Manjaro simplifies Arch to the point of where I am competent enough to teach others how to use arch linux after 3 months lmao, first of all the commands in terminal just make sense and second of all you can do ANYTHING you want with your system. Want waifus wall to wall sure sure pal, try that on windows lmao, there is just something magical to an app store that is ACUTALLY USEFUL unlike that windows trash, the ONLY thing i have missed out the entire time was online games with invasive anti cheat like denuvo that are mostly aimed at brain dead teens that like online shooters but have no money…, so i lost nothing at all lmao, well except black ops cold war, a lil salty but still havent bothered with windows in five months now, got a linux gameboy (miyoo mini plus), a linux mini pc (steamdeck) and this monster pc beast on manjaro, if you want help transitioning to linux please ask and i shall show you de wei, i run starfield at 2k ultra with no upscaling or vrs, vsynch and vrr on and shadows on high because ultra is a waste of fps, i get a minimum of 50 in new atlantis and over 120 in some indoors stuff, starfield is the hardest game to ever run on pc, so if you want to leave windows in the garbage where it belongs please ask me for help
It took you 25 years to choose freedom? Oh, the shame of it all… 
I use multiple operating systems; without prejudice – Sooner or later the realization creeps in that they all have their share of annoyances; Linux, or BSD, simply make them easier to overcome.
Yes, and only 4 hours to get himself banned for picking fights. 
I saw what you did there!
I think it is a generation thing a bit.
People that had to do something with computers in the 70s and 80s, they are used to console and unix anyway. But they were very few.
Then in the 90s cheap computers become readily available and to persons as a hobby, so to say. And they were shipped with dos, windows or mac os. So at the beginning at the www boom and the GUI interfaces the windows was pushed everywhere, and it was easy to use from incompetent users and beginners. At that point in time, the GUI Linux was honestly just not mature enough and not working well for the average Joe. The web was smaller, the documentation for beginners was rare and mainly in english.
So as someone that started using computers in 1993, windows was the obvious cheap choice (mac - the expensive) for beginners. And i was one of the few that had a 33.6 k dial up at that time, and for about an hour a day, so searching for some commands to type was a little harder than now. There was yahoo, and some groups, and that was it. Only hardcore users with professional interest would have used unix/linux back then.
I’d say, the earliest semi usable linux instances for the end user came at least 10 Years later, Knoppis, Ubuntu, etc. With a lot more documentation. And still they were buggy and problematic with the hardware.
So if someone started using computers back then, win would have been the only sensible choice, because linux was very “beta” stuff. It came somewhat to the level of windows in terms of easiness and user experience with Ubuntu in the late 2000s.
A long way since then and since at least 10 years linux distros are on par. Now is a matter of choice…and marketing. But back then was not so.
I wasn’t even born yet, and I don’t like the way Windows does things.
Personally, I think it’s more of an attitude problem. But I don’t think I should say more that that - after all, this isn’t a psychology forum…
Elitist … 
That’s the point. Everything was harder back then. No matter what OS you used. And we still managed to do it.
I was maybe 10-12 years old when me and neighbour screwed up his parents’ 486 with Win 3.11. What to do now… well, I installed it again from those 6 or whatever floppies. Plus they also had a printer. Had to install damn printer driver. And it somehow worked. When they came back from work, everything was in order.
And what about today? I can tell you first hand how kids are today, one word — incompetent. They have everything they want, they can search for anything in a matter of seconds, but half of them can’t even figure where to turn the PC on, how to save a file, how to log off, etc. All they know is how to swipe and press buttons on phones.
And in few more years some of them will be installing Linux… so get prepared. 
I even had the win 3.1 over a NovellDOS7 on that 486. That dos was the deal back then. It had utilities with gui and mouse support build in and even a 3d games. A couple of lightyears above the state of the current ms dos 5 at that time.
The kids of today are functionally illiterate. Most of them. Never had seen a paper book and you want them to read wiki and man pages…
There is a big variance in competence among todays kids.
Not where I’m from. Sadly. There are of course few exceptions, which would be fine like 20 years ago.
I started out on other people’s computers with PC-DOS 3.30 in 1990, and the first computer I ever worked with ran TurboDOS.
By the time I bought my first computer — late 1991 — I had already decided that I wanted to use OS/2. The computer — a Brother slimline desktop model with an i386 DX processor — came preinstalled with DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.0, and I used it like that for six months, until OS/2 2.0 — the first 32-bit version of OS/2 — became available.
I then ran OS/2 for five years, although I had some UNIX experience from college and work, and I had to use DOS and later Windows 3.11 at work.
By 1997, I needed a new computer — the Brother had everything on the motherboard and no room for expansion slots, and its onboard GPU was starting to act up. I then wanted to go with UNIX, and specifically, the x86 version of Steve Jobs’ NeXtSTeP, but this was hard to still come by — NeXt was then just being assimilated into Apple — and very expensive.
All of my friends were on Windows 95 at the time, but coming from a real 32-bit operating system, I did not want to settle for something that still ran on top of MS-DOS. So I compromised and got Windows NT 4.0 Workstation.
Two years later, I discovered Mandrake Linux, and I installed it in dual-boot with NT. Mind you, I didn’t have an internet connection yet at the time, so there was no one to ask for advice. But I didn’t need it, because I can read, and the Mandrake CD set came with printed manuals and lots of HowTos. This was in the first week of December 1999.
On the 1st of January 2000, NT wouldn’t boot up anymore due to the Y2K bug, despite the fact that I had installed all of the official service packs — don’t even get me started on how hard it was to actually obtain those from Microsoft itself via their customer service — and in spite of Microsoft’s own Y2K pack.
Mandrake still booted up happily, however, and because I had already for a long time wanted a UNIX system, my needs were met. I never looked back. After all, NT was only a compromise solution in my case, and I had never really bonded with it. 
As soon as I begot an internet connection — I waited until cable internet became available here in town, which was late in April 2000 — I started helping out newbies in the various GNU/Linux discussion groups on Usenet, and I have continued doing so until early this year, when I finally had enough of the dropping intelligence levels in those discussion groups and the periodic infestations with mentally deranged trolls and spammers. I had also just gotten out of the hospital from suffering a stroke, and so I decided that enough was enough, and that my time was better spent elsewhere.
I have also run a small IRC network for a number of years, together with a bunch of other people. All of our systems ran GNU/Linux — different distributions — and for a short while, we had a FreeBSD machine as well.
At present time, I am a member and a moderator here at the Manjaro forum, a (less intensive) member at the PCLinuxOS forum — a distribution I’ve used for a couple of years — and the administrator at a non-computer-related forum.
The Manjaro forum takes up most of my online time, although the forum I’m an administrator of has just recently suffered a security breach, and as such, I am now also spending a little more time there, given that we’ve decided to move to a different (and more up-to-date) hosting solution.
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I seem to recall that came with a companion disk: TutorDOS, prior to the “for-dummies” era; though I probably would have qualified at that time.
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It did, indeed, and that was my first introduction to the computer.
The machine in question — an Olivetti — did however have a strange keyboard layout. Instead of the Esc key, it had a Help key, as well as 16 function keys along the top side, no cursor key island, and a numeric keypad with cursor key functionality, but defaulting to numbers — instead of a NumLock key, it had a Field key.
I don’t know what kind of processor was in the machine — possibly an i8088 — but it had two 5.25" floppy drives side by side, and no hard disk drive.
It was only later — via a printed course and two accompanying floppy disks from my uncle — that I became familiar with MS-DOS/PC-DOS 3.30, and then that same uncle gave my dad a refurbished XT clone (with two stacked 5.25" floppy drives and no hard disk) for his birthday.
And that’s where I then had my first practical experience with it, and within three weeks after that first experience, I was already writing elaborate batch files, and a few weeks later, I was analyzing my uncle’s GWBASIC programs and writing some of my own.
Around the same time, I was also enrolled in a professional training course at a center where they used genuine IBM XT machines (with an HDD), and that’s where I learned WordPerfect 5.0, and then later 5.1.
And I was so proficient at it — including my understanding of DOS — that the instructors requested that I would assist them in writing up a WordPerfect 5.1 course and teaching WordPerfect to adults whose native language was not Dutch, which I then did. For writing up the course, I had to work at a different facility farther away, where they were using mostly IBM PS/2 computers, and where I became interested in OS/2.
After that course ended, I then decided to go back to college and study Applied Information Technology, although I quit after one year.
I was already 28 when I went back to college, and I had to pay for my tuition from an unemployment fee, which also had to cover all of my expenses, as I was living by myself (and alone) in a rental apartment. In addition to that, the college treated us all like children — they even sent me a letter one day that “my son” had neglected to attend class. 
And last but not least, with the exception of a small and select number of teachers, many teachers were just very bad.
One example was a woman who taught by way of handwritten slides on an overhead projector, and her slides were completely unreadable, just as she was only mumbling and you simply couldn’t understand what she was saying.
Another example was a mathematics teacher who was actually a professional military officer — he was a Major by the start of the school year, and by the end of it he had been promoted to Colonel. He used to cover approximately 30 pages in his course per hour, and we often had two successive hours from him, which meant that he was covering 60 pages.
And worst of all, he would often skip entire chapters with the excuse that “You’ve seen all of that in high school last year, so I’m not going to explain this”. Most of the other students in my class had attended other college or university directions before enrolling in IT, and for myself, high school was 11 years ago at that point in time — which I told him, too.
I also had a couple of very bad health-related episodes that year — rushed to hospital in an ambulance twice, and each time shortly before the exams — and so by the time of the final exams, when I got to the COBOL exam, all I could do was write my name on the paper. Total blackout. I had to wait for one hour before handing in my paper, and so that’s what I did, and then I walked out of the room, right over to the administration department, and I told them I was dropping out.
I then bought me a number of books, and I started studying stuff on my own, at my apartment.
Addendum: Another thing that I forgot to mention is that this particular college education was too geared towards employment in the corporate sector, with courses about fiscal legislation, bookkeeping, economics, et al. That too was a major turnoff for me, because I was interested in computers, operating systems and programming languages, not in corporate and financial-economic affairs.
The difference is that detailed information was more freely available then; one usually just needed to find a ‘readme’ file. Now, useful incormation is frequently obfuscated behind corporate policy, licencing restrictions and/or pay walls – enough reason in itself to gravitate toward Unix and open source; IMHO.
Well, there was no such file when it came to my uncle’s self-written BASIC code. I simply analyzed the code and then implemented my own variations of it in my programs.
I started using Computers in the 80s, first as a Methods Engineer, then moved to become a Programmer. I worked on DEC PDP 11/70s, Data General Mainframes and Wang Minis. I remember the excitement when the Software Department got our first IBM PC clone, with MS DOS, in the mid to late 80s. Us lowly programmers weren’t allowed near the thing, until the Senior System Analyst got bored with it.
I programmed on Windows through the 90s, and started using Linux in 2000… Mandrake KDE, arguably the easiest Linux distro to use, and way easier than Ubuntu, when it finally came along. Mandrake made it really easy for me to transition the Linux, so much so that I almost never touched the CLI. When I moved to Ubuntu, I was finally forced to actually learn to use the CLI.
From about 2002, I was still programming on Windows, but running Windows on a VM on top of Mandrake then later Ubuntu… getting a job in the corporate world on any platform other than Windows, with my experience proved exceedingly difficult. But working for a small company meant I had a great deal of latitude, so I chose to use my personal Laptop.
I finally got away from Windows by retiring.
I remember those.
That was my first distribution as well, and I’ve used many iterations of it, with KDE 1.1 (
) at first, then KDE 2, then KDE 3.
Then I used PCLinuxOS for a while — with KDE Plasma 4, the first release to bear the Plasma name, and I still have it on a laptop — due to Mandrake having become Mandriva and suffering so badly from corporatitis that they fired their own founder, Gaël Duval.
PCLinuxOS is a spin-off from Mandriva, founded by TexStar (Bill Reynolds), a former Mandrake/Mandriva packager. I’ve also used Mageia for one release; it too is a Mandriva fork, mostly maintained by laid-off Mandriva packagers and coders.
Meanwhile, I’ve also dabbled with Gentoo, and the last iteration of our IRC network ran CentOS — earlier we had Mandrake, openSUSE, Debian and Slackware.
But either way, when I discovered Manjaro in 2019, it was love at first sight, just as it had been with Mandrake in 1999.
Well, you say that, but back in those days, Mandrake didn’t have a graphical installer yet — it was all ncurses-driven — and absolutely no dependency management. If you wanted to install something, then you had to hunt down all of the dependencies yourself.
Not a real problem for myself — because I was genuinely interested — but imagine if Manjaro were like that today. As far as I know, only Slackware maintains the “no dependency handling” policy anymore, and they are also still using a console-driven installer.
The n 
bs here would probably get a seizure if they were faced with that.