Windows 7 thankfully pushed me to linux, when i bought a 'student edition' from digital river to upgrade from xp for 39 euro. As it turned out, this win7 key i

Windows 7 thankfully pushed me to linux, when i bought a 'student edition' from digital river to upgrade from xp for 39 euro. As it turned out, this win7 key i got from digital river only could be authenticicated, when the iso had been installed over a pre-existing xp-installation. I never installed xp again, so now i have a win7 leftover for some games that pops up a screen every 30 min, which tells me that the system is not sure wether it's genuine or not. I can leave that window open and it doesnt steal focus. But how stupid is that to sell such a version anyway. First i need to install xp, and then i need to install win7 over it. Why? That was when i realised i need to get out of this. Somehow i heard Linux Mint would be easy for people that are sick of windows. Installed like a breeze. I had to move out. Like if you don't live with your parents anymore. Windows = Dad. Macos = Mom. Don't misunderstand - both are nice, and so i am nice to people that use these systems, while nonetheless probing sometimes wether they don't have any desire to live on their own a bit more. Most of them somehow appreciate my tales of freedom, but at the same time feel they can't deal with their life without Mom washing their clothes and Dad telling them when they should be home. Often this goes hand in hand with a severe adobe or visual studio addiction - they make the most perservant drugs - and are often a necessity for survival, which is a shame. I reserve a warm place in my heart for those people and think well of them. But that aside - now i had my own shitty apartment and needed to do everything for myself. First it was hard and i needed Wine. I totally wrecked it two times. But freedom. No more eula accept clicking without having read it was enough for me to continue. I now can change the scrollbar gfx of the whole system by editing a dead simple png file. Nobody cares. I can install, backup, delete and setup anything like i want, without permission from anybody. I also don't get shouted at every imaginable occasion that 'Hey, you! Did you know you are using Linux(tm)(r)(c) <accept> <ok>' - instead, the system is able to shut up about itself and to get out of the way as much as i want it to get. That is so much beyond priceless - and this translates into a quality of life that is only comparable with having your own garden near the house you've built yourself while tasting your own brewed beer with best friends in the sunshine of a late summer afternoon. And everything linux is searchable on the internet, which runs on it. I keep in mind to also care about the people that made this possible, in humankinds brightest collaborative effort so far. They all shall be remembered, their names encarved in granite, and i acknowledge their immense contribution to humankind. Kudos to them that made this possible, including all other free operating systems contributors, from all the GNU, BSD, Plan9, riscOS, templeOS and others. So, from 2011 to now, i experienced about 5 distros, and currently have settled on manjaro with xfce. The next time i might try real archlinux as a main system maybe? The hardware support is amazing actually. I plug stuff in, it instantly gets recognised and usable without any further ado. I had an Ipad for a short time, i wanted to wipe it to factory settings and upload some pdfs to read - how foolish of me. First it needed a superspecial cable. Then, this Ipad could not be acessed as a simple usb storage device. Wtf. Who built this and why? Finally after the factory reset it did not boot anymore and demanded i connect it with a windows or mac that had itunes installed. Haha. No. But it also makes me sad that such electronic things exist which demand such utter nonsense from me that i won't fulfil for them. I have, to make this clear, no bad feelings for anybody that earns money to live by working for microsoft - may they live well. Then i am sometimes remembered by force of what a wierd microsoft business corporate world system this 'windows' is oozing out of every corner, when i _have_ to use it for work in special situations, and it feels totally backwards to use it. It's like entering a room where tv is on and the people in it all obsessively want a deeply involved discussion with me about the running show. Well, thats my story with this..