Linux is the best. No forced upgrades, skills that last your whole life, and you can read the code. Highly recommended!

I've been using linux since 94 and there have been so many changes that its hard to quantify.

In general, I would encourage new users to use either Ubuntu or Fedora (probably Ubuntu to be honest). These communities are the most newbie friendly and offer the most migration assistance.

Personally I'm a Fedora user, but Ubuntu has a very active community with lots of documentation available. In general stay away from more specialized / esoteric distros until you actually understand linux enough to solve your own problems. Yes Arch / Nix is very cool but if you don't yet know the basics can be overwhelming.

All in all, I would suggest dual-booting or running Linux in a VM at first. Try to make it your permanent OS and find out "what works and what doesn't". Most of your hard problems will fall into 2 categories: (a) Windows apps you depend on that you need to find a linux alternative for, and (b) Specific hardware that may not have full support. For instance, your "all in one" printer may or may not work fully in Linux. Often times "b" problems can be overcome, but requires using different programs to utilize its different features (ie. CUPS for printing, but separate scanning program to utilize the printers scanner).

Long history of occasionally trying linux and giving up, then a history of being able to install only ubuntu / mint or similar, and at least one thing would not be working, and nothing i could figure out would work, and possibly break the system.

Then, I waited a few years, and geniuses fixed everything. Now there's a bunch of distros that just work.

What made the big difference was ORACLE VIRTUALBOX

I can't recommend this enough. You just try as many distros as you want right there on your windows system, and see which ones just work. You don't have to have any other software - just load the iso like a file. Then whichever one you like, you can just use it in that box/window forever. You can save changes and everything. Or you can put it on a usb and load it as a live instance. Or you can reboot to the usb and install it.

After a long string of attempts that left me pulling my hair, this route has made me love it again, and I'm currently running one that is faster than any OS I've ever had, there's no lag looking at files, I can do everything I hope to do, it's just all awesome.

Thanks nerds, I couldn't do it without you :D

This is my story: #449878

I tried getting RedHat working for days in 98, then got a Linux magazine with a Suse CD that got me to the twm window manager :-)

Man that was a kick haha!

Then later I used the VMware beta in around 2000 to finally get my productive stack of Pagemaker and Photoshop on Windows into a VM, so that I could simply roll it back every time it failed, which was after a couple of hours max of work hahaha

Never looked back, although these days I sometimes boot the degen, genocidal slime that Windows has always been in QubesOS for subversive purposes only ;-)

I started using Linux when Ubuntu 6.04 came out. My brother showed me Ubuntu and I loved tinkering with it. Funny thing is back then it was very rare to install Linux and have it work out of the box. Every upgrade was almost guaranteed to break something.

Now-a-days I recommend starting the Pop-OS since Canonical has decided to do a bunch of dumb stuff over the years. Once you get moved advanced you can move to Debian, Arch, NixOS, etc. Cool thing about Linux is there are tons of different setups, you can customize it as little or as much as you want.

My advice to a lot of people trying to learn Linux: Make Linux your primary OS, you will learn it much faster, don't dual-boot and switch back and forth. Having Windows as a fallback will make you learn Linux much slower.

Raspberry pi.

Awesome project. Education, education, education! It worked!

I was using Unix and suddenly everybody started using Windows. So I wanted to check out Linux for a free desktop. Then all of a sudden all the IT appliance hardware was running Linux. So all the Unix admins needed to know Linux.