I don’t know about you, but Linux has been a huge (and growing) chunk of my life. I’m not a dedicated computer person or an IT person, but you can’t do anything nowadays without a computer. Windows is OK if you like constantly high stress hormone levels about being hacked (by the good guys or bad guys), and sort of embodies all that is broken about capitalism. OTOH, Linux if family. I dunno - just rambling and wanting to say, “Thank you” to the Linux community.
Without Linux? I would use only FreeBSD.
I’d still be playing with Solaris and my sunblades and probably packaging stuff up for that.
I actually resurrected one and added a IDE to SATA convertor to hook up a 36GB SATA drive a few months ago. It needs more RAM though aside from that it is still chugging along…
I would probably be using Apple but I would either have had great difficulties or not attempted to do many of things I have been able to do since I started using Linux in 2000. Both my life and the lives of many of the people for whom I have worked using FOSS would have been different.
Hi,
Without Linux? Then Unix rulezz… 
Well the free alternative would be the *BSD family which FreeBSD was already mentioned.
OTOH the GNU Hurd was suppose to be the kernel of what is now called Linux OS AFAIK.
What happen to the HURD project is a another story but here are some links about the under active Kernel.
https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html
I’d have the high stress of all that anti spyware runninig in the backend, all the spyware that leaked through & watchful eyes of Windows 10 on me.
All that on a PC soooo slow it’d get last place at a snail race!
Oh & a couple other things smartphones with the BSOD, & internet connected houses telling us,“I’m sorry I can’t let you in until my update & reboot is finished.” Then while you’re waiting,"Windows has stopped due to error code 0xa56414iamjunk4u house is locked until this error is fixed.
With out Linux I’d still be trapped in the blue screen of death
I had a Sun blade 100 running OpenBSD; the CPU started having issues a few months ago; I recycled it but the monitor is still in use; I now have an old Sempron which I have experimented with Ubuntu, OpenBSD & FreeBSD.
I would probably be complaining about using Windows and dreaming of getting an Apple.
Although it also depends on if that extends to Android and Chrome OS?! Those would be the immediate fallback, before Windows.
I’ve only recently started using FreeBSD (work servers), but I guess I could throw that as a dual-boot until it wins me over…
I guess most would be using BSD Linus himself stated in an interview he wouldn’t even attempt at Linux if BSD or GNU were mature enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum–Torvalds_debate
Torvalds, aware of GNU’s efforts to create a kernel, stated “If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I’d not have bothered to even start my project: the fact is that it wasn’t and still isn’t.”
Still time to develop FreeBSD…I am using it now! Torvalds project is not the only OS in town and FreeBSD is much faster than any Linux I have ever used. And it works very well as a desktop OS.
The only time I was using FreeBSD was when using FreeNAS. I didn’t like it because it felt different from Linux, though it was doing the NAS job very well and ZFS seems to be cool
Also I’ve heard that you cannot load kernel modules and for any feature that you don’t have in the kernel you need to recompile it This is really counter productive IMHO and far far away from user friendliness, which I prefer over speed alone.
BSD feels strange, compared to Linux, but something that could get used to. At work we are using FreeBSD on our web servers and every so often I get reminded that this isn’t Linux, and things may be different. Usually it is when making a shell script is a very small difference making it fail.
The System Admin here, who is the one that picked BSD, is a fan so at least I can use him to help answer my questions. I got involved because I’m one of the developers and I have Linux experience. Funny how that goes…
Yes, of course… leave us not forget OS/2.
I would probably go with OS X as a Linux replacement. My working machine is an Macbook Pro and it’s great to do programming jobs.
I like when i read someone from out of the IT world saying that uses and likes Linux (whatever distribution). I always try to convince friends and family to move to Linux (I always try with Ubuntu, because is more friendly).