I have been using a Linux OS since 1997 (RH 4.2). At that time we had to configure xfree86 just to get the damn thing to show a UI, and when it did the UI would be ugly, 640x480, and crashes often. I was 15 when I started, and when I finally gave up on Windows I was about 20 years old. Since then I've switched distros fairly rarely. I was a RH/Fedora Core user for a long time, then I switched to vanilla Debian, finally going to Ubuntu (and its derivatives). I tried #! back with 9.04, but went back to Ubuntu. Suffice it to say, since 2008 I felt I had the most solid Distro I had ever used and I wasn't going to change it for the world! That is, until Mir came. I was able to forgive Unity since it didn't change the core of the OS or Display server (I hated the DE, but switched to Xubuntu just so I can keep the core OS). Then Mir was announced, and that changed everything. The rapid pace of development, the secrecy, the response from KDE...I just could not find myself using Mir since it isolated the community that I joined when I was 15! The nail in the head was the license that Mir was going to use. It was very restrictive, and very disheartening. Before this I told people to not judge Mir, to wait until it was released and see how it compared to Wayland. The restrictions of the license, however, made that a near impossibility. Canonical's fear of competition has forced them to become what I had feared with the introduction of Unity...a company that embraces their closed system.

Since their license announcement I have been jumping from Distro to Distro. Linux Mint to openSuse to Fedora to Vanilla Debian. All great OSes but something was missing. Mint felt like a re-skinned Ubuntu (my fiancee uses it as her main distro and she likes it), openSuse just didn't like my laptop, and Fedora just did not feel right for me (did not like yum as much as I thought I would). I was ready to settle for Vanilla Debian (LXDE) when someone reminded me that #! was still a distro and that the latest release was using wheezy. So I whipped out the old USB drive and put #! on it just to see if it will sell me over. After just 4 hours with it I decided that finally I found my home. The core OS is stable, the DE is very configurable, and even though not everything worked out of the box it wasn't difficult to figure out what I needed to do.

So I just wanted to say hi and that I look forward to being an active member of this community.