Initially I just wanted to escape Windows in some way or form. I heard about
"Linux" like everyone else of course, so that was naturally the first thing
to try, as it didn't cost my anything. I formatted the drive and installed
Suse 10.
Too many things didn't work and I couldn't make them work. Installing
software didn't work too (I didn't knew what to make with the sourcecode
tarballs I downloaded). After a week Windows came back to my harddrive and I
concluded, that I need someone to help me make the switch.
After some time I found out about Ubuntu and how it was supposed to be easy
on beginners. I went to a pretty cool project, called "linuxpaten" (or
"linuxgodfathers" in English). People who considered themselves profficient
enough were assigned to beginners like me and helped out, personally, over
chat.
After I learned how everything works, GNU/Linux became my favorite OS. After
some distro hopping, Ubuntu became my then-final choice, mostly because it
had reasonably new packages and lots of projects not involved with Ubuntu
directly made pre-packaged versions for Ubuntu.
That was also the time where I got interested in the history of the operating
system I was using. Youtube spit out many videos of Torvalds holding
speeches, but also a video called "Richard Stallman, father of all things
that are Linux". Of course I had no idea about who Stallman actually was and
was thrilled to find out, that his contribution to the creation of the
operating system was at least as big, probably even bigger than that of
Torvalds.
Once I read up more on RMS and GNU I started to really like his philosophy
and his stance on freedom in the world of software. Besides programming I've
got a lot of fields of interest, one of them is philosophy. I even studied
philosophy at a university, besides other things.
Stallman, in my opinion, is the greatest thinker of our time. He is one of
those people who revolutionize the way we think about ourselves. The last
revolution of such magnitude might very well have been the invention of human
rights. Stallman invented user rights. As with human rights, the idea is
alien at first and hard to adopt. For many people it seems unrealistic, that
the mighty ones would give up even a portion of their power for something
they don't even believe in. As with human rights, the situation of normal
people, the public, would improve.
Once I started seeing things this way, it was just a question of time before
I found Trisquel and started using it, since it is one of the biggest (if not
the biggest and most popular) distribution on the FSFs list of approved
distros. And it is based on Ubuntu, the distro I would have used if I never
found out about Richard Stallman, the GNU project and the freedom issues!
