The story is long, it covers my experience with win7, win8, and two very different linux distros. It sums up a lot of frustration new linux users experience, so maybe some of you will find it an interesting read.

This story started with ubuntu 5.x or something, but that story was more like a game, where I just wanted something different, but couldn't (or wouldn't) switch entirely because I liked photoshop, and I also liked playing games (diablo 2 and quake 3). Which meant, that if I had to dual boot, it's a waste of time to constantly switch, when windows could do all things linux could. Plus I was sharing a desktop pc with my sibling, who didn't really see the point as well.

Later on, I played poker for a while, and none of the software at the time ran on linux, both poker clients, and stuff like holdem manager, so it didn't even cross my mind to switch.

3.5 years ago I got my own laptop with win7 preinstalled, and even I kept playing poker for a bit, it crossed my mind to give linux another chance. At that time, quake3 became quake live (played in a browser), and diablo 2 slowly faded for me. I also had to study a lot, and thought linux would be: a) a good break from all gaming and poker, b) give me some respect from coding/programing teachers, c) help me understand command line better, etc.

I don't remember what exactly didn't work when I dual-booted ubuntu back then. I think it was laggy mousepad, or some screen brightness settings that didn't work. But when these tiny things are experienced every day, it becomes annoying. And when it becomes annoying, it becomes unusable.

I soon upgraded to win8 (to my dismay), and forced myself to use that. I started to work in my internship, and it was not enough time to play around with linux when stuff needed to be done.

After 2 years of having a laptop - exactly when its warranty ended - it started overheating a lot. Being a poor student, and starting to freelance, I decided to pop linux in, and saw that temperatures are reduced by 20-30% under light use. I decided to try out the new and shiny Manjaro with xfce (which is still running on my laptop to this day), and to make myself a developer who uses linux daily.

Problems quickly arose. While it was great in browsing and coding, it was not that great with emulating a web server (I used xampp), and didn't work out of the box how it did on windows. Having spent countless hours of tinkering with various linux servers on virtualbox to just get my phpserver running and accessible, I gave up to deadline pressure, instaled win 7 over my win8, and went back to the world of windows. I agree playing with linux servers taught me a lot, but in a time where work has to be done fast, there's no time to learn the whole new thing, as there is no time to try and make illustrator work.

I moved countries, settled in a full-time position, with company's laptop, and slowly started using only linux on my home laptop. I was more experienced now, I could set up vagrant boxes, virtual hosts, change some things on the server, so it didn't scare me to use linux for personal projects anymore. That came at a price of a lot of time spent on it before.

At my work, I slowly got into a hate and hate relationship with win8 again, and all the bloatware that this laptop had preinstalled. I hated user interface with these stupid tiles, and I was thirsty for something new. And that's when I started to look into linux world for my work laptop as well. One of my col...