RealMedia once made a program called RealJukebox. It let me rip CDs and play music with minimal nonsense. One day I got online and RealJukebox forcibly converted itself to RealOne, which was useless garbage. No amount of restoring from backups or fighting registry settings would bring back the program I relied on.

This was where I learned to care about software freedom. Or rather, when I first demanded it, but could scarcely express the concept. I knew I was betrayed.

All of this went down on an eMachines 566i2 that shipped with Windows ME. It was my first computer. The prior family computer ran Windows 95, which despite being five years older, was plainly a better experience. So while I was never the guy calling Bill Gates the devil, I was already well aware that Microsoft was a lumbering giant that could easily fumble that big picture.

So it’s kind of bizarre my first Linux experience was through someone selling their SuSE 7 CDs at a boot sale on another continent. We’d moved to Germany (military brat) and I think I was running a Windows XP developer build that one ultranerd friend had burned for me. (I paid this back by making like seven copies of everything I pirated. CD-Rs were so beautifully cheap back then, and my entire hard drive fit on a dozen.) Some guy with a pile of ISA and PCI cards atop plastic milk-crates on a chilly sports field had a folding paper sleeve labeled “Linux,” which I’d vaguely heard of, and I figured yeah sure that’s worth a couple bucks to try. He tried gamely to explain that it wasn’t selling or buying, because it was “free software,” but even looking back now I think he was more confused than I was. Dude still took money for a professionally-made ordeal. I still have the stickers within arm’s reach. I ran that for a few months, I guess? Lots of nights on non-numeric roleplaying over IRC. Went back to some Windows after that, until the next move and my first laptop, a proper IBM T42 running XP.

In college I was enamored with Ubuntu’s initial promises (and any form of ‘e-mail us to get free discs’) and handed out a bunch of earth-tone paper sleeves for an OS I guess I was dual-booting. I still used XP throughout school, on that laptop and on a tiny little desktop my long-distance boyfriend sent me so we could play City Of Villains together. I’m a little fuzzy now - but I was using Ubuntu for a while after school (and after that boyfriend), until Mark Shuttleworth declared all windows would be left-handed, and I felt that familiar sense of betrayal. I switched to Mint for a while and then decided I cared too much about video games to bother dual-booting all the time.

I was on Windows 7 from about 2010, and exclusively from about 2013, until about the end of 2020. When I built my new machine - the one I’m typing this on - I knew I was going all-in on Mint. It still has problems, believe you me. But they’re all my problems, and potentially fixable. They’re not locked into a decade-old OS that was honestly the pinnacle of Microsoft’s oeuvre. They’re not ever-shifting betrayals of a product where you are not the customer. They’re plain ridiculous technical goofs, plus the occasional conflict between user demand and common sense.

I wholeheartedly recommend Linux Mint with Cinnamon to anyone who gives a shit about their computer’s operating system. It is good software. It runs with negligible bullshit on my at-one-point higher-end desktop with a dozen cores, and my thirdhand beater laptop with Windows Vista stickers. I’m still using Foobar from my late Windows days and IrfanView from my early Windows days. It is the least bullshit solution, for someone who is prone to call bullshit on just about anything.