Use whatever operating system you want (just don't expect me to support you for free)

I've been using computers for a long time. I won't bother listing all of the computers and operating systems that I've used over the years as an effort to establish some kind of geek cred here, but suffice it to say that I play around with computers a lot, and have for a long time. I'm not much of a programmer or anything like that, but I like using computers and making them do work for me.

And it would be disingenuous of me to imply that I didn't partially subsist on free pizza and soft drinks in lieu of cash payments for technical support through high school and college. I definitely did those things, and they gave me a lot of valuable experience fixing other peoples' problems.

As I gained experience, and as personal computers started to become a thing, I naturally moved on to trying out some of the so-called 'alternative' operating systems. Actually, the first computer I bought was configured to dual-boot between Windows and Slackware. I didn't do much with Slackware at the time except dial into my ISP, but the seed had been planted.

I eventually moved away from Slackware (mostly because I didn't have X installed or configured, and I just had to have a GUI at that point), and I gradually removed it from my computer and began to live in a DOS and Windows world again for a while, until a friend said that he was going to go to someone's house to install a copy of Red Hat Linux, and he asked if I wanted to tag along.

So I did.

Installing Red Hat that night reminded me that there were other operating systems out there that did mostly the same things that I already wanted to do (browse the Internet, play some games, listen to music, that kind of thing), and I went out to my local Best Buy and picked up a copy for myself and got to work dual-booting.

And... I don't really remember that much about my experience. I installed it, I played around with it, I didn't really know what I was doing, so I had to have someone come over and try to fix it (and he did), but I decided then and there that I would be more self-sufficient. I'd figure out how this stuff worked and I would be my own technical support from here on out. I bought a book which was essentially just a printed and bound of the Linux Documentation Project, and read it from cover to cover. I bought a second computer to play with. I dual-booted again and tried to figure out LILO, and so on.

But, after a while I decided to try ditching Windows entirely and living in another OS for a while, mostly Red Hat. And it worked reasonably well for a while. I took it to LAN parties and people were suitably impressed (i.e. they said, "Huh", and then walked off). I could even play the hot games at the time, and that was pretty rad.

To keep an already kind of long story from getting too long, I'll skip the rest of the boring minutiae and get right to the point.

Around that time I was a regular in a few IRC channels, and in one of them people frequently posted status updates with their computers' harware specifications. I did it, and it showed that I was running some kind of Linux kernel under Debian and some people made a few remarks, but one that stood out to me was that one of the guys posted something along the lines that 'running an obscure operating system in the hopes of scoring some kind of geek cred isn't impressive to me'.

This was surprising to me. I was familiar with the Mac vs PC nonsense, but it was the first time I really experienced a kind of outright disdain for using anything other than mIRC on Windows. If you used literally anything else to chat with, you were weird and trying to be different on purpose, like some kind of weirdo.

Of course, being 'into computers' made me a weirdo in the first place, so I was used to that

I never looked at running a different operating system as something that I did for any kind of geek cred or anything. I ran them because I thought it was neat to figure out the different approaches to program management and user management and how the device drivers work and things like that. I vacillated between operating systems a lot in those days. I dual-booted Debian for a while, with Windows. I ran Gentoo full time for a few months, but switched back to Windows. I ran some distro or another on my laptop, but always ended up with Windows on my main computer for a variety of reasons.

That is, up until a little over a year ago.

I had already been running a lot of varied operating systems all over the place, mostly as toys. I even quit dual-booting at some point and instead put together a computer dedicated to running Linux so I could 'keep up my skills', even though I spent very little time on it.

There were three main drivers for me to install something else on my main computer, though.

We had a conference call at my Real Job(tm), where one of the senior IT guys who has an unusual disdain for any operating system that isn't Windows for some reason remarked something along the lines of (referring to Linux), "Why would you trust your business to something that someone wrote in their spare time?" Which, to me, was staggeringly ignorant
Windows 10 came out, and rather than rehash all of the things that there are to not like about it, I'll just say that it pushed me over the edge to ditch it from my 'daily driver'
I was bored and I wanted a challenge


So, I moved from Windows to FreeBSD on my main computer, and I have a smattering of other operating systems installed all over the place around here. I run these operating systems because I want to. I like fiddling around getting computers to do things. I like the challenge. I like learning new things.

But here's the thing: your needs are probably different from mine. Yeah, you might have a computer, and yeah, it probably does the things you want it to do (more or less), and that's fine. Maybe you've heard about this Linux thing and want to give it a try, and that's OK, too. Run whatever you want, accept that you'll make mistakes, learn from them, and move on. 

And even though I have enough to do at my Real Job(tm) that I can't spend an entire evening reinstalling everything on your computer, that doesn't mean that there aren't people out there who are just starting out figuring out this computer stuff who will. Make friends with them, learn together.

Just do me a favor. Run whatever operating system you want, not the operating system that someone else told you that you want.