Why did you move from Windows?

[apoorv_khurasia]

I first got a taste of UNIX when I entered my university. We were given accounts on one of the mainframes running Solaris and we could use our PCs/Laptops to telnet to it (for assignment purposes). I did not know for a long time what was beneath it, it just appeared to me as an enhanced version of DOS for all I used was vi and javac.

There is a room in the Computer Services Center called Sun Room and the PCs there looked a bit strange to me. One day I could not resist myself and I entered that room. There were strange keyboards....(they were the Sun Keyboards) and a PhD guy was typing really fast on them, managing 4 desktops at a time and I was impressed. I asked him what was this version of "Windows" and he laughed and said "it is Solaris" and told me few things about Solaris. I asked him where could I get it and he told me that I should better install Linux.

I did not install Linux then because I did not have a PC. By the time I bought a PC I had learnt quite well how to use a Solaris workstation (I came to know that our mainframe logins work on it) but it did not impress me that much....for all I used it for was (vi and javac) and ofcourse I did not know an iota about what this "Linux" thing was (I am not a Computer Science undergrad....I am in Physics but later I did some courses in CS as electives)

In my second year I came across a friend who had Linux on his laptop and I got impressed by the beautiful way it booted up (he was using some version of SUSE). I then decided "lets try this thing". I asked him if I could get his CDs and he told me that there is no licensing issue to it. I was impressed. That was the first time when I came to know about Open Source and Free Software. He helped me install Mandrake 9.1 on my PC and offered me life time support for one lunch (one time fees)!!!

I started using Mandrake and experimented a lot with it. I screwed up a lot of things and google--->linuxforums was my best help guide (besides my friend). I came across various distros and tested them and what I observed was the ease with which I could change my OS and run applications on it. I can keep my system up for weeks without anything crashing. The last I booted Windows was a month ago and my system is up on BSD since then (no halt/reboot).

The primary motive behind prefering Linux over windows was my assignments and projects but I never moved away from Windows completely. I admire that OS for some of its merits (though quite few....btw I use MSVDM (Virtual Desktop Manager so that I have four desktops) and gvim whenever I am on windows....I had tried to use blackbox on windows but performance was awful ...etc).

[scruggsw]

I switched initialy because the computer I had inherited was plaged with Windows ME. I have used Windows OS's have always been able to at least tolerate them. ME just had too many problems for me and I had been wanting to try linux anyway. Then I saw what MS is planning on doing with Vista.

Now I still run XP on my laptop and may install linux on it. I have found since I put Debian on my desktop that I have more control over what and how it does things.