I've been a windows user since XP. I've never really tried any other OS until 2018. I've never used Mac OS either. I've tried to hackintosh my computer but I found the process too tedious and gave up in the middle.
It all changed when I tried Linux Mint on a spare laptop at my grandparents' home back in 2018. It was my first time looking at an OS that's not windows. I was amused by it. It felt extremely good and smooth. The UI was pretty similar to windows and I kind of liked it.
I immediately wanted to test it on my 1.5gb ram desktop. It was a very old one and it ran Windows 7. I wasn't a fan of windows 7's aero theme and its overall UI and I liked Mint better so I decided to install Mint on my desktop.
The thing is, I was too young back then and my technical knowledge was quite limited so I asked my grand father's friend, who's good with computers, to install Linux on my machine. Now I didn't know that it was called Linux Mint back then so I just told him to install Linux. He instead installed ubuntu. I was quite confused because I thought he installed Mint and it didn't look like Mint but I adjusted with it and continued to use it.
Ubuntu experience was quite fascinating. It was smooth, looked decent (definitely felt better than Windows 7). My grandfather's friend taught me some basic terminal commands like sudo apt install etc. It felt good. Linux gave me a lot of power and it was fun to use. I used to mess around with it a lot. The only problem was that it didn't run video games properly back then so I was mostly limited to browser games. But suddenly one day, my OS got bricked. I couldn't login to my desktop and all my files were locked behind it. Luckily he dual booted Ubuntu with Windows 7 so I was able to switch back to Windows again.
I was furious. I was told that Linux was very stable but yet my OS got bricked. This wasn't the first time that this happened to me with Linux. I faced more OS bugs later during my journey.
I eventually started hating Ubuntu. I didn't want to give it another chance again. I don't like GNOME look (even though it is better than Windows 7).
Then came 2 years gap.
I didn't touch Linux again during that gap since it left a bitter taste in my mouth.
But again in September 2020, I noticed that my pc (not the same 1.5gb ram one, this was a 4gb ram one) wasn't looking that good and also some games like CSGO weren't running that well on Windows and moreover I heard that Linux gives better fps. The pc ran windows 7. It was stable but I also didnt like the look so I decided to give Linux another try. This time Linux Mint.
This was during peak covid so I couldn't go back to my grandfather's friend to get the job done since we had quarantine. So this time, I decided to do it on my own.
I grabbed a flash drive, watched a tutorial about how to install Linux Mint. I downloaded the iso, downloaded Rufus, created a bootable flash drive and successfully installed Linux Mint on my machine.
It was quite smooth and it looked cool though I didn't like the way they forcibly changed Firefox's icon, looked dull. I installed CSGO and gave it a try.
It was quite disappointing because it ran worse on Linux. I still decided to keep Linux and use it as a daily driver. I had online school during this time and our school used Cisco Webex Meetings but that wasn't natively avaliable for Linux back then so I had to use the browser version which was quite inconvenient.
But a few days later, the same thing that happened with Ubuntu happened with Mint. I got locked out of the pc again and the OS got bricked again.
I had no option but to delete the Linux paritition and use Windows as usual.
Then I got a new budget gaming PC and it ran things very well so I pretty much forgot about Linux until 2021.
Then in 2021, the interest for Linux kicked in again but this time I wanted to try another distro. So I chose Manjaro since I heard that it's a gaming distro. I didn't know that it was based on Arch Linux and that I had to learn new things to use it and I found installing applications very difficult since there was no option for arch linux binary in most of the websites. So I uninstalled it again.
Then fast forward to 2023, I had a new laptop but it was quite slow ( the reason for this slowness turned out to be faulty ram which I discovered 6 months later). Windows was too laggy at times and almost unusable so I knew its time for Linux again.
This time, I decided to give Ubuntu a second chance and installed the latest LTS version on my laptop but I was disappointed that it was still slow.
Then I installed Manjaro KDE. It looked pretty similar to windows 10 and it was cool but I faced the same slowness issue and had a hard time installing stuff on it since the package manager in Manjaro KDE didn't have many packages.
Then I installed Kubuntu since I wanted to experience a Ubuntu based KDE distro. It was quite good but as usual, the OS got wiped after restarting my pc after installing some stuff so I was fed up again.
This time I installed KDE plasma. It looked pretty good and it's Ubuntu based so I didn't have a headache with the packages. However, I found the basic apps to be quite dull. The UI was good but I just didn't like the apps that were offered by KDE. The package manager lacked a lot of stuff too.
So I just gave up and uninstalled Linux , switched back to windows 10 and took a break. All this happened in a week after installing distros for 8 times.
Then fast forward to April, my PC became dead slow again. The ram issue was becoming worse and I was literally getting 3 fps in desktop. It was laggy and unusable.
So I installed the good ol' Linux Mint again. Yet, it was quite laggy but definitely better than Windows. The problem was that I couldn't run any games on Linux Mint due to bad drivers and most of my software that I use like Visual Studio wasn't avaliable on Linux. It was also very difficult to compile C++ programs and generate an exe that runs on Windows. So I tried to reinstall windows again but it kept failing.
Took it to a computer shop but they couldn't diagnose the problem either. I even replaced the existing HDD and SSD with a brand new SATA SSD but it was still the same but I eventually figured out that it was a ram problem and replaced my RAM and boom! Problem fixed!
I didn't install Linux Mint again after this since currently there's no need for it but next time, I might install Pop OS. It looks pretty good too and i'll give it a try someday.