So here’s the story about my involvement with GNU/Linux distributions.

My first contact was with Ubuntu in the college library’s computers. At first I was like “omg, what’s this? It’s different from Windows, all the icons are on the left and… what’s this terminal?”. I was very curious about the system, checking out all the different programs that came with it like GIMP… exploring all that stuff.

Later on I picked up a computer running Fedora, didn’t get to use it much, another college property. Still, that attracted my attention. “What’s this about distros?”.

Then Windows 10 happened. All the notifications in the taskbar saying “get Windows 10 now for free!” and that nagging stuff. And that was before knowing about the privacy practices.

There were some guys who were Linux heads and I hanged out with them. I was getting the hang of Bash using Cygwin, loving how easy it was to install stuff using the command line (that was one of the experiences I had in college). And the desire to get out of Windows got bigger, even more so because at that time my laptop was getting slower and older with each new update.

So that’s why I changed the operating system. I wanted to use the real shell, not just Cygwin, there was Windows issues and… I liked that different interface too! Because it was different from what everyone had. Sure, there are Macs and OS X, I got to use some too, not that much, and it felt strange.

The biggest hurdle was backing up all the files. There were lots of stuff I was hoarding back then: music, notes, books… sure, the plan was to dual boot. Despite that, what if I messed up the installation? Then I needed to pick up a distro. I did a lot of music production using FL Studio on Windows and that was important to me. Then people pointed me to Ubuntu Studio and I went with it. That’s the only program I had a hard time replacing, LMMS isn’t quite the same thing. The low-latency kernel was a huge plus, helps a lot with recording.

Now to the music player. I like reviewing the music I listen to, grading them, and most players just play the music, they don’t come with that feature. In Windows there was MusicBee… and there’s no Linux version. Running it using Wine didn’t cross my mind. Then I found Guayadeque, it works fine.

The good thing about migrating from one OS to another nowadays is that the most common programs people use are cross-platform. The ones they’ll miss the most are the Microsoft Office suite, now it’s got a different name. For everything else, people use browsers like Chrome or Firefox and they run in most places. I got my dad to switch to Linux Mint later on and that’s all he ever used. Another plus was that he was used to LibreOffice and other FOSS programs.

The migration itself took a couple days, until I got used to the new system and put the files in all the right places. I got to learn a lot about configuring stuff and didn’t really miss Windows. Even for games. My gaming is usually emulators and they have better versions in Linux. Didn’t really miss that part.