Hello! :-)

[pb]

Hey all, I suck at being social but I guess I'm obliged to start. So I thought it would be nice if we, well, talked to each other, maybe. :D

My first computer was Amiga 500, soon followed by Amiga 1200, which died one me some time in 1999. It was then that I decided to buy my first, systemless PC and install Linux per advice of a friend who was already using it on his Amiga 4000. I fell in love instantly and the feeling still lingers, I never actually bought a Windows licence in my life. Okay, one copy came with my previous laptop but I instantly replaced it with Debian and it's not like I explicitly paid for it, so it doesn't count, right? ;-)

So anyway, I haven't played much for the first few years of using Linux, though happypenguin.org helped me find some neat free/libre game every now and then. It all started to change with the first Humble Bundle that brought to light (well, to my attention anyway) some pretty great commercial games... once again I fell in love instantly and bought every other humble bundle that had Linux games included. :-)

Another breakthrough was in late 2013 when HB pushed their first (I think) steam exclusives, Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior. I wasn't too happy about having to create an account at "wtf is this steam anyway", but it was only until I dug deeper and found a whole new layer of Linux gaming. Instantly bought all the Valve classics that were already on Linux, stunned that they even ported Portal, which I have heard great things about, insta-bought it at full price, oblivious that the steam sale was just around the corner. :D

And so here I am today, addicted to buying games, and sometimes even playing them. And forever in love with Linux. How about you? ;-)

[pb]

Yeah, when I got the PC, I went out to buy some magazines with install discs of Slackware, Mandrake and was it Knoppix? Something like that. I settled for Mandrake with KDE2 for a while, but I've since jumped over many distros, including Linux From Scratch for several years, recently I'm on Arch on the laptop and SteamOS on the gaming machine.

As for the dekstop, I think KDE2 was lovely, but I hated KDE3 to the bone and I was really mad, even considered going back to Amiga :P but ultimately settled for Gnome. Then a similar thing happened, they dropped Gnome2 in favour of some crappy new version, KDE4 was not for me either, so I went to Mate briefly and then ultimately settled with XFCE, again trying many other desktops along the way. I had my share of pain with choosing the mail client as well. Yeah, there are fields in which Linux doesn't exactly shine, but the idea behind it is pretty great and well worth occasional PITA. :D

[bradgy]

TLDR; Hi, I'm bradgy, I used to game on Windows and now I don't. Looking forward to Linux Giveaways becoming a thing.

Hi all, here's my long-winded take on the dreaded introduction.

I have been gaming on PCs on and off for the entirety of my life. It began with the Commodore 128 my parents got when I was young that I used to play (and fail at) Wonderboy on, and play (and fail at) Space Rogue on. It then moved to the IBM platform we got when I was in high school with the 486 DX2 66, 8 (!) MB of RAM and MS-DOS 6.22 (!) that played DOOM, Jazz Jackrabbit, and SimCity 2000. I have had my own PCs since 2002 running Windows XP (then Vista then 7 then 8) and had many great memories of the wonderful games released from that time on. Some of my favourites include NWN, Re-Volt, AOE:2, Civ III, KOTOR. HL2, SC2, Morrowind, Mass Effect, DA:O, The Walking Dead. I've had Steam on my desktop ever since HL2 came out, and apart from the experience of downloading an entire game from the internet at about 80 KB/s for the first time, I've never had a problem with it :)

Despite this background in PC gaming, until around 2009-10 I had never heard of Linux. Whether this was because I had never felt inclined to tinker under the hood much, and so wasn't exposed to it, I'm not sure. However around that time I started to become interested in the other things that my home PC could do, such as playing local media on my TV. This led me to find out about Kodi (XBMC as it was known then), sabnzbd, sickbeard, small home servers, and so on. I began to read everything that Whitson Gordon had ever written on Lifehacker, which back then was especially geared towards hacking and therefore recommended Linux heartily. I wondered if I too could make my own "home theatre PC of my dreams" with emulators for every kind of console, and access my TV and movie collection from the one place. It seemed doable. I didn't consider at that time whether I could also one day run Linux on my desktop. I'd always need Windows to play my games, right?

I think we all know what happened after that. Come 2013 Valve released Steam for Linux, roughly coinciding with peak "rise of the Indies", and slowly but surely more and more of my game collection became playable natively on Linux. Wine development continued apace. I remember sitting down one day and going through a list of my favourite Windows only games and looking up the AppDB entry for each of them. When I found that I would be able to play most of them on Linux, and that eventually the others would become playable, I realised I no longer needed Windows on my desktop.

And that was that. Like most switchers (I don't like the word 'converts'; cultish undertones) I started with Ubuntu (12.04 to be exact). I was distrohopping for a while however I've been on Antergos with GNOME/Arc-Dark since the start of the year and have everything working just right so I have no itch to jump at the moment.

I usually upload a bunch of spare humble keys to SG once or twice a year so it was a pleasant coincidence that this time it coincided with the formation of this group (thanks for getting it up and running, pb_!).

Hope to meet/hear about your Linux gaming journey here soon, and share some games around as Linux Giveaways grows.

bradgy

[SmN]

Hello, I've been exclusively a linux user for quite some time now.

My computer hasn't changed much the last few years, sans an used intel xeon e5450 I got for cheap last year as I didn't need to change my mobo for that (though it required fiddling with the socket...)and an AMD HD 7770 that I got from a friend.

I think it's been already a decade since I started using linux and I think I've esclusively used it for almost the entirity of that length. Currently using antergos with mesa(not git) and linux-pf and a modified gnome-shell to have icons integrated in the bar, mixing applicaiton list and the bar together, and placing it at the bottom of the screen. My favorite setup I'd say is basically unity due to the vertical space saving, though it didn't seem worth it to try to emulate globalmenu in other distros nor was it enough to keep me in due to its outdated packages.

[Mercutio]

I guess you can call me a hobby Linux user. I've used only Linux on my computers for nearly 10+ years. If you use Archlinux you may find some AUR packages from me.. 100+ atm.

I love playing TF2, and play comp time to time. Otherwise I'm in random games I've been lucky to get lol.

[Kheilus]

Hi all,

Probably the most casual. I've personal desktop Linux for years now but still boot Windows for all work needs to due some native requirements. So I dual boot (Win + a few distros). I also VM because rebooting is such a hassle (as is partitioning to allow for dual boots) for whenever I can. The VM also allows me to play Windows games, so you'll see me on both. And I make it a rule to buy Linux (or SteamOS) bundles to support.

[ebbpp]

Welcome all
My gaming story begin with AT/XT desktops in elementary school with after school classes, after that first come Amiga 500, soon after Pentium 75 with Windows 95 which I reinstalled almost monthly due my incompetence and well because it was WIndows 95 :). Linux come with my first laptop, a friend of friend is a giant Linux supporter, and my laptop had Windows Vista on board about which I heard so many awful things at work and from random people, that I decided to format my drive with first distribution: Xubuntu, lately since my laptop practically died (screen flickering, few months after repairing) and it was old enough I bought new used one from which I'm writing now. It has dual boot, but 99% of time I'm using my Lubuntu on it.

[Fanch [Linux]]

Hello, I am Fanch, I use Linux (Arch Linux) since a lot of year :) I use steam since few month !