It's just come up again for the sake of context in another thread, so I'm going to start this thread purely to link it when needed ("dynamic linking" drumroll). Also means I can ad-infinitum update this -- because your journey ain't over till you're over -- just by editing the OP and I can post other things in here like lessons learned, standard tips, useful tricks, etc. (those in separate posts, duh). This just keeps references simpler as I can simply link to things rather than have lengthy exposition text-walls between spoiler tags -- as is my wont being as verbose as I can sometimes be, albeit only in second place as there is one other... Ah, yes, right, on-topic (in off-topic):
The first distro I had was Tiny Core (I don't count the PCs donated to my local library or kiosk stuff). It was for a really old Acer laptop (about circa 2005ish model -- it weighed about a metric ton). My decision based entirely on the most lightweight thing and that's what I found according to the interwebs. I still used Win7 as my daily on my main laptop. Anyway, next stop was antiX because I wanted to try the next thing (yes, I was adventurous) and antiX was billed as super light. Once I was comfortable, it was wash, rinse, repeat: I went crazy testing things on the poor old gal, distros probably never heard of like "Bodhi", and even Net/FreeBSD -- mainly FreeBSD (I actually really like this OS and almost chose it over Linux, but I'm glad I stuck with Linux because Linux ended up getting way more support and attention -- though I may defect in the future as my relationship with Debian is growing, pardon the pun, "unstable"). So Ubuntu and "user-friendly" stuff were very after-the-fact for me and that's likely why I find them more complex (yep, and that's 1/2 reasons I may leave Debian: increasing complexity, the other being packaging). Also, I have a psychological block against anything too heavy, regardless of beauty, and I like simple.
Eventually I figured I'd choose a prime OS (i.e. not a deriv). So I ended up with Debian as my "final" OS, because it was stable (I wish people would stop thinking that referred to hardware, when it refers to the OS and its packages), and it was very configurable from a netinstaller base-only install, while not being quite as OTT granular as Arch. Basically it gave me the best of all worlds.
Time went by and one day I realised how much better Debian was than Windows -- I mean from a perspective of feeling secure and in control of my OS, I hadn't yet become all political about software. Problem was I had so much Windows-only software. But I did what I recommend everyone do: took the plunge. By that I mean I didn't just uninstall Windows from my daily machine, I wiped the OEM partition so I couldn't turn back. And I discovered very quickly that there were a lot of really good replacements. I had no idea GIMP could do what it could because the UI was ugly (still is, but I'm glad each change is gradual) and Photoshop looked way more polished -- as one example since office stuff is pretty much of a muchness, especially if your first word processor was Word Perfect on MSDOS.
It took me like a month or so to replace everything except Paint.NET, which I still cannot find a good replacement for (been from Pinta to Krita) but I no longer need it. Funny thing about it is I've found a whole new approach to many tasks after over a decade of Linux. I did start maintaining a Win7 VM after the fact, mainly to access files with software-specific formats and convert them, for example my PDNs, as well as for the software for my programmable mouse, but it organically fell into disuse because input-remapper fixed my mouse issue and I found a new approach to things, and eventually it became free disk space years back.
Sadly, as of a few weeks ago, I had to install Win10 in a VM to use Amazon's Kindle Create software which is the only thing that guarantees Amazon KDP full compatibility (they used to support Linux with Kindlegen and there's a Mac version of Kindle Create, I'm not sure about the lack of Linux support). Sometimes you gotta make a concession and be pragmatic.
The first distro I had was Tiny Core (I don't count the PCs donated to my local library or kiosk stuff). It was for a really old Acer laptop (about circa 2005ish model -- it weighed about a metric ton). My decision based entirely on the most lightweight thing and that's what I found according to the interwebs. I still used Win7 as my daily on my main laptop. Anyway, next stop was antiX because I wanted to try the next thing (yes, I was adventurous) and antiX was billed as super light. Once I was comfortable, it was wash, rinse, repeat: I went crazy testing things on the poor old gal, distros probably never heard of like "Bodhi", and even Net/FreeBSD -- mainly FreeBSD (I actually really like this OS and almost chose it over Linux, but I'm glad I stuck with Linux because Linux ended up getting way more support and attention -- though I may defect in the future as my relationship with Debian is growing, pardon the pun, "unstable"). So Ubuntu and "user-friendly" stuff were very after-the-fact for me and that's likely why I find them more complex (yep, and that's 1/2 reasons I may leave Debian: increasing complexity, the other being packaging). Also, I have a psychological block against anything too heavy, regardless of beauty, and I like simple.
Eventually I figured I'd choose a prime OS (i.e. not a deriv). So I ended up with Debian as my "final" OS, because it was stable (I wish people would stop thinking that referred to hardware, when it refers to the OS and its packages), and it was very configurable from a netinstaller base-only install, while not being quite as OTT granular as Arch. Basically it gave me the best of all worlds.
Time went by and one day I realised how much better Debian was than Windows -- I mean from a perspective of feeling secure and in control of my OS, I hadn't yet become all political about software. Problem was I had so much Windows-only software. But I did what I recommend everyone do: took the plunge. By that I mean I didn't just uninstall Windows from my daily machine, I wiped the OEM partition so I couldn't turn back. And I discovered very quickly that there were a lot of really good replacements. I had no idea GIMP could do what it could because the UI was ugly (still is, but I'm glad each change is gradual) and Photoshop looked way more polished -- as one example since office stuff is pretty much of a muchness, especially if your first word processor was Word Perfect on MSDOS.
It took me like a month or so to replace everything except Paint.NET, which I still cannot find a good replacement for (been from Pinta to Krita) but I no longer need it. Funny thing about it is I've found a whole new approach to many tasks after over a decade of Linux. I did start maintaining a Win7 VM after the fact, mainly to access files with software-specific formats and convert them, for example my PDNs, as well as for the software for my programmable mouse, but it organically fell into disuse because input-remapper fixed my mouse issue and I found a new approach to things, and eventually it became free disk space years back.
Sadly, as of a few weeks ago, I had to install Win10 in a VM to use Amazon's Kindle Create software which is the only thing that guarantees Amazon KDP full compatibility (they used to support Linux with Kindlegen and there's a Mac version of Kindle Create, I'm not sure about the lack of Linux support). Sometimes you gotta make a concession and be pragmatic.
