Cause ‘muh freedom’

The younger users may not be aware of this… but privacy and freedom were big concerns about the internet since at least the early nineties. We knew that the moment of being ignored was only going to last a little while and it was commonly discussed. And it was already discussed about how insecure windows was and rumors of their back doors and the like.

In that light… when I first heard about linux in 1995 and gave slackware a try one weekend I knew that eventually I was going to switch. But I was/am a graphics artist and 1995 was too soon for doing that kind of stuff at the professional level on linux. But I knew the day would come, so I consciously started switching to open source apps instead of cracked proprietary apps.

Around 2006-2007 there was a lot of talk about projects like Ubuntu making linux highly functional for a graphics person and relatively “easy” to get running. By that time the only proprietary software I was using was Adobe, which I only cared about using while at work and a couple games. And even then, running adobe inside of virtualbox was an option. I dual booted and after about 1-2 months I reached the point where I finally was comfortable enough to not ever go back. After about a year and realizing I hadn’t booted into windows for about 4 months, I erased that partition. I’ve never looked back.