I got into Linux after doing my first end to end build of a pc, I needed an OS, and I wanted to learn basically how to build a server for my own amusement.

Here are the benefits: literally ninety-nine percent of everything else in the world is or seems to be based on Linux or it and Linux dated at some point. The best programs for ripping/encoding movies are on Linux. If you want to build a home media server or do home automation: Linux. If you want an easy, cheap NAS: Linux. Network wide ad blocker: Linux. You can do all of these on the same machine at the same time and it will be ‘let’s go’ and it can do it on surprisingly lower resources than Windows ever will. Once you’re comfortable with Linux, there’s a massive range of things you wanted to do or didn’t even know you wanted to do but Windows made difficult or expensive or inconvenient that are ridiculously easy to do. Even something as simple as doing backups to your primary machine are suddenly low stress. This is why when getting my friends into it, I tell them to use an old PC or laptop and go: every time–every time–they’re like “I’ve been wanting to do X and it’s right here” and me “yeah, I know, welcome to a much less frustrating digital life”.

If you can’t or won’t for whatever reason transition fully from Windows; you don’t have to. It makes life with Windows monumentally easier as you can lower your expectations on what it will do and leave it for things that for whatever reason, it has to do. Linux fits itself into your life, you don’t have to carve out spaces and overthink way too much to make a space compatible with Windows.

For me, the biggest benefit: I have ADHD and depression and was and still am perpetually bored combined with low grade misery. I combat that with learning new things, setting up projects to do, anything to occupy my mind. Linux is amazing: there’s always something new to learn and to do, because it can do anything. I want to learn how routers work; flash a router to DD-WRT and go. Get into advanced terminal and command line: Ubuntu Server, Arch, or Slackware, let’s go… Home Automation looks interesting: there’s an entire OS for that or I can run it in a container on my primary machine. I know what a container is and how to use it: awesome. Media Server, NAS? I’ve built them on single board computers and run them or I throw them on the same machine: Linux can do that.

Here’s the funny part: I went back to school to get a degree in Software Dev and decided actually, I may get three; I was barely a mid-passing student the x decades ago I tried this education thing. Since I restarted, everything is just–easy. Someone gave me a scholarship, which is insane. I tutor people, for fucks’ sake; its weird. At work, I started getting much more advanced assignments: batch? Terminal, sure, send me the design documents, I’ll test that. SOAP: never seen it before, but not really worried, send the documents and give me a demo, I can do that, I"ll write everyone a tutorial afterward.

The most important thing Linux does is it teaches you–and keeps doing it–that your computer is not an unknowable force of nature you have no ability to control or anticipate, but a tool. A complicated, advanced tool, but a tool. It shows you and tells you how each part of the tool works and why and how they fit together and you have no reason to be afraid or panic ever again. Nothing will faze you anymore: hard drive error to cataclysmic failure, motherboard short to weird beeping that never stops: okay, you have experienced it (twice) or you read about that on that site when you were looking up sed statements, you can handle this. You may have checklists for it. You recompiled kernels, which at one point you were sure were some sci-fi thing; this is not even on the radar for upsetting.

You will have the extreme pleasure of telling Windows when it gets saucy with you 'You do know I can format you down to bare drive and reinstall everything in the next five seconds? My data is safely backed up on Watson Xubuntu and I have some free time; are you really feeling it right now?" And do it. And be annoyed for the next few hours you have to do it, but you can and if you have to, will, and it’s inconvenient but you’re not worried at all because this is not some unknowable wtf black box magic; Linux taught you this is just a tool, and exactly how it works and everything will be fine.

This has been my SepTalk on me and my feelings about Linux.