It is so funny when people claim Linux authority by saying, “I’ve been using Linux since the 2000s…”
Sit down. My first distro was Slackware on a 200Mhz Pentium MMX. And back then, window managers were the hotness, not desktop environments. Back in my day, we fiddled with Xeyes in IceWM—and we liked it.
But none of that vintage cred actually matters, because Linux never wins people over with nostalgia. It wins people over when it finally does the thing they care about.
I abandoned Linux in the early 2010s for the same reason most people did: it didn’t have the apps or the games I needed. The OS was fine. The software ecosystem wasn’t.
What brought me back? Gaming. Not philosophy, not ideology, not a love of fiddling with config files.
Gaming forced Linux to solve real, modern problems—drivers, performance, Vulkan, translation layers, graphics pipelines. And once those problems got solved, the benefits spilled into everything else: creative apps, productivity apps, niche tools, Windows compatibility layers that actually work.
This is what people still don’t get: regular users don’t care about Wayland vs Xorg, package formats, compositor drama, or kernel minutiae. They care about whether the apps they need will run with minimal friction.
An operating system succeeds when it disappears into the background and lets people use their software. For the first time, Linux is genuinely doing that—and that’s why the momentum is finally real.
Sit down. My first distro was Slackware on a 200Mhz Pentium MMX. And back then, window managers were the hotness, not desktop environments. Back in my day, we fiddled with Xeyes in IceWM—and we liked it.
But none of that vintage cred actually matters, because Linux never wins people over with nostalgia. It wins people over when it finally does the thing they care about.
I abandoned Linux in the early 2010s for the same reason most people did: it didn’t have the apps or the games I needed. The OS was fine. The software ecosystem wasn’t.
What brought me back? Gaming. Not philosophy, not ideology, not a love of fiddling with config files.
Gaming forced Linux to solve real, modern problems—drivers, performance, Vulkan, translation layers, graphics pipelines. And once those problems got solved, the benefits spilled into everything else: creative apps, productivity apps, niche tools, Windows compatibility layers that actually work.
This is what people still don’t get: regular users don’t care about Wayland vs Xorg, package formats, compositor drama, or kernel minutiae. They care about whether the apps they need will run with minimal friction.
An operating system succeeds when it disappears into the background and lets people use their software. For the first time, Linux is genuinely doing that—and that’s why the momentum is finally real.
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That's the reason I always recommend people interested on Linux to first do an adaptation period keeping Windows but slowly changing all their applications for others that run fine on Linux. After that, jumping to Linux is totally painless, and suddenly you discover a treasure of apps you don't have on Windows.
That's the way I did it, 20 years ago.
Work forces me to use Windows, so I know what is at the other side. And the only thing I miss is Visual Studio (the classic one, not VS Code).
I have never been cared about games, myself.
