I am just very curious what peoples stories are. And if you are not using Linux what is holding you back?
No judgement of any kind, just pure curiosity.
I had a coworker mention his RetroPie setup. I followed suit and built one, but quickly realized that the system under the hood was pretty cool!
A few months later, I built a PC on a budget. In avoidance of purchasing a Windows key, I threw Pop!_OS on it instead based on the RetroPie experience. Greatest decision I could have made!
Edit: this was about 3 years ago
Huh, I didn’t except people to have started with Pis at all when I made the post at all but now you are the 2nd person who mentioned it. But it does actually make complete sense. Thank you for sharing!
I’ve got a few Pi’s laying around, and I always find uses for them. So darn useful!
It was a gradual process. It somehow started with Raspberry Pis because there were some laying around and I wanted to use them as a server for something. Later privacy and my increasing repulsion for windows played a role. It also helped that I stopped having friends playing online games with friends, very convinient, so I had not to use windows for that either. Now I just love using it. I can do whatever I want and the system does only what I want. And foss is great.
@MouseWithBeer you didn’t tell us your story
I was typing it up and then work called and had to go AFK for a bit. I posed it now :)
Thank you for sharing yours! Pis are great little things.
I had not so great experiences with Pis. They would drop USB devices every few dozen hours. Might be fixed with updates or newer Pis
What do you guys do with your PIs? I almost got one to use as a pihole server but thought it’d be a waste of money if that’s all I’m gonna do with it (running standalone piholes on my desktop and laptop now). Still interested if there’s anything I can use them for. 😅
I used them for pihole & unbound, qbittorrent, local http server and kiwix. I would still use one because they use like 5W max, but I had issues and running all these things on bare-metal is a pain. Now I run all my stuff (now adguard instead of pihole) on a small computer < 20W in proxmox. It sadly is totally worth using more power for this.
I just used it for a project for college. I wanna put a pihole on it as well (mainly for phone), just never got around to it years later. I gave my spare to my boyfriend tho and he is using it as a media server.
I use one as a Pi-hole server. It is amazing realizing how many ads are on the internet now. Especially good for blocking for Android.
Husband uses a Pi for his model rockets - getting telemetry data. We have previously used it as a microcontroller for a homebrew homebrewing cooler.
My first computer was a Samsung N150 Netbook (Intel Atom N450 1,6GHz, 1GB RAM, Intel 3150 with Win 7 Starter which i bought instead of a smartphone in primary school. I refunded the smartphone i bought since it was very bad. Windows 7 Starter sucked on this netbook and you couldn’t even change the background image without changing some registry entries. Not sure where I got the idea to install Linux but I decided to install Ubuntu on it (i think it was ubuntu first and later lubuntu like lubuntu 8.10) and i had a much better experience than with windows. I also hosted a mincraft server on this laptop and played at the same time with almost zero fps and my friends complaint about the server lagging
I had a love hate relationship with it. On one had it was mine and I could do whatever I wanted with it, on the other hand the thing couldn’t even handle playing 720p Youtube videos. Mine was running win7 ultimate tho, would probably a lot nicer with Linux on it.
I guess I will start. People beat me to it.
The year is 2015 and the GPU drivers for my laptop decided to stop working out of nowhere. No matter how much I screwed with them I couldn’t get them working. So even if my only experience with Linux at that point was a little bit of screwing around in VMs I decided to install Mint. Guess what? Drivers worked! (AMD ones then actually stopped working as well somewhere around 2018? Third party ones still work to this day). Man gaming back then on Linux was rough, but hey, my laptop worked so I didn’t care and my desktop was still running Windows 7 anyways.
Then in 2019 I build my fancy new PC, get everything set up, installed Windows 7 … USB ports don’t work, no drivers exist for them for Windows 7 at all…shit… There was no chance I was going to install Windows 10 on it so since Linux served me well for 4 years on my laptop I decided to just screw it and install Mint there too. Mint turned into Manjaro (and recently Arch on laptop), Proton became a thing and all is good in life and I wouldn’t want to have it any other way.
I did eventually install a LTSC version of Windows 10 on a separate SSD that I keep around for emergencies that gets booted into on average every 3-6 months.
I started with Android, of all things (first android phone in the froyo/gingerbread era, iirc). Got really interest in modding so I signed up for XDA. It was pretty cool while it lasted, and it introduced me to the world of GPL and open source stuff. Still didn’t install Linux.
After a few years, my now ex-company started using Ubuntu and it worked pretty well for such shitty PCs, so I got more interested in Linux. At home, I got interested in building kernels, so I started reading up more about it. Finally installed Virtualbox and installed Mint and built my first Android kernel from source. Stuck with Mint for a few years.
Got interested in Arch but was intimidated, so I went and installed EOS on my laptop. Learned more about Linux (Still using EOS there now) Kept using VMs for hobbies and tried a lot of distros.
Saw iusearchlinux.fyi in lemmy and it called out my name. As an asshole whose whole life revolves around bragging about using arch, i signed up for this instance. 😎
I didn’t even think of Android, I guess technically correct is the best kind of correct :D I been using it since Dount, but never did anything more fancy than rooting and running cyanogen/lineage.
EOS? I never heard of it, is it just EndeavourOS shortened? At least it seems to make sense in context. Sorry if this is a bit of a dumb question.
Since you said you used a lot of distros, is there any you would recommend to try/stay the hell away from?
Yep, its quite handy when your username tells everyone automatically so you don’t have to use your macro (that I assume every arch user has) to tell everyone.
Yeah. Got hooked on cyanogenmod. It was fun specially when Xposed was introduced later on. I don’t follow the phone scene much nowadays, though.
Yeah, it’s Endeavour OS. It’s pretty lengthy and I’m lazy so EOS it is. Lol.
I’ve tried Puppy, various Ubuntus (can’t remember which, but mostly the lighter ones and the main distros), Debian, OpenSUSE, Pop, Fedora, Mint, most of the popular ones, etc - mainly looking for something for a daily driver on my laptop but still ended up on EOS. Most of them stayed just a few days, though, so I can’t really give you any comprehensive answers. Although I’ve had trouble with OpenSUSE the most iirc. No idea why - might just be me. Or is it zypper? 🤔 Idk, pacman just works for me (and apt, of course). RN I’m trying out Nix OS on my VM. It’s actually pretty cool, although I’m still not familiar with everything.
And yes, an arch users let’s everyone know they use arch.
I wish I could install it still, was so good.
Yea, I literally couldn’t spell the name if I wanted to, I gotta look it up and copy paste it so can’t blame you for just going with EOS :D
That is a lot of them :o You are the 2nd one who mentioned issues with OpenSuse in this thread, do chances are its not you.
I use Arch btw.