I am not going to compare why Linux is better than any other OS. That kind of comparison leads to nowhere and is really different from one person to another. After all, comparison is the thief of joy, as Roosevelt said. What I’m going to do is try to tell you a story of how Linux has been for me over a decade.
My joy with Linux started back in my high school days. I was gifted a crappy old atom-powered netbook that was obsolete the minute it released, lol. I did not come from a very fortunate family it was the best thing my parents could afford. It did its job well with Windows 7 and even with Windows 10 beta, until it did not. Long story short the harddrive blew and had to be fixed somehow. I have no idea what went wrong, and I let a technician in my area handle it.
It did not go well. They told me that a complete harddrive change was necessary and it would cost a fortune, almost half the money required to buy a new used laptop. So, I took it home and tried to thinker with it for a while. Again, long story short, I found Puppy Linux. They claimed that they cannot even be installed on harddrive. My logic was that since my harddrive was cooked, I was going to run my computer on a USB stick while I’m collecting some money to buy a cheap harddrive.
Well, turned out my harddrive was not broken at all and just had a very messy partitioning. With included gparted, I erased the whole partition table, and my PC was fixed!
Like, I-was-able-to-install-Windows kind of fixed!
But I did not. I installed Linux Mint “Rafaela” and went with it. I still remember the only reason why I chose LM was because their naming scheme was and still is beautiful. It was not an amazing experience, but I was traumatized by Windows; it was very enjoyable nonetheless. I used the netbook for a couple more years until it completely died on me.
However, one thing that Linux was lacking back in the day was the game support. After my laptop died in 2017, I assembled my own PC gaming using an X59 motherboard, Xeon X5660, RX 290X, and 8GB of RAM. It was so cool to have a 6C12T CPU for about $20 even today, let alone back in 2017. It was plenty powerful machine and I dual-booted it with Windows out of spite, just to play games on it.
I rode it until 2019, I believe. It was a good time to have such a powerful machine for cheap. However, after it died, I gave up on PC gaming and bought a PS4 instead. I mean almost all the things I did on my PC were to play games, why bother set up a gaming PC if I can get a PS4 without any hassle.
But, such as life, everything comes to an end. My PS4 died, just in time for Proton release, which revolutionised and changed Linux gaming forever.
And now, I’m writing this from my PC running Arch Linux. I am able to play Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate on my Linux machine, something that I would call sorcery back in 2017.
Linux has always been cool for me. I only talked about my main PC, but honestly, I use Linux for a lot more than just a PC. I created a NAS, a VPN device, a firewall, a print server, home automation, and more! I am still rocking a Linux VPN and Firewall back in my parents’ home. Heck, even my phone is running Linux kernel. I have no idea if there is any other OS/Kernel that is this flexible and open.
But honestly, flexible and open are the main things that made me fall in love with Linux. In other words, Linux does not have any restrictions in place. It does whatever you say it should do, even if it is to your detriment. I suspected the technician of my harddrive was aware that it was just a corrupted partition table, but Windows installer just did not let them erase it. But Linux just bombed it and erased all the things in there.
Linux lets me create an abomination of a storage solution that will be broken and make my whole data go south. It let me cache a 1TB Btrfs harddrive on Raid0 with a 128GB bcache SSD as write cache. Was it fast? Absolutely. Was it stable? It was a nightmare to maintain, lol. But hey, it let me. That’s the thing! Linux assumes you are a smart, capable of thinking individual!
I love Linux; it has been a part of my life. It taught me that live is full of possibility, that I am capable of creating a mess and fixing that mess myself.