Do you use Linux?

I've tried it, but there's a lot of work to getting it set up right and I don't want to put in the effort. Of course, if I bothered to learn it well, it would probably be way easier to set up than Windows, but that's ok.

Mainly at work. I guess i can put up with it at home but currently i only dabble with a virtual machine on my win 7 box and its still not conducive to gaming. Still learning and feel like an idiot when working with it.

I spent the past 9 years primarily as a Linux (RHEL/CentOS) sysadmin with a good amount of development thrown in, I guess they call it DevOps these days. Recently I moved into a full development position working in Gentoo. My work machine has been Fedora for a decade now and I can't imagine getting work done efficiently in anything other than Linux. Windows has been a solid OS since ditching the old 9x kernel to focus on NT but the black box nature of it and lack of a centralized software repository is a major burden for productivity.

My primary home PC is also my gaming machine so it of course runs Windows. Dual booting is a hassle so if I need to do work I have Cygwin installed or use VMs in VirtualBox if needed. I would love to use Linux full time but I'm not going to hold my breath for the dream of the "Linux desktop".

I use it on my laptop, but I use that thing mostly for work. It's not bad though, just wouldn't ever have it as my main OS since not all pc games work on it.

Been using linux since 1996 (a couple years before the year of linux on the desktop). Use it as my main system at work, a Mac laptop as my work-from-home machine, and windows on my personal devices because games.

I really only use my home machines to run steam and chrome, so the OS is largely irrelevant.

I like linux quite a bit, but I like games so doesn't really work for me atm.

I dabbled a bit on some ubuntu and a few other distros here and there and I like it a lot, but really for my home PC is just not possible to use it, it might be true that there are more games coming out with linux support but not all of em.. the day I can play all my games no exception on linux is the day I'll never use windows ever again.

I go back and forth. I really like Linux for if I'm doing programming of any sort, because the built-in toolset is so much better. But for my day to day nonsense (and especially video games) I can't get away from Windows. I've tried dual booting, but I only ever boot into windows these days, and if I really need it I can run a Linux VM.

I have it running as a separate partition on my little 4-year-old netbook. It doesn't make the netbook cry as much as Windows. I just use the internet on it anyway.

Ubuntu has become insanely user-friendly over the years. The setup is quick and painless. I always recommend it to people to try on a second laptop or whatever to see how they feel about it.

I myself use Linux exclusively on my laptop, and I dual boot Linux and Windows 10 on my pc. I pretty much only ever use Windows for gaming, which is not very often as a student.

I tried Ubuntu, gave up when I had to look up every thing I wanted to do.

I couldn't figure out how the fuck to install Debian.

I've tried Ubuntu but it still sometimes feels like something that should be simple isn't really so simple. For instance, I want to watch Netflix - but you have to have Silverlight to do that and you can't get that running on a Linux system easily.

It is hardly rocket science and I might decide to dive into Ubuntu again, especially after having to go in and disable all of the information gathering features that MS puts into Windows 10. I dunno, maybe I'll go put it on a virtual machine and start messing with it in my free time. How do you have your Linux and Windows partitions separated? Or do you have them on separate drives? My PC only has one internal drive, though I do have an external. I guess I could keep a 50GB Linux partition, the rest for Windows and gaming, and the external for all other files? See, you've got my damn wheels turning again, I'll get halfway through all of this and then get annoyed at something.

I do have a spare laptop but my brother's about to go to college so I'm going to give my dad this five year old spare and he's going to give my brother his fairly new laptop. I did have Ubuntu on that spare for some time. In high school, I took parts from a few different old computers and got one working and put an old version of Ubuntu on it, so I'm not really a noob with the OS or anything, I just find Windows a lot easier most of the time.

I've used it exclusively in the past, but I now run OS X. I still use Linux at work and on my servers, where I run CentOS 7 or Arch Linux.

Yeah you run into silly things like the Netflix issue every blue moon. Luckily there are always a lot of great resources out there if you have the time and patience to look them up.

I have a 250GB SSD split down the middle for my two partitions, and a 2TB drive that I store all my goods on that both OS's share.

Setting up a dual-boot was definitely the most tedious part of my current setup. Windows is definitely easy to use, but I do feel a lot of it is just because of how ingrained in our brains it is after using it for so many years. A few years of running linux and that has become second nature to me as well. Definitely a learning curve to it, but nowhere near as steep as it once was. In many ways I find Ubuntu much easier to use than Windows. Especially considering how much better it tends to run, and not having to deal with all the garbage that can find its way onto Windows machines.

As someone studying computer engineering, Linux has also become a godsend for programming lol.

Linux certainly has its place in my work, but I mainly deal with a Microsoft ecosystem. I do however run a private Ubuntu Server from home. It's pretty great.

My work laptop runs Ubuntu, my work desktop runs some esoteric distro that I never bothered checking (I only use the laptop anyway), my home desktop dual boots Mint and Windows 7, but I pretty much only use Windows because games. If you're not dual booting and don't care about games, Linux is very straightforward to setup and a great system to use. My mother uses it and she loves it, especially because she doesn't need to be worried about viruses anymore.

How? As someone in their junior year of a software engineer degree I can't see how this makes sense. IDE's, solidworks, and visual studio run great on windows (with the last two being exclusive to the OS). I can't see how linux helps anyone other than an IT guy who needs a networking solution that is more secure. I by no mean have any issue with linux at all, but in my first year of school I had to deal with a lot of tools from the CIT program taking the same class who only used "Ubuntu" because it was the best thing ever. Look man I just need to get eclipse running and get some shit done, I'm not looking at taking half an hour to install flash or silverlight on my damn laptop. I apologize in advance if I am making an argument for an OS in a work environment where this is more of a discussion about an OS used for entertainment. Still though, even OSX has xcode and swift, and if you want to go to the dark side and build something in C#, visual studio is actually really impressive( and free for students!). Also, disclaimer, if I am missing the whole point, I have been drinking seeing as this is the last weekend before classes start....

I tried using it a few years ago but it just didnt fill my needs for a computer at the time, thats not to say I am completely opposed to learning it at some point in the future.

I use it (Ubuntu) exclusively. My Windows install shit the bed for some reason a while back so I said fuck it and installed Linux. Really haven't looked back since. As far as games go, the only thing I miss is Warframe, but almost everything else I would play is either cross platform or console exclusive anyway so not like I really give a shit. There are a few PC games here and there I would like to try, but so far nothing I can remember that made me feel the need to to back to Windows. I'm definitely not opposed to it though. Whenever I build my next PC, I'll have both Linux and Windows, but as for right now? I'm good.

I used linux as my primary OS for years; first Ubuntu, then Debian, then Arch. Arch was really great for a while but became super unstable when they switched over to systemd. It ended up breaking everything and I got sick of the constant management so I went back to Windows. Nowadays I'm on a Mac so I just run OSX, and after using Linux for so many years it really feels just like Linux designed by someone who kinda knew what they were doing. The Unix filesystem is still there so I already know my way around the terminal, but it feels way less cobbled together than a lot of linux distros do. I'm cool with not really using linux ever again

I used it as my main OS for a few months a few years back, but it meant booting to Windows whenever I had to do anything important (involving programs that didn't work or didn't work well in Linux). It was such a pain that I simply stuck to Windows and after some time got rid of it altogether.

I toy in my head with the idea of installing it on a laptop, but with the now-incredible usefulness of cloud storage stuff for my writing and other projects, the idea floats away very quickly - Windows has everything I need and is easier to use for me at this point. If I see something come along that Linux is amazing at and is useful to me personally, I'll 100% install it on some random extra machine I buy or build.

I use it almost exclusively at work (sometimes OSX instead), and at home it's Cygwin usually. It helps that I'm happy using vim for pretty much all my work related stuff.

Except for games (Steam on Win7). Sadly that's not the majority of my computer usage anymore.

Linux is a great OS, but there are still caveats to using it as a daily driver. Like most people have said most of the popular distros like Ubuntu and SUSE come with easy to use GUI environments, but it definitely helps and makes life a lot easier knowing how to operate a command line. I'm in school learning Information Security and pretty much all of the best tools are on Linux. Honestly the only reason why I run Windows on my PC is because of gaming.

It never was my primary OS but I've been using it on the side since college. I used it a lot as a developing platform since it's a great OS for developing in general. A lot of my classes used it as well. Nowadays, I have a HTPC with Steam OS on it (it's technically Linux) in my living room and I always wanted to install some kind of Linux distro on one of my other machines as a developing machine for personnel projects but since I do software development all day at work, I don't have the drive to do it for fun anymore. Kind of a bummer since all my tools at work are mostly Microsoft based and I miss developing on Linux sometimes.

Back in the 90's when I was big into DOS and thought this whole Win 3.1 thing was terrible I thought about Linux.

Now as a lazy adult I'm absolutely fine with minimal user interaction with under the hood elements of anything. It is why I prefer to play video games on consoles or why I don't really see the appeal of Android's open ended nature.

I've been a Linux user since 1999. Started with Red Hat 6.1, currently using Fedora 22. Like most others have said, mainly for work, and for security reasons. My main fuck around machine at home is Windows 10.

And even though you said it doesn't count, I count Android as Linux. Been rocking it since '09. 2.3 is still my favorite version.

If my entire library would run on Linux then I'd scrap windows in a heartbeat. I've used linux for about 7 years now, mostly for work but I have a dual-boot set up on my computer so I can use it at home as well. I've used Ubuntu, Genome and XFCE, and each has it's pros and cons. If you're looking to start with something familiar then Ubuntu is a very accessible OS, though I'm currently using Genome and once you've got the hang of it, it can feel very slick.

As always though, it's quite a specialist OS, so unless you're using it for something specific for which it is obviously beneficial, you're probably better off sticking with Windows.

Fedora at work. Cygwin is good enough for me at home.

I ran Ubuntu for a really long time on my college laptop, and before that I ran Mandrake (awful), Red Hat (solid), and Debian (initially baffling) at one time or another, but when that was stolen I bought a Macbook and stopped using anything but OSX for a couple years. When I built my PC I had an Ubuntu partition that I'd use now and again, switching to Windows to play games that didn't run under Linux, but when I wound up having to replace my hard drive last year I never bothered to set it up again and have just been using Windows. I like a lot of things about Linux, but I haven't had much drawing me toward it lately since both Windows 7 and 10 have essentially been great--the reason I used Linux so much back in the day was because of how goddamn shaky older versions of Windows were (that and I had a ridiculous fondness for dicking around in the terminal because it made me feel like a COOL HACKER GUY), so I don't get as bothered by it anymore.

I've only used it in an academic setting. I've never used it at home.

I mostly use Windows, but a couple of my PC's also have Ubuntu installed as a dual boot thing. I've got some Linux boot CD's for troubleshooting too, but all in all I guess I boot up Linux a few times a year.

For a couple of years I tried using Ubuntu Studio as my main music production thing, as it has a realtime kernel and could potentially handle MIDI sequencing with little to no note delay and stuff like that, but every major update consistently crashed the system - breaking the audio drivers (they kept switching back and forth between ALSA, PulseAudio and something else with every other iteration) and finally totally breaking the desktop environment, so I gave up on it.

Been using Linux on and off since about 2001 I think?

@sweep: Agreed.

So which distro is your one of choice now? Still Ubuntu?

Basically this for me. It was the main OS all of my university courses used (since they were all designed around using software that was freely available. You could use whatever you wanted to do the materials but it all had to run on Linux for marking) and I've kinda stuck with it when not playing games (other than when I'm on my laptop where I use OS X) since I prefer it to Windows (the "under the hood" aspects of Linux make a lot more sense to me than Windows, and I vastly prefer developing on it). I don't same drive dual boot it though, I actually have it on a separate SSD that I switch between with my Windows SSD in BIOS (which is a pain but also the most first world of first world problems) so I can wipe the SSD and install something else whenever I feel like it (which works well because I like messing around with different distributions).

All comes down to preference, really. I mean, I haven't used the likes of Eclipse or Solidworks (for a Graphics and design course) since first year. But being at a stage in my education where I am no longer limited to using the IDE we are learning how to code on, Linux is where I like to do my work. Especially on my laptop which isn't a very impressive machine, as it is my desktop that I put the money into. Windows can be sluggish on my laptop, Linux runs like a dream. Makes work easier.

I use my Chromebook pretty often and it's built on Linux. Does that count?

I use Linux for work and for special applications at home (such as when I need to use Linux for something that another OS cannot perform) but prefer to use Windows personally. I could do just as well with full Linux environment personally, but I grew up using Windows so it's just my personal preference.

SteamOS if that even counts. Im just crossing my fingers that it gets it together enough so I can completely switch. I initially installed it as a dual boot setup but SteamOS insisted on overwriting windows. So had to ditch it but will come back later since my home computer is specifically for gaming.

When I used it, with multiple attempts, it seemed like a coin flip if drivers would install properly or not, not worth the headache.

I need to just try building a file server or something entirely from scratch just to get some practice in. I kinda half measure it at work so i still don't think i can consider myself well versed.

I totally agree with you. Also software engineering and computer engineering are a lot different as well. I have Linux on a few older laptops I for no reason at all still keep around but it has improved the performance significantly over the stock Vista they came with(yea these are some old ass laptops I for some reason keep around) lol.

@marc@believer258 Netflix totally works natively on Linux without Silverlight now, you just have to use Google Chrome.

I'm poor so I bought a Chromebook, swapped out the hard drive for a larger one and put Xubuntu on it. It's pretty great. I'm just a user but I really like an OS that's fast and (now that Windows 10 is out) not mysteriously phoning home information to Microsoft. And I can play a lot of the indie stuff I'm into thanks to the recent push for Linux ports.

edit: even if I had a beefy pc I'd probably do my best to just keep games on that thing and not even open a browser unless I really had to, and keep email and web stuff on Linux, just for security reasons.

I use Linux occasionally and appreciate it for what it is and what you can do with it but for the most part I feel zero need to use it on a regular basis outside of work.

Out of the distros I've used over time my favorite is Mint. Just felt clean and could get it up and working on a box with little or no hassle. Ubuntu is okay but I just don't care for it too much these days for small nagging reasons.

I started using Linux after having issues installing a lot of software I was using on Windows - I was working on a web project and had to install a bunch of crap like NPM, Ruby, etc. and on Windows it was just a nightmare process trying to get all the dependencies right and the installers were just putting files everywhere, making it much harder to remove it all once I was done with it. It was a much simpler process on Linux.

Since then I've primarily used Linux, but I still dual boot Windows 7 to play new releases that aren't supported on Linux. The AMD drivers have been kinda hit and miss for me - there was a time when I couldn't play Dota 2 at 800x600 with 60 FPS despite having an HD7970, but it seems to work fine for most games that have native releases now.

I've been using Linux Mint because it has the beginner friendliness of Ubuntu with a better UI, though I'm getting a bit tired of the packages you get from aptitude often being very outdated, which leads to having to either compile from source or in the case of AMD drivers go to their website and get a dinky installer that will most likely break something the next time you reboot. I'm not sure what distribution to move to for more current packages, I'm a bit afraid of going the whole way to something like Arch because whenever I've tried it I've always managed to screw something up during the install.

I am really glad that SteamOS is bringing some games that would never have been released on Linux before there, like Shadow of Mordor, Borderlands, etc.. I never understood why some people seem to get upset about it.

@jack268: Mint is weird. In general instead of Mint I'd suggest the latest version of one of the official Ubuntu spins that come with a traditional desktop. Xubuntu, Lubuntu and Ubuntu Mate are all pretty good.

edit: to be specific I think Mint is based on an older version of Ubuntu, I think 14.04 right now, so if you want newer drivers/kernels grabbing the latest version of any given official Ubuntu release instead would probably be a better idea.