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I've been a Windows user for most of my life, mostly, alright, completely because I was unaware of anything affordable other than Windows. I'm a dropout, so I've never made enough money to blow on a $3,000 Mac. I had just finished my daily article migration (reading random news pieces in the hopes of gaining new knowledge. Hell, it might come in handy in a trivia game.), when something inexplicable caused my computer to BSOD. For all you neophyte tech support types, no, I don't remember the error code. I turned it back on, and it seemed to work fine, until a few hours later it did the same thing. Now, if you use Windows, you know that it crashes a lot (at least individual applications, if not the entire OS), but never every few hours as in my case.

I contacted Microsoft tech support, and after much struggle in a) trying to get a human on the phone, and b) convincing them to give me a free copy of Windows, they told me in polite terms that yes, your computer is fucked, and no, we won't give you a copy of Windows to replace the broken one. (Strangely enough, this would later become a social-engineering ruse to illegitimately do what I was legitimately trying to do here: get a free copy of Windows. And whaddaya know, it succeeded >:) ).

As a broke recently-dropped-out ex-college student (to sate your curiosity, I dropped out due to the fact that I'm not, er, how do they put it, academically gifted.), I didn't have the $300 it would take to buy the new copy of Windows. I began looking around for other alternatives, and just about when I was ready to give up completely and resign myself to an internet-free life, I stumbled upon the Almighty Penguin-Mascotting, Cost-Free, Vegan Anarchist (only the second part is true in my case)-Friendly, Coming-In-Multiple-Formsing, Poor-People-Friendly, Microsoft-repelling,Apple-repelling, Privacy-Friendly operating system that I've come to love today, known in shorthand as Linux.

Pleased to know I had the opportunity to save $300 (which I later spent on an ounce of weed and fucking ramen noodles. It wasn't the cheap grass either, so the spending was around 80% weed and 20% food, eh.), I installed Ubuntu...and the rest is history.

--notacoder (NAC) July 27, 2018

If you want to find me on IRC, it's Spotchat (occasionally freenode, when i feel up to reading the list of channels. That shit takes longer to read than it takes to read every work of Shakespeare in one sit.) network, typically the #linux channel. My username will most likely be "notacoder".

If you want to chat me on Jabber/XMPP, first install OTR (otr or no deal), then add me at "notacoder@draugr.de".

I have an email, but it's hidden-service based and has something around 37% uptime. Which counts the times when all the page displays is "Welcome to Nginx."