What’s Your Best Experience with Linux?

My story is a simple one.

I turned on my computer I logged in, did some work, played some games then I turned it off.

No one tried to murder me (force updates), or put me in a potato (notification ads), or feed me to birds (change my defaults). I had a pretty good life.

The speed of transcoding video using FFMPEG on a non-GUI installation of Debian, on an old small-form-factor PC - 2nd-generation i7, 16GB ram, 240GB SSD.

is this irony?

It makes me feel like I own my PC.

Bend to my will, silicon golem, for I am root!

Everything. Software, usability, customization, community, you name it. Using Linux has advanced and keeps advancing my computer literacy skills. This would have never happened if I kept using Windows. There's also the "activist" angle. By using Linux and other FOSS software, I feel like I'm disengaging the worst parts of modern life and society and taking power away from the corpos even if it doesn't have huge impact.

This has the feel of a marketing questionnaire. "Are you not ready to give a 5-star rating to Linux? Click here and we'll get right back to you!"

Oddly enough, I'm struggling to think of a single experience or feature. The decisive benefit of Linux specifically and FOSS in general is something less tangible: it's the feeling of empowerment and control you get. A computer of any kind is always something of a black box. Knowing that you have full control over it, even if you don't understand everything, is revolutionary. I'm certainly not going back.

When I fully switched 2 years ago, I thought I'd try doing all my gaming in Linux and was really anxious wondering which and how many games I wouldn't be able to play. Imagine my surprise when all of them ran. I haven't found a single game I couldn't get running. Hell, I even beat one I couldn't get running in Windows! That being said there's a bug preventing VR from working that I'm a little sad about. Apparently Steam only supports Ubuntu, I use Endeavour.

Did my PhD on a like $500 Linux box 20something years ago. My lab was dysfunctional and I was a WFH pioneer of sorts.

I worked tech support for a software company. In the summers things were slow and they allowed a little leeway for working on personal enrichment projects.

I was aware of a room near IT that was filled with outdated computers and hardware. I asked if I could play with them. A few 100 hour weeks later and a coworker and I held a demonstration for IT and management. We proposed using all the old hardware as PXE boot thin clients (1GB RAM + Small HD + PXE NIC) using a modified Debian that would run all the tech support agent software via Citrix. It went off without a hitch in the demo setup.

Management loved it as they could see the cost savings. IT loved it as they'd get another ProLiant Server to house the Citrix and VMWare tooling. It also meant significantly less time dealing with Windows issues on all the agent machines. Ended up rolling it out to 50 agents that year and it was a success. They eventually moved to HP Thin clients, which built on the original idea.

For a lowly tier 2 tech support agent with a passing knowledge of linux, it was a proud achievement and got me noticed in the company.

Project 2.0 was an Asterix box. We were spending a ridiculous amount of money on international calls. Was able to route all the international calls in the office with logic routing on the primary Tadiran PBX (which ran OS2/Warp...lol) to a little Dell workstation with a Digium telephony card and FreePBX. Costing actual pennies on the dollar. It was like magic!

Linux was the wild west back then.

Q: Which Linux distro were you using?

A: right now, kickesure a Debian based distro focusing on security and privacy. Before that, used started with Knoppix and, mandrake and then many other Debian based distros (maontky Xubuntu and Mint)

Q: What feature or aspect made the experience stand out?

A: smooth, stable, fast, secure

Q: Did it change the way you use Linux or tech in general?

A: not really but made me more interested in learning about my OS to serve my privacy better

It's been my daily driver for 26 years. 40 years or so if you include Unix before.

When I can just work on my thing and the OS is invisible

After getting fed up with Windows I finally returned to Linux desktop as my daily driver. I have used Linux for servers and to keep old computers usable just a little longer, but I couldn't make the switch because I used Adobe and played games.

So, with I finally had enough and switched to Fedora, arguably a boring distro, I was pleasantly surprised how well my games run on it. The killer feature is that it gets out of my way and it just works.

I owe Valve a lot of gratitude for putting all that work into making gaming work on Linux. I could not have switched without it. I hope the trend continues.

Boot times - I have an old and weak laptop, but it still works fine for some purposes. Boot times are so much shorter with Linux and I don't sit around waiting anymore :)

It's my daily driver since University and I like Fedora best. What I really love about Linux, is that it empowers you to manage your PC (and even your phone) on your own and without BigTech. No Microsoft, no Apple, no Google ... that is invaluable!

I had some old hardware lying around and decided to try building LFS (Linux from scratch) on it. For those unfamiliar, LFS is a "distro" where you compile every single package from source manually, with no package manager or anything. With my limited Linux experience it was really like diving directly into the deep end but the process was surprisingly easy and I learned so much by doing it.

Once the base system was complete, I installed the bare minimum needed to get X, Xfce, and some basic applications running. I'm honestly amazed how little system resources are required to have a fully functional graphical environment for basic web browsing and whatnot. The system boots almost instantly on a decade old hardware and after boot sits at way below 500mb ram usage.

Improving my battery life from 1h to 5h. I knew it would be better but never expected it to be so much better.

(OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a power hungry gaming laptop)

GNOME GS Connect on PC with KdeConnect on phone.. It works so well. I'm listening to Music on PC and phone call comes in, it mutes my music till call ends. I get an SMS message, it pops up as notice and I can reply via PC. I leave my system at work unattended I can lock my PC screen from my phone. Shares Cliboard between them. The list goes on, and it all works so well...meanwhile Windows Phone they keep pushing on me always fails to configure or work at all.

Straight Debian or DietPi for homecontrol, homeserver only headless. Can´t do that without linux. So thats my killer feature.

Steamdeck, if that counts, grafix interface. Also killer feature.

Right now.

I'm running Dietpi (Which is pretty much a "tweaked" debian) on my orange pi 5 max and arch linux on my x86_64 pc. Both are bare metal installations, so the "killer feature" is, er... whatever I want, pretty much. I also have a orange pi zero 3 running dietpi serving me nextdns under docker... and another orange pi zero 3 serving as my "Theres a blackout going on in town and all I have to do is to play retropie" pc.

It's all been good, since I gave up on NeXTSTEP around '97, but it got next level best with rolling distributions. Arch has been game changing. I'd used Redhat, CentOS, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, Gobo - all for one or more years - but until Arch I never felt I'd really escaped dependency hell. I still occasionally will have a hiccup, but it's more like a dependency heck, not something that turned into something that consumed an entire day to resolve. And it's the only distribution that hasn't (yet, knock on wood) screwed up grub so that my machine wouldn't boot. I've screwed it up, by e.g. migrating SD's and getting the UUIDs wrong, but never has the upgrade process screwed me over.

Finding out that it's nowhere near as difficult as I supposed and is amazingly flexible. This is in 2004 when compiling drivers (kernel modules) for display and Wi-Fi was a normal thing for my laptop.

There was a point where the terminal emulator environment just clicked in my head. Binary and library paths, specifically dynamic linking. Compiling with the correct flags... Just building a small CLI tool in C.

Then having all of that wrapped up in tmux with a mixture of emacs and vim on the side. Essentially my whole user environment felt like a flexible IDE where I was coding close to the metal.

My best experiences have to be the GNOME workflow and the startup time of Void Linux.

Hi, @sohrabbehdani@lemmy.world !

I have a long history with Linux, mainly doing stuff for other people on their Ubuntu machines and having a MacOS laptop myself. I have been into FOSS for a couple of years now and decided to go Linux earlier this year. I got an old PC from work that was gathering dust in the warehouse, and was mainly looking for an everyday distro that was flexible enough to support the applications I'm already using. I've been using Debian + KDE for a month now and love it. Before that, I used openSUSE + KDE for about two months, but the amount of weird misbehaviour and inability to install packages/things I needed/wanted got to me, and after copying all my files to an external drive, I installed Debian with KDE. The combination of the functionality and aesthetics of KDE combined with the stability and abundance of packages for Debian works great for me. I'm constantly tweaking things, exploring the possibilities, learning keyboard shortcuts, installing new applications, and generally feeling like I finally have a computer (I know it sounds silly), like I did when I was a teenager 😆.

Around ten years ago, Ubuntu, my first time using Linux. Press Ctrl+Alt+Fsomething, drop to bash, run vlc videofile (Mylene Farmer Ennamoramento clip) - and the damn thing works! It plays video with ASCII graphics out of the box!

Stayed with Linux ever since, I just love that this is something I can actually learn and tinker with

bazzite in general has been great as an all purpose os including gaming

i did disable almost all the gnome extensions it installs but apart from that it's been super reliable

I use zorin and by and large like it because I install it and can use it right away and maybe install a thing here or there as needed.

It took a while to set up.

First, I had an issue in China because of UDP QoS. The game I was playing worked, but eventually you get the connection dropped.

So I connected through Wireguard and used udp2raw to simulate a TCP connection. It worked, but eventually the IP would get banned because China bans VPNs.

So I used xtls xray to get around this, but in normal operation it wraps UDP into TCP. This means when a packet drops it gets retransmitted which causes lag in the game at the smallest amount of congestion (and China is super congested connecting outside the country)

So instead of using http 2 I upgraded to QUIC by routing through nginx. Then I could still use udp2raw since QUIC is UDP. To smooth out the packet loss I used udpspeeder. To route all packets in the client I used tproxy with iptables rules.

Now, the best part is I'm on NixOS and I used the NixOS packages and wrote it as systemd services.

If I copy my folder to another computer and update all of this software would start up and route to the correct ports/addresses automatically.