Why I use Linux
It's always interesting to me to be asked what OS are you on, well I'm on Linux of course for a few reasons among them is it's free, open source, secure, runs on almost anything, and is very customizable.
I use a wide range of distributions throughout a year (It annoys my girl sometimes ;) and am often asked what distribution I run personally or what distribution is the best one for gaming. I am always happy to provide what I am currently running or recommend in the Linux world but usually this comes down to the user and their personal expectations of a personal computer and what they are looking to achieve or not with the computer.
In this blog inspired by @Luculent's project I was asked to "write a small blog post describing the distribution , the desktop environment and some of the software you have chosen to use, and just let people, especially windows users, know why you went the rout you did." so for the first time I am going to talk about my expertise/history in computers and installing operating systems.
It may surprise some that I was raised in a Windows world and am completely self taught, I started having interest in computing at young age and no real world experience tell about the age of 15 or so, when I had a home base my "godfather" whom worked for Windows at the time taught me real world experience showing me how to build and install my first computer from the ground up, with books and books of what each part was for and did at the time, according to the current knowledge at the time. I built my first computer on Windows (no version) developers edition that was distributed to those that worked on the Windows code, I still have the sticker somewhere, and the key still works, yet I am now a Linux user.
A major reason would be ownership & transparency, what rights do I have using this operating system is a big question no one is asking them-self's and with the 'recent' enlightening events on what priority-ware like Facebook does with ownership over your data, it should be really scary think what does Windows does with all the data they collect on my computer and open source software eliminates this very important question.
The next reason among many was expertise, as I got older and became more advanced starting testing software, severs, and applications I noticed almost everything ran on a Linux code at the base and I had to adapt to the environment, I don't think Linux was a very user friendly OS at the time but I got good at the terminal codes to use it, now days it's just if not more user friendly than Windows and far more capable, I would challenge you to find a full time developer or technology guru that doesn't run an instance of Linux.
I guess that brings me to what I use and feel is the 'best' Linux system overall, and it's hard pressed on what and why but I am going to do my best here. I run a few at a time to be completely honest but if I were to X out of all the virtual boxes, unplug all the external hard drives and flash drives I'd boot into Ubuntu Studio.
A few reasons that I love Ubuntu studio, first is Ubuntu was my first Linux love and I think that flame is going to hold for a long time still being one of the top rated Linux distributions on the market, I picked the studio flavor because I love making and creating and of course do a little coding and this indeed is the prime creator OS with anything you need for making videos, music, editing photography, or graphics. I use a custom XFCE desktop environment that can be easily customized and arranged to your personal preferences on computer layout and is very lightweight so it doesn't consume many resources.
Ubuntu is a fully ready out of the box operating system so it has all the necessary applications you would need, and maybe a few you don't so for applications here we are going to go into what I end up installing on almost every Linux system I boost.
As a Gamer my favorite applications are Steam, PlayonLinux & Wine these allows me to play and install games on my Linux system and don't come as a base packages on most Linux systems. Overall I think that many Windows users don't even try Linux systems out because of old pretext that they are cumbersome, hard to use and not user friendly when really its not the case, you can make everything fit to you personally on Linux and out the box most systems are very user friendly, and doesn't spy on you! (Although you can opt-in to send feedback that helps future development)
I hope this inspires someone to take a new look at Linux and try it out, and that leads to my recommended OS's for Linux beginners Ubuntu Budgie and Ubuntu MATE were both designed for simplicity and are great operating systems and I feel make it a easy move from Windows.
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