanding applications.

...plus, with money being in short supply, even if I can run one of my Windows apps under Wine or in a VM, the difficulty of transferring any licence keys and persuading it this isn't a new installation! Ideally I would be able to copy an existing Windows installation file tree into Wine (or a VM) and have it run as is (but clearly the developers wouldn't want that to be easy, regardless that I am a legitimate user).

Case in point: CorelDraw. I have a history with CorelDraw going back at least 20 years, and I know how to "drive" it. Many other graphics packages (at the time) had silly quirks which ruled them out (eg Visio). Those were in my "business user" days, and when I became a "home user" I continued to use my original CorelDraw (stuck with 8.3 filenames) well into the era of long file names, until I got a newer version bundled with a graphics tablet (I don't use the tablet!). I can't be spending hundreds of pounds on a new CorelDraw, so I'm stuck with my existing Windows installation for as long as I can continue to maintain it.

Yes, I've tried migrating to Inkscape. Inkscape can read CorelDraw .cdr files, sure, so I can access my back catalogue of work, right? Yes and no. Inkscape only reads the first page of a multi-page .cdr file, so I would have to go through my existing work and burst the pages into multiple single-page .cdr files. But even then I find Inkscape hard to get on with, its user interface is not something I'm used to, so when I need to get something done in a hurry (as it usually is), I reach for CorelDraw not Inkscape.

Yeah, I know, first world problems. What I'm saying is it would be much easier to start out using Linux exclusively in the first place than to transfer to it as a seasoned Windows user, and it is only in recent years the Linux world has been mature enough to even consider it. Even so, I think the man in the street just wanting a trouble-free user experience would be better off with Windows, or better still a Mac (if money is no object).

[ajgreeny]

I first played with Ubuntu 5.04 that was on a CD or DVD on a computer magazine way back in 2005, obviously, not because I particularly wanted or needed to get rid of Windows (can't remember which version; 95, 98?) but was just curious to see what it was.

I installed it and dual booted for several years until about 2010 I think, only ever booting to Windows which by that time was XP, to update it and its antivirus, just in case I ever needed it. It soon became obvious to me that I was unlikely to ever "need" Windows again so I deleted it from the machine and ran solely on Ubuntu or Mint with no real preference for one over the other.

When unity turned up I moved immediately to Xubuntu and the Mint Xfce version, again with no real preference. Now I'm mainly a Xubuntu user but often boot to Mint just to keep myself up to date.

Haven't used Windows since except at a local Community Centre where I volunteer and Windows 10 now frustrates me beyond belief!

[Cyberbleuet]

Depuis 2006 debut avec Ubuntu 6.06 LTS et depuis sous divers distros

Salutation!

[mikeflan]

I thought I would be able to, but I find so much of my general work unreproducible in Mint

There are a few software packages that I can't do in Linux, but so few.
A couple applications in the Aspentech suite, like HYSYS.
Ceasar pipe stress modeling would be another, but I don't use it.
https://docanco.com/caesar-ii/

When I need HYSYS I remote into the work computer with Remmina and use it. Maybe 4 -6 times per year.

I suspect these "must have" applications will be web based eventually. I'm not sure I am going to like that, but it will happen.

Nowadays I work to limit my work hours to less than 30 hrs per week, and preferably less than 20 hrs per week. And as a result limit my time on windows.

[AZgl1800]

For me - about 15 years. I finally made the move about 3 years ago.

Probably something like that.
I looked at Unix around 1988ish
signed up for a class at the local University on C++ which got interrupted after six weeks, with a job move.

10 years later, I started looking at all the different Distros, and PC for Linux or some name like that, seemed the easiest for a neophyte to try out....

Gave up on that, because there were not enough Applications ready to go, that would interface with the Microsoft world, and my job was to maintain MSloth systems at work....

2010 and I retired from the Slave job, and found LM17 Cinnamon and never looked back

[kenetics]

My son, who was going to Tech School at the time, gave me a Knoppix disc in 2006 when I expressed some interest in the Linux that he was learning. I tried it, but didn't think it was useful enough to replace windows. I then received a free disc that Ubuntu was offering at the time. I tried it in my newly built computer, but the disk kept spinning and wouldn't load anything. I saw a new Linux distribution that looked interesting and had a friendly forum, so I download Linux Mint 2 Barbara and it worked perfectly. I had little problem adjusting to Linux using Mint.

I've tried many other distros since then, but mostly have stuck with Mint.