Believe it or not, I used to be your typical normie apple shill, with products such as the iphone, ipad, macbook air, and so on and so forth. At this point in time I didn't really care about free software, or computer security in the slightest.
I basically had a blindfold over my eyes. I was actually sold on the marketing point that apple actually cared about user privacy and security, how pathetic.
As time went on, I started seeing the holes in apple's siren song. I "wised up" if you will. I started seeing apple's claims for what they really were, absolute lies. The whole apple ecosystem started to fall apart in front of my face, and I was kind of lost on what to do about it.
Lucky for me, a friend of mine who goes by the name of speedie, was into free software and GNU/Linux around this time. I didn't immediately jump ship though, as I waited at least several months before I took action.
Fast forward a couple a months, I sold off my m1 macbook air, and bought myself a nice little ThinkPad T460 to use. As soon as it arrived, I installed Linux Mint on it. I never looked back from this moment, and it was liberating to finally have a system that didn't run a proprietary spyware operating system, and did what I wanted it to do.
I spent some time learning more about GNU/Linux, and tried out some more advanced distros such as Gentoo and Arch Linux. After trying out Gentoo, I loved how much control it gave me over the internal workings of my GNU/Linux installation, but I decided it would be too much of a pain for me to maintain.
I then tried out Arch Linux, which was significantly easier for me to manage compared to Gentoo, while still giving me a lot of the control that Gentoo did. I then decided to move from Linux Mint to Arch Linux as my daily driver. I love using Arch Linux, and have gotten aquainted with it quite well. It's what I run on all of my machines that I actively use.
I suppose I may have rambled a bit too long back there, but thats the story of how I went from normie apple shill to gigachad GNU/Linux elitist in a nutshell. If you'd like to share your own story of how you got into GNU/Linux, i'd love to hear it. Feel free to send it to 'primrose@snowcake.me'.
Signed,
Lilium_Snow (Primrose)