In the 1980s I learned to program with GW-BASIC and later QuickBASIC on the MS-DOS and PC-DOS operating systems.

In the 90s I primarily used Windows 3.1 on DOS. It was not until 2000 that I switched to Windows 98 and in 2002 to Windows 2000 Professional.

In 2007 I had my first experience with PCLinuxOS. I had an old computer and Debian based distros at the time did not support the hardware. But PCLinuxOS did.

However, PCLinuxOS at the time - despite its great hardware supprt - was not a stable system in the long run. I then took the bold step to replace Windows 2000 by Ubuntu 8.10.

My experience with Ubuntu 8.10 was great to say the least. I liked the simple Gnome 2 desktop, the good looking fonts with good contrast (way better than Windows even today).

I also tried other distros like SUSE, Fedora and others using the RPM package format. But I found Debian's Synaptic far superior. Note that PCLinuxOS was not Debian based, but it did include Synaptic.

I do not remember exactly when I made the switch to Linux Mint. It must have been around 2012, but at least since version 13.

The main reason I chose Mint over other distros are the LTS releases. It is probably the reason why Mint has become so popular; most people like to use their OS for a couple of years, rather than being forced to upgrade every 12 or 18 months.

Beside that, Mint is user friendly and it favours a traditional desktop with Cinnamon and MATE. I am still very fond of the Gnome 2 interface.

I also looked for a great high level programming tool other than C, C++ or scripting lagnuages. Coming from QuickBASIC I first found RealBASIC for Linux a great cross-platform RAD tool. This was in 2009. But RealBASIC had its limitations, especially with printer dialogs. And not being able to save the code to plain text, It also did not support real open-source.

I also tried Purebasic, which is also cross-platform and proprietary, like RealBASIC. The advantage of Purebasic was - and still is - that the compiled source is very small and fast, comparable to or even better than C. The disadvatage is that Purebasic is a procedural language; it does not support oop.

Around the same time (2009) I tried Lazarus, which required me to learn Pascal. But Lazarus was not all that stable at the time, so I kept using both Purebasic and RealBASIC for cross-platform programming.

In 2015 I tried the latest version of Lazarus and surprisingly, it had much improved. It is now my main development tool for both Linux and Windows.

I primarily use Linux both for daily tasks as well as software development. Next to Linux I use Windows 7 64 bit to compile Windows apps.

The only downside with Lazarus is that its LCL creates not so small executables, but it is a small price for having a cross-platform RAD with the great free pascal compiler at it core!

Today I have Linux Mint 18.1 on two desktop computers. One is 64 bit, which I use for programming. The other is 32 bit, which I use for daily tasks. With Docky installed on both systems it allows for a great and comfortable workflow.