It’s been my daily driver for 26 years. 40 years or so if you include Unix before.

Straight Debian or DietPi for homecontrol, homeserver only headless. Can´t do that without linux. So thats my killer feature.

Steamdeck, if that counts, grafix interface. Also killer feature.

After getting fed up with Windows I finally returned to Linux desktop as my daily driver. I have used Linux for servers and to keep old computers usable just a little longer, but I couldn’t make the switch because I used Adobe and played games.

So, with I finally had enough and switched to Fedora, arguably a boring distro, I was pleasantly surprised how well my games run on it. The killer feature is that it gets out of my way and it just works.

I owe Valve a lot of gratitude for putting all that work into making gaming work on Linux. I could not have switched without it. I hope the trend continues.

This has the feel of a marketing questionnaire. “Are you not ready to give a 5-star rating to Linux? Click here and we’ll get right back to you!”

Oddly enough, I’m struggling to think of a single experience or feature. The decisive benefit of Linux specifically and FOSS in general is something less tangible: it’s the feeling of empowerment and control you get. A computer of any kind is always something of a black box. Knowing that you have full control over it, even if you don’t understand everything, is revolutionary. I’m certainly not going back.

Boot times - I have an old and weak laptop, but it still works fine for some purposes. Boot times are so much shorter with Linux and I don’t sit around waiting anymore :)

GNOME GS Connect on PC with KdeConnect on phone… It works so well. I’m listening to Music on PC and phone call comes in, it mutes my music till call ends. I get an SMS message, it pops up as notice and I can reply via PC. I leave my system at work unattended I can lock my PC screen from my phone. Shares Cliboard between them. The list goes on, and it all works so well…meanwhile Windows Phone they keep pushing on me always fails to configure or work at all.

When I can just work on my thing and the OS is invisible

Finding out that it’s nowhere near as difficult as I supposed and is amazingly flexible. This is in 2004 when compiling drivers (kernel modules) for display and Wi-Fi was a normal thing for my laptop.

My best experiences have to be the GNOME workflow and the startup time of Void Linux.

Improving my battery life from 1h to 5h. I knew it would be better but never expected it to be so much better.

(OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a power hungry gaming laptop)

I had some old hardware lying around and decided to try building LFS (Linux from scratch) on it. For those unfamiliar, LFS is a “distro” where you compile every single package from source manually, with no package manager or anything. With my limited Linux experience it was really like diving directly into the deep end but the process was surprisingly easy and I learned so much by doing it.

Once the base system was complete, I installed the bare minimum needed to get X, Xfce, and some basic applications running. I’m honestly amazed how little system resources are required to have a fully functional graphical environment for basic web browsing and whatnot. The system boots almost instantly on a decade old hardware and after boot sits at way below 500mb ram usage.

There was a point where the terminal emulator environment just clicked in my head. Binary and library paths, specifically dynamic linking. Compiling with the correct flags… Just building a small CLI tool in C.

Then having all of that wrapped up in tmux with a mixture of emacs and vim on the side. Essentially my whole user environment felt like a flexible IDE where I was coding close to the metal.

It’s all been good, since I gave up on NeXTSTEP around '97, but it got next level best with rolling distributions. Arch has been game changing. I’d used Redhat, CentOS, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, Gobo - all for one or more years - but until Arch I never felt I’d really escaped dependency hell. I still occasionally will have a hiccup, but it’s more like a dependency heck, not something that turned into something that consumed an entire day to resolve. And it’s the only distribution that hasn’t (yet, knock on wood) screwed up grub so that my machine wouldn’t boot. I’ve screwed it up, by e.g. migrating SD’s and getting the UUIDs wrong, but never has the upgrade process screwed me over.

Everything. Software, usability, customization, community, you name it. Using Linux has advanced and keeps advancing my computer literacy skills. This would have never happened if I kept using Windows. There’s also the “activist” angle. By using Linux and other FOSS software, I feel like I’m disengaging the worst parts of modern life and society and taking power away from the corpos even if it doesn’t have huge impact.

Hi, @sohrabbehdani@lemmy.world !

I have a long history with Linux, mainly doing stuff for other people on their Ubuntu machines and having a MacOS laptop myself. I have been into FOSS for a couple of years now and decided to go Linux earlier this year. I got an old PC from work that was gathering dust in the warehouse, and was mainly looking for an everyday distro that was flexible enough to support the applications I’m already using. I’ve been using Debian + KDE for a month now and love it. Before that, I used openSUSE + KDE for about two months, but the amount of weird misbehaviour and inability to install packages/things I needed/wanted got to me, and after copying all my files to an external drive, I installed Debian with KDE. The combination of the functionality and aesthetics of KDE combined with the stability and abundance of packages for Debian works great for me. I’m constantly tweaking things, exploring the possibilities, learning keyboard shortcuts, installing new applications, and generally feeling like I finally have a computer (I know it sounds silly), like I did when I was a teenager 😆.