I have a little recent story…my husbands work laptop crashed and couldn’t boot into windows at all…even safe mode. He had some files on there he was desperate to recover so I had him bring it home. I made a bootable Puppy Linux thumb drive and had no problem booting onto it. Located his files…had a bit of frustrations with having to change the attributes from read only to read/write but succeeded. Most of the files were fine. Two were unreadable but with the others, he was able to get back to work the next day and only had to recreate the two damaged files instead of the whole project! Saved him probably two or three days of work! He told me I was his hero! 
. I told him his IT department was too lazy to try to rescue his files…they didn’t care if he had to spend days reworking them. 
Great job!!! 
I’ve had a weird relationship with Linux, been off and on it for years and kept falling back to Windows for one reason or another.
Recently I’ve started using Linux as the “main OS” for the past 2 weeks with the occasional boot back into Windows either for that 1 key business application that uses Windows-only components that spit the dummy in WINE or other emulation/compatibility layers, or when friends want to play games that are Windows-only and perform poorly in emulation/virtualisation (I just want to play the game, not fight it).
Currently rocking Linux Mint 19.3 Cinnamon with Terminator as my Terminal Emulator (Panes are awesome). Mint still has the best Out of Box Experience I’ve ever seen in a Linux Distro (I often like to get up and running with the least amount of fighting for my home PC)
I’d really love to run Linux more on the daily, just don’t have a good laptop. Maybe one of these days I’ll invest in something from Dell but tbh I’ll probably continue running MacBooks cause it’s the best version of Linux imo, ie it works. I know I’ll get flack for that comment and Ubuntu is awesome these days but all other distros still have the problem of breaking themselves too often
That is certainly the way things work, no need for flack.
When an OS has money infusions because its what helps keep the company going then it tends to be more refined which can be great for those that just want it to work.
On the other hand the less refined OS’s have more flexibility who want it to do more then just work so its kind of a give and take. Though most people are in the class of I just want it to work. That’s why Microsoft and Apple were able to get so big. So in my opinion its okay to be in either boat. Just depends on your preference.
One day I’m sure you will step out and create a test machine and try other stuff that’s how we all end up falling in love with the ability to make it our own.
Sadly, I don’t use Linux as my primary system any longer, but I do maintain many personal ancillary systems running Linux for various software.
I first started using Linux back in high school when I stumbled upon a digg.com thread (or whatever Digg called “topics” back then) that showed a clip of a user’s multi-desktop setup. The user had those nifty 3D effects enabled to the max, so when he would switch between desktops (a concept that blew my adolescent Wintel mind) it would render each desktop on the sides of a cube that he could spin. He had one desktop running a Windows instance in VirtualBox on fullscreen. I just had to have that setup.
I’ve used Ubuntu, but honestly haven’t in years. I do, however, have three Raspberry Pis and love them.
Well then, you must be using Debian on those Pis 
I worked as an OS support guy for a Software dev team early in my career, VMS, Unix, Mac and Windows NT 3.1 Beta. I got one of the few PCs we had around and fought with floppy installation of early Linux and it’s really horrible Xwindows configurations and video cards.
I’ve kept my fingers in various Linux systems all along, today I’m on my 3+ year old laptop that was unusable with Windows 10, so I nuked it and installed Fedora, later moved back to Kubuntu for the UI, it’s like a new machine. I have multiple VMs of various distros, but really wish I could use Linux at work…
Except that macOS is based on BSD UNIX and uses a Mach kernel.
But that is just a minor point. 
Well, Chrome OS is Linux, but I doubt that is what ya mean by this thread. No, I didn’t manually install Linux on a PC. But, I have 3 Chrome computers. When I learned that I needn’t worry about antivirus software at all, I was interested.
I bought a Chromebox ad got hooked. Then, I bought 2 Chromebooks within a few months. I like how they are all synced too. Whatever I install or bookmark or do on 1, transfers to the other 2 the next time they get turned on. Pretty cool.
I’ve been using Linux since about 2003. I started with Xandros; I heard that it came with Opera (at that time my browser of choice) so my thinking was “Since I do 99% of my stuff in browser it means that Linux can cover at least 99% of my needs” since then moved to MEPIS and when MEPIS community wanted to release a Xfce Debian Stable-based distro in style of MEPIS, I joined efforts to build what is now called MX Linux. Since then that’s the only thing I’m interested to use – but hey, I’m biased because MX is partially customized from start to my needs since I’m one of the developers.
About Desktop environments, I don’t care too much right now as long as the environment provides a decent panel that shows a start menu, launched apps, a system tray, etc. Xfce is a good compromise in terms of customization and speed.
Started about 20 years ago, when my desktop couldn’t get the latest version of Windows to run because the hardware was too old. Bought a copy of Red Hat Linux in a box! Came with a copy of Star Office 5.1 - the only Microsoft Office alternative out there besides WordPerfect.
Currently, I’ve for an Acer Chromebook running crouton (a side-loaded version of Xubuntu) and and Lenovo Chromebook running crostini (linux apps running on ChromeOS). Neither of them is perfect, but they’re both pretty good.
The biggest thing that linux has taught me is when you’re confronted with, “this is the only way to get this done,” it’s usually because they haven’t explored the alternatives.
Oh, and when you see README.txt it’s usually a good idea to read the text.
Great question and interesting thread! 
I first used Linux when the IT guy at the US high school where I was doing a year abroad as a junior pointed me to it in 1997. I tried RedHat on my laptop, that was fun but barely useful for me as a “consumer” at that time. After that, I tried OpenBSD for a brief time, probably to become even more 1337 
- all of these explorations were merely trying it out and going back to DOS/Windows shortly thereafter.
Over the process of the past 20+ years, I tried using Linux every once in a while, seeing how the systems had improved. The intervals of trying Linux became ever so slightly longer and the pauses shorter. The advent of Ubuntu really was the big impulse of making me try harder and harder to move off of Windows and onto Linux. In the past year, I had a run of six months using Pop_OS! exclusively.
I went back mostly because of what big_D wrote above:
I was really fascinating to see how far Pop_OS! had brought Linux for consumers, but also how much I depended on a thoroughly working Microsoft Office. MS Office simply is that powerful - let me rephrase that: I am less experienced in any other office software so that I am simply less effective with the alternatives. I wrote a post over on the Pop_OS! reddit page to give kudos to their team and still share some perspectives of someone sadly moving back to Windows at
https://www.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/eoj5cj/kudos_to_pop_os_going_back_to_windows_but_likely/
I dabbled with Linux in the past and always had a desire to learn Linux. I finally made the jump last year and so far it’s been good. I have a lot to learn like about but every time some breaks Uncle Google is there for me.
I have a feeling Microsoft will eventually, someday, release a version of Office for Linux. They have already produced Teams for Linux, which makes total sense, especially now, with developers working from home and in large companies.
Another thought is Edge for Linux and installing Office web apps as PWAs. Might be a workaround to have decent Office compatibility within Linux!
Except that Teams is not a “Linux” version, it is a “not tailored for any platform” version, running with Electron. The same as VSCode and Skype.
The full office is written in a mixture of C++ and assembler, using MS libraries. That will take a lot of work to get it onto Linux and the market share just isn’t there for that sort of investment - a majority of Linux users wouldn’t touch MS Office on Linux, because a) evil Microsoft and b) it isn’t open source.
Linux will need to get a few hundred million “non-open source” devotees or a lot of major corporations, before it will be worthwhile to invest in it. And without it, those users won’t use Linux, because the applications they need aren’t there.
Just look how long it took Microsoft to translate Office for Mac from PowerPC to Intel. They started in 2006, it wasn’t until around 2016 that there was anything approaching feature parity between the new macOS version and the old PowerPC or Windows based versions - and even then, things like VBA were missing.
One of the biggest hurdles that the translation form PowerPC to macOS Office suffered was that a lot of Excel formulas were written directly in Assembler and needed to be converted from PowerPC to Intel - a complete re-write!
I wonder how the translation to ARM will be on macOS for Office, whether it will be feature complete or stripped back again.
Heck, look at Windows on ARM, Microsoft have had that out for 4 years and they still haven’t managed to get a version of Office to run on WoA, you are stuck with the 32-bit Intel version running under emulation.
The PWA might be a way to go, but only offers very limited compatibility with “full-fat” Office.
It was a re-write, so it’s a completely new product. I don’t think there is any legacy codebase there. It seems much more polished than the Windows version, partially because it’s using Apples latest APIs. Therefore, I’m pretty sure, we won’t even notice any difference in functionality while running it on ARM.
I’m running Arch Linux with Cinnamon desktop.
I bought a copy of Red Hat at Office Depot in the mid to late 90’s out of shear curiosity, I installed it on a virus infested Windows Pc I was having issues with. It cured the problem, however I quickly lost interest in Red Hat due to the lack of software. It seemed really clunky to me. Xp came out so I really lost interest in Linux for a while. It wasn’t until I discovered Fedora that I took notice of Linux again. Seeing all the progress they had made in the Linux world really impressed me . I knew that I’d better keep an eye on this. My true love for Linux came when Windows Vista came out. I was like,“Let me outta here!” By this time Fedora was really shaping up in my opinion. I loaded it up on my Vista laptop, that was my "Linux epiphany " its was so fast! Then came all the distro hopping and I mean a lot! I tried Ubuntu , ran it for a while …NOT. Then I found Debian loved it! and still love it!. Debian really helped me understand Linux better. then came Arch! really hard at first but it grew on me and now is my favorite distro and daily driver. I apologize for my lack of good grammar. I’m an eccentric old geek .
Ps. Here are some other Linux distros I still like (in no particular order)
Peppermint, Bodhi, Manjaro, MX, Kde Neon, Sparky, Pop Os
I think that the cloud and Office 365 will deprecate the need for OS specific versions of Office. Google doesn’t have a Linux version of Docs, it just works on all platforms.