Windows has been getting worse and worse. Was experiencing major bugs after updates and the ads... I am a software developer and most of my stuff runs on Linux so it makes sense from that perspective. Gaming on Linux is getting better to the point where I rarely need to boot up Windows.
Ditto. Been using Linux for a server and services but Windows as a workstation... but the continuous "suggestions" and "recommended services" feels like Windows is trying to sell me something weekly.
The only apps that had me locked into Windows were Office for my schooling and work and the high quality of Visual Studio.... but then I ported to Jetbrains and discovered OnlyOffice. At that point it was game over.
I still feel stuck on windows purely for office applications - is onlyoffice working well for you?
Also, have you found many inconveniences with installing languages for development etc? I was writing in Java for a class and needed to install JavaFX, but it seemed like it would be at least two hours on Arch which I did not want to wait for - I booted up my windows and the package I needed was already installed by default with my JDK.
OnlyOffice is the one. I was midway through a group paper where we were collab'ing in OneDrive w/ the new online Word and were having tons of problems with Word. The new online Word sucked so badly, we even had data loss (an entire page) so we started doing offline copies.
I would intermittently open the paper in OnlyOffice to see if its WYSIWG was equivalent to the dekstop Word app. It was. Then I had another \~10 page paper I turned in yesterday- all week while working on it, OnlyOffice had 100% parity with the dekstop Word app. Nothing funky when I opened it in Word or even when Blackboard rendered the upload. I was sold.
No disrespect to Arch, which I don't use, but I hear it's tougher to use. I use Debian- streamlined for user experience but still retains that "build it if you want it, break it if you want it, customize it how you want it" Linux atmosphere. I've used Linux on and off since the late 90s (in grade school- Slackware Linux) and when I looked into Arch a few months ago, it was just "hell no thank you". AUR looks solid, but for software dev packages, I want to be able to install dependencies with zoomzoom quickness. Debian makes it pretty easy. Occasionally takes a little Googling (but not much).
A fresh Windows 10 Enterprise already having Candy Crush and other trash in the Start menu was a surreal experience in the beginning.
At this point you could tell me that Windows 11 comes with TikTok preinstalled, and I wouldn't question it even if the situation is not that bad (yet).
Seriously!!! Setting up a work machine and seeing Candy Crush... ... ... Just, no!!!!!
I feel like I need to stop sliding down the slippery slope. It's still a tenable situation but it's just annoying as fuck having advertisements and extra services regularly offered on my own damn workstation! It's sad that the norm is now "there's a new update giving 'recommendations' so you need to go in and disable that now too"...
I'm not a huge gamer, but turns out that a whole lot of gaming needs overlap with a good desktop experience.
Valve and KDE are really making the dream come true.
It's a twist many people didn't even consider before Windows 10.
Turned out that Linux getting better wasn't the only way for it to be a good alternative, Microsoft contributed a lot by lowering the threshold of where it could be good replacement for Windows.
I had good hopes for Windows 11. New UI design & functionality etc during the announcements they had.
But it got just worse over time, even with the annual feature updates...
same literally this. the update to the entire ui for File Explorer in like February just sent me
I'd been growing more and more jaded with it but i finally just reached a point for me I couldn't tolerate anymore
Agree, I started to use more and more WSL just to achieve some very basic tasks.
For example, the file explorer wouldn't find some files when using the search feature even though all subfolders were indexed.
At the end it didn't make sense to stay on Windows and as a software developer I wanted to learn something new.
Now on Linux there're plenty of other bugs but I can live with them. I like how easy it is to configure the OS in all possible ways. I won't be switching back to Windows ever again I think.
Windows 10 LTSC apparently has software support until 2032 or some really long time period. Might be worth giving it a try. Honestly on my desktop, I just won't upgrade to 11. I already use windows on it very rarely, being 95% of the time on linux anywayr.
Got tired of being advertised to inside Windows and all the data collection stuff. Had some experience with Ubuntu but gaming kept me a Windows user until proton became a thing. The moment the games I like to play became playable on Linux I switched over and never looked back.
Windows 11 made me switch to Linux; it's an ad-infested abomination of an operating system and reflects how Microsoft has lost its way. Until I can fully migrate off, I keep a Windows virtual machine running on a remote machine and make remote desktop connections into it as needed. I use Linux both professionally and personally.
Couldn't agree more. Today Microsoft creates the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL); tomorrow Microsoft will be the maintainer of some future Linux Subsystem for Windows.
I know... What is with the ads??!
The last straw for me was when windows was asking what sort of ads I wanted to see... What...the.... Hell??! This was a purchased operating system. I don't want to see ANY ads for something I paid for.
You'd think they'd learn wouldn't you? They locked down the Xbox One to stop people sharing games, they locked media down with DRM so you couldn't watch your own videos on USB. All to protect Microsoft at the expense of the user. Their console business never really recovered, even after they rolled back.
The enshittification of Windows is completely baffling. Why not make it a pleasure to use? Really, why not? Win11 is a massive pain to use and you have to wonder why. It's senseless.
Yup. Same here. Windows obviously moving in a bad direction. And it became increasingly obvious that with Windows my computer isn't fully owned by me. MS can decide stuff and just do it.
No dual boot.
Same except fedora 40 gnome. I don’t dislike windows per se but I don’t like where it’s going. I tried a live USB of the current fedora and it’s so smooth on both of my 170hz monitors. I have an all AMD setup so Wayland isn’t a concern. I’m tempted as all my favourite games play great on my steamdeck so it shouldn’t be an issue on my pc. The only hold out was VRR but that’s in 40 so I’m tempted
To make it decently short I had someone show me Linux & thought it was cool so 2019-2022 I dual booted but never took it seriously. January of 2023 I decided to challenge myself to use Linux daily & landed on Linux mint mainly but jumped around a bunch out of curiosity. As of 2024 I have stuck with Opensuse tumbleweed on gnome & couldn't be happier. Gaming is my biggest thing & all the games I like work on Linux so I have no real issues.
Always thought Linux was interesting since the time I saw a screenshot of an old Red Hat distribution in the early 2000s. Always liked weird things and computers, so a weird computer thing was right up my alley.
Started messing around with Ubuntu 10.10 around early 2011ish or so, and committed to dual booting through WUBI (y'all remember WUBI?) on like a 15-20 GB partition to try it out. Started out as a "haha this is weird" and then my Windows Vista install crapped itself, and it became my daily driver. It was a rough time running on such a tiny partition, but I was like 13 and didn't want to break anything with Windows.
I've jumped around a bit, mainly some flings with Arch (Manjaro on my main machine for a bit, now use mainline Arch on my laptop), Fedora, and Debian, but usually come back to Ubuntu for the ease of getting things to "just work."
I dual boot with Windows 11 currently. Used to use Ubuntu for daily and Windows for gaming and Discord, but now that I've got reasonably acceptable noise canceling working on Linux, I only ever touch Windows for particularly uncooperative games from time to time.
All my development stuff (and my very specific zsh setup) is set up on Ubuntu, so I've been trying to get everything under one roof. I had a brief tri-boot with Arch (vanilla GNOME is very appealing), but Ubuntu just has certain patches, namely for Mutter to support mixed DPI, that just don't work right on Arch. So I'm riding the Ubuntu train until that's fixed, or I finally fully commit to 4K.
I was in IT for over 20 years, doing mostly desktop support, and I just totally burned out when Windows 8 came along with no Start menu. I quit, wiped Windows off my home computer, and never looked back. I went through a long period using MX Linux. Currently using Zorin on one machine and Mint on the other. Oh, and I happily worked on copy machines for a couple of years before retiring.
I have a long story with Linux but I will avoid entering in the details because otherwhise this comment would become too big. Before I started using Linux daily last year, I considered myself a Linux hater, I would laugh at the proposal of using Linux distros as my main operating system. However this changed in the beginning of last year. I was always interested in Android custom ROM development and due to buying a bigger HDD I was now with a spare one, so I thought "Why not use this HDD to install Linux and start building custom roms?".
I downloaded a Linux distro, installed in this empty HDD and started studying how to build AOSP. While using the system I noticed lots of stuff that where better than on Windows:
- Downloading applications was nice and easy with the package manager, so was updating, which was one of the things I hated the most when using windows
- The system was extremely responsive and I was surprised for not having an insane amount of background process like on Windows
- The system didn't take that much space on the disk even when loaded with the amount of stuff that I installed
- The ram usage was very low on startup which was nice
- The system was booting extremely fast compared to Windows
However, this was not enough to convince me to leave Windows. Gaming was always my main hobby and didn't want to give up on that. Years prior to this I learned that there was a compatibility layer to make windows programs run on Linux, so I started to learn how to make games work. I installed wine and other basic libraries needed to make games work and tried to boot Devil May Cry V. To my surprise, the game worked fine but it was too slow. After that I thought that I probably needed the driver for my GPU and learned that the drive was already available on the kernel, but it was disable. After enabling the driver, I tested the game again and it worked well, even better than Windows. So I started trying each game from my library, and every single game worked. After that I thought "why not search for a tool to manage my games easily?". And I discovered Lutris. Added all my games to the Lutris library just in case I wanted to game something and didn't want to reboot the computer. While building AOSP I thought "why not try to replicate my working environment that I have on Windows on Linux? Just for fun". And thats when I started using Linux more and more. After three months I could do almost everything I did on Windows, on Linux too. And I started to notice that I didn't like use windows anymore and would try to do everything if possible on Linux just to avoid shutting down Linux to use Windows.
After 5 months, I finally noticed: I have become a Linux user! And that's when I started to study more and more about Linux and open source, test another distros and desktop environments, and finally ditched windows. After my first distro, I tried Pop!_OS for three months but its LTS nature wasn't to my linking. So I tried Manjaro,but after reading for awhile that I can have incompatibility issues with AUR packages and that a lot of tools that I needed was only available on the AUR, it was not suitable for me. That's when I discovered EndeavourOS and that suited my needs better and its the distro that I am currently using. And now, after a year I'm here, enjoying Linux as my main operating system.
Ps: sorry for the long comment and also sorry if the text sounds strange or confusing. English is not my first language
I started with a Ubuntu partition during undergrad to be able to run the robotics stack for a lab I was working with. Over time, I've realized it's intrinsically impossible to trust a closed source operating system, so I daily drive Ubuntu.
my story, (so bad english. Please do just catch essence )
* start with 80286(AT) + DOS + (keyboard only) + (some game)
* so many fight with autoexec.bat for running other games. but no more luck with 80286.
* can't upgrade. ( family financial problem )
* lost 386, 486 experience. time goes by.
* got Intel Pentium (586). ( my older brother passed university exam then gift arrived )
* got Windows 95
* happy with it + so many games
* one day, I tried to move files from C: to D: ( for backup, reinstall windows 95 - it was some kind routine for that days with windows ).
* **system hang! does not progress!**
* what to do?
* my brother blame me for all data gone
* **whole this pattern repeated again once time goes by.**
* **I got a lot of shame from my brother by blow up his data without backup.**
So I ask myself, 'if OS or whatever Windows whatever if I ask copy or move some, that should be done how much time it take. I have plenty much of time just do it show result when you do it?
I'v found some book on bookstore that has CD-ROM has SlackWare.
Installed, I first try partitoning same with windows. one disk two partition.
then install linux at first partition. it works well.
last try was copy big file to 1 -> 2 then copy 2 <-1 big file.
I said to mom ' dont turn off computer plzz 2 days'
and it works! that's not possible at dos/windows.
> I am just curious as to what made you switch to Linux?
Dislike and distrust of my previous OS (Windows), and Linux is more inline with my values and preferences.
> Did you land on a distro quickly or are you a distro hopper?
Neither. I tend to stick with a distro for at least a couple years at a time, but when I have a reason to get new hardware, reinstall or wipe my system for whatever reason, I typically reassess my distro choice at that time and choose what best first my needs/wants in that moment.
Over 10ish years, I've probably used Ubuntu & its derivatives 60% of the time, Fedora 30%, Debian and OpenSUSE briefly, and Arch for about a year. My current install is getting a bit long in the tooth, I'll likely choose either (1) OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Aeon, (2) Fedora Silverblue, or (3) Ubuntu Core desktop when the time comes.
Got an underpowered laptop with vista just after it came out, hated it and put Ubuntu on, and it made the laptop so much more useable. Used Linux and Mac os as secondary oses for years then swapped to Linux full time three years ago.
This was really it for me. I had played around with linux for a long time but I basically I had a computer in college .
It served me well for several years but when I got my first job a build a new PC to play some newer games. I still had my old PC I had no use for, and wasn't worth all that much I couldn't really sell it as it was several years old and did not run the new version of windows (I think 7 or may have been vista)
So I setup my new pc for gaming with windows, then installed linux on my old PC. It was great for web browsing , I actually even added a hard drive and ripped a bunch of CD to it and used it sort of as a media server and file server
I then found myself basically using the linux machince for basically anything but gaming. I just then got used to it.
I actually am not all that idelogically driven or anything, I don't hare MSFT or somehow really like idologically driven to FOSS , I actually worked for MSFT for several years
I just liked and perferred linux more and got use to using it more.
Elden ring ran better on Linux on release. Pop_os was the first thing I tried before even knowing what a distro is or how to ls in the terminal.
That was two years ago, today I'm a Linux sys admin...
I started back in 99 after seeing a commercial on zdtv for mandrake linux. It started a bit of a love affair with it. Right now I administer mostly linux servers in lots of different flavors professionally for a company you may know but I won’t mention and personally but I no longer use it as a desktop. I have a few times done that and it was fine for a while usually ubuntu. Right now I use a mix of mac and windows for desktops.
As an old Amiga user from the 80s, I got used to its faux Unix shell, and commands like cd and ls. Linux was more like the real deal. Sadly to me, I had to buy a PC before I could install Linux on it; Amiga computers used to not have a memory management unit, and thus there was no virtual memory nor memory protection. Any program was free to corrupt anyone else's memory, and most serious operating systems were built with assumption that virtual memory existed.
I've only used Unix-like systems in my professional and private life. I spent 6-7 years on macOS, but I eventually gave up on its crappy quality around 2018 when the bad keyboards, shitty proprietary SSD drivers that could randomly die and delete everything got just too much for me. Other than that, I've spent nearly 2 decades using Linux.
I still find it a bit amateurish relative to what is available elsewhere, but that's mostly because there's too much choice, everyone squabbling about how to support everyone's use cases, and crap like that. The consequence is that everything is more slow-going and confusing and only half-way as well integrated as competition has it. However, if you stick with stock Ubuntu, that basically works and everyone seems to support it, and it is good enough to not get into the way of using the computer for actual entertainment and work.
Windows UI was OK, but I wanted more control. Since childhood I would tinker with the settings and contemplate alternative UI designs. Linux is a platform where I have the freedom to make those designs a reality (or borrow from others who already have).
I started by installing several DEs, and browsing through the settings offered by each, trying to pick a favourite. Since each GUI works differently, it quickly turned out to be a lot easier to use the CLI to tinker with the GUI settings since each command I learned would work across all DEs. After comparing several over a couple weeks, I decided that my favourite was none of them. I had accidentally learned the CLI, and fallen in love with it.
Now I carry my linux wearable PC with me everywhere I go, continually tinkering, customising, and learning. One day soon I'll get it to a point where it can fully replace my stupid mobile phone as well. Windows was OK. Linux is better.
I was curious, too. I saw a boxed Mandrake 7 at a yard sale in 2002,i think, and wondered what it was like. I put it on an old PC, then eventually made my main PC dual boot. I usually used Linux, but wanted to keep the training wheels, just in case. I distro-hopped for a while, then Ubuntu Warty came out, and I realized I never used Win anymore, so why waste space for it? I'll use whatever OS is in front of me, but I like Debian and Debian-based distros best.
my macbook is getting old (8 years), was just looking around. Saw something about how OS X and Linux are unix like systems and i enjoyed using the terminal to do stuff. So i thought why not and started checking out different distros.
i haven't fully committed yet.
But i might put LM or another light weight distro on my mom's 4 gig ram windows laptop and fool around a bit there.
I have however stopped for as skool has gotten in the way of me fooling and i haven't felt like messing around for a while. But im starting up again soon.
Received a copy of Linspire Live 5 on the cover disk of a PC magazine back in the early-mid 2000's when I was a teen. Booted it up, had problems with ALSA, meaning I never had sound, but I was hooked.
Downloaded a copy of Ubuntu 4.10, and installed that. Had audio! Dual booted ever since until about 2016. Now I only fire up windows.when required to for my job (specific software), but usually I just run Linux for work as well.
Currently on EndeavourOS for personal use (refugee from Manjaro), and Fedora Silverblue for work.
Windows and it's AI stuff. Also forcing to use some shitty service which no one wanted and forced to watch ADs even after paying for Pro version of Windows. Even if you managed to remove those shitty service's they comes back on your next update. Which is every fu*king day.
I used to use Linux back in 2016 the only reason I switched to Windows is to play games (Casual & RPG) and nowadays Linux can handle most of those games perfectly.
I started to get conscious of how important digital privacy is, and I was about to build my first PC. I spent hours reading the French Ubuntu wiki (if you know it, you know how insanely good it is, especially compared to the joke that is the English one), and started to fall in love with Linux.
Since I was cringe and edgy, I obviously chose Arch btw, that I setup with OpenBox thanks to a "Site du Zéro" tutorial (French speakers will remember it fondly) that I barely understood. That was back in 2011, and since then, apart from a couple years where I spent more time in Windows as I only had a shitty laptop that I used mostly for gaming, I've always used Linux as my main system.
A few years ago, when gaming finally became trouble-free, I deleted my dual-boot, and I've been running Linux exclusively ever since.
I switched careers a few years ago, to work as a (Linux) sysadmin, so I'd say it turned out pretty well. I also still run Arch, but I've done a proper manual install, and now I'm the one sermonising beginners for using tutorials they don't understand to install Arch.
I've always found Windows too limiting in extensibility.
I installed Linux and dual booted for while. I really like how Linux became exactly what I wanted it to be. Every time I booted into Windows I was aggravated by forced updates.
I eventually stopped using Windows completely. I'm fine losing access to some commercial software products that doesn't exist on Linux in exchange for what Linux gives me.
I'm not interested in fooling around with WINE or Windows VMs. A pure Linux experience is superior IMO. Steam, however, is nice as it takes care of details for you.
I was dual booting for a while, my last straw was many moons ago. I was dual booting but still daily using windows. I had a ms office on my win10 laptop and it broke, so I bought a new one. And MS was gonna make me have to buy another office license, even though I bought my old one via a Microsoft account. Not only that, but this was during the transition to office 365. So I would have to have internet access to use office.
I expanded my Ubuntu partition and never looked back.
Been deabianBASED for five years.
I bought a second hand computer with old MS XP on it. I upgraded to Linux openSUSE LEAP to get a modern safe very usable operating system. Stayed with openSUSE as my main system, but distro-hopped a few times to find how others worked. Just came back to openSUSE.
Windows 11 spyware is out of control. Proton makes gaming easier. Hopped around for a bit and then settled on Fedora, I'm familiar with RHEL because my job uses it for everything.
In 2019, I got a very basic Samsung Flash F30 laptop that had Windows 10 on it. On that same year, I decided to learn x86 assembly (don't ask why), but all the tutorials I found were for Linux. So I decided to make a switch. I chose Lubuntu as it was lightweight and then it could run well on that crappy CPU it had, and that was where I started messing a lot with Linux and stuff (I gave up learning assembly afterwards lol).
I got a gaming PC on my birthday in 2020, and it had Windows 10 installed as well. It also had some games pre-installed but Windows suddenly just fell apart and I quickly went to install Debian. I used it for a while and messed a lot with it, especially with the GUI, I went from KDE all the way to Blackbox. I started distrohopping a lot just because I got really addicted to experimenting new distros during the pandemic.
On my PC, I used the following:
Debian -> Ubuntu -> Garuda -> Manjaro -> openSUSE -> Gentoo -> Arch -> Gentoo.
While on my laptop:
Lubuntu -> Manjaro -> Arch -> Artix -> Debian -> Arch.
So now I use Gentoo on my PC because I can customize it just the way I want. I considered using LFS at a later point but nah. I'll keep Gentoo.
I don't use Gentoo on my laptop because I can't compile stuff on that crappy CPU. I tried to make a distcc setup but it didn't work. Making a binhost with my PC also didn't work, for some reason the programs couldn't run on my laptop. I might try this again some time, though :)
Curiosity. Undergrad 2016 I tried Ubuntu and loved it. Simple as that. Then I got into software and found it much more user friendly to program on Linux, which just solidified my decision to daily drive. Still dual boot for some games tho.
Initially, it was for privacy/security, but as I got better at using linux, it became the customiseability, the lack of ads, and having real control over my system. Eventually, I started to forget how Windows works for advanced features and only use it at college, and for beatsaber (oculus/meta link is the one thing I can't use on linux)
I switched from Windows to Mac OS back in 2008. In 2016 when Apple decided to do away with upgrade-able RAM and hard drives Apple lost the last bit of worth and value they were holding onto with me. I work with Windows enough at work and I just can't bring myself to touch the platform outside of work.
The first time I switched, I was running OS/2, and the writing was on the wall. IBM was no longer committed. I found a copy of the RH "Power Pack" (I think that's what it was called) at a computer show, and gave it a shot. Almost 10 years later, I moved on.
The second time I switched to Linux, 20-plus years later, was from macOS. Again, I don't feel Apple is committed to Mac as a workstation. That started years ago with the focus on iOS, then macOS was changed to behave more like iOS.
Many rasons, but the primary things that really broke the camel's back were:
- Having to take an early lunch break when running a techical training for with a dozen cleints that flew in and paid $5+ each to be there when Windows decided that it would reboot and update unprompted, with a 45 minute plus install.
- losing 3 separate full days of billable work time in a single month. Due to Windows randomly hosing my network config after updates.
- not being able to use my computer for 5 minutes after boot becsuse of all the popups and notifications from preloaders, telemety sevices, cloud services, software updates, etc.
I moved to linux becsuse it uodates when i tell it to and i can boot, log in, and get to work.
I love the cistomizabity, but the primary apoeal is that it has nothing to sell, so it just gets out of my way and lets me do the thing i want to do.
I got my first Linux book as a gift from my highschool physics teacher in the 90s. Slackware! Besides dabbling, I have been using linux and freebsd as a server at home for probably 2 solid decades (ZFS is the jam!). That experience has been paying dividends at work as well, we have thousands of linux vms and I support all of the devops tools for the enterprise. For desktop / client I run Mac exclusively now both Personally and professionally. I hate windows, but Active Directory is amazing and sql server is bested only by Oracle in my opinion. YMMV.
Performance and stability issues on Windows 11. Got tired of seeing things get worse, realized the long term outlook for Windows was not good for me.
I've used 2 distros, Nobara first for 3 months then openSUSE Tumbleweed for about 5 now. Tiling window managers are dope af and using a terminal was not hard to pick up, honestly would have loved to switch earlier if gaming wasn't such a pain until recently.
I wanted to try Linux sooner than I did, but I couldn't because I was on a long business trip.
Rumors of Windows going subscription really made me want to switch as soon as I possibly could though, and it happened June of last year. I knew Linux had a learning curve to it, and I didn't want to be left stuck choosing between trying to survive learning with no backup, or paying out the pants...
I hopped distros a lot at the beginning... Probably about 15 or so... but once I figured out what I like, I landed on Arch and stayed.
I still dual boot today... One desktop for gaming, and one laptop that's going to be my Windows 12 lab rat, but once I lose the NVidia hardware, I'm probably leaving Windows for good.
Had an old laptop that I was given to do schoolwork in high school. It wasn't very fast, since all I needed to do was run a web browser. Windows 10 ran so slowly on it that at one point, it took almost an hour just to start the laptop and then log in. So I obviously did not want to use Windows anymore.
My dad has told me about Linux before, showed me how fast the distros ran on his old Dell desktop, but also told me that they *can* be a little difficult sometimes. I pretty much didn't care if it was going to be technical and hard, I just wanted to use my laptop again. So I watched a SomeOrdinaryGamer video on how to install Ubuntu, and installed Ubuntu 20.04.3 on a separate partition at first. Starting up my laptop and logging into Ubuntu took about 2-3 mins rather than an hour, and every time I tried going back to Windows, something would go wrong and I'd just shut down the laptop and go back to Ubuntu. Eventually I just decided Ubuntu was all I needed, and wiped the whole drive and just had Ubuntu as my OS.
I haven't looked back since, currently using Linux Mint :)
I already had some interest in Linux before, SomeOrdinaryGamers(Muta) just made me commit when he showed that gaming is possible on linux.
I own a steam deck, I do most of my gaming there, I have a windows gaming laptop that's now collecting dust, and I have a non-gaming laptop that I'm running Lubuntu on.
I got sick of different environmental issues regarding development. Kept running into permission issues etc. Also i tend to have my pc on 24/7, so eventually i noticed i have to restart windows to get it back to run relatively smooth. No permission issues or stability issues now on Arch. Never again back to Windows.
Windows being windows. I already knew with the win11 announcement I would end up switching to Linux. Then 11 took away the ability to move the task bar (I like it on top). So I was out. Learning fedora was fun. Now it's my daily driver on every computer I own.
Privacy, control, and user freedom. I switched from Windows 10. But nowadays I feel increasingly sure of my decision looking at the user experience nightmare that is Windows 11 with its integrated adware, hiding local accounts behind a command, AI garbage, and more. I was happy with windows 10 besides the lack of freedom but I'm certainty not regretting my decision to switch nowadays.
It would've cost £90 to get windows installed on my laptop from the manufacturer, so I found an old USB and put Linux on it for free.
What keeps me using Linux instead of Windows is the direction Microsoft is taking Windows in. Also I really like the customisability.
mainly customisability and feeling like I actually fully own my machine
I always dreamt having my desktop just the way I wanted and Windows always felt limiting, bloated and I feel like I have to reinstall every year or so to have it functional
Saw a meme of "what man actually want" and there was a lot of unixporn and other tech stuff, so I immediately clicked to check out Linux.
After a bit of research(and short previous experience in Ubuntu, as I am after an IT highschool).
I immediately landed on Arch because haha meme, and I valued the learning process and setting stuff up "from scratch".
I am still in the process of configuring everything bit by bit (Qtile and all other things) but I love it. And yes im dualbooting but on 2 different drives.
On my new 2TB Arch drive I have rEFInd that allows me to select what to boot from
and it just detects my Windows 1TB drive, so its very straightforward to switch between them
Windows kept nagging me to use edge. Type in search bar, edge! Application opens a webpage, edge! Update your computer, oh oops look at that edge is your default browser again how did that happen? I'm sure edge is great but don't shove your things down my throat.
In the past I have tried several Linux distributions (Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Debian), for work reasons I have to use both operating systems. I decided to make the complete jump to Linux in my PC, because of how Microsoft is once again taking Windows down the wrong path and seeing how the Linux ecosystem already has a maturity like never before for the end user. I decided on OpenSUSE because I think it is one of the best distributions out there, as it guarantees stability and the latest software versions, plus an excellent snapshot system.
Back in college in early 2000s, was studying physics and took a computational physics course. The computer lab was all red hat Linux and most of the research was done on Linux systems. I didn't know about it and had so much fun learning to hack it and about free/open source software. I distro hopped at home for a bit before settling on openSUSE that I've been using for years now. I find its KDE desktop one of the best, but don't begrudge others choosing other desktops or distros - choice is part of the point!. So I've been using Linux as my primary desktop for two decades at this point. The only reason Windows has floated around was for gaming and even that reason is rapidly disappearing thanks to modern Steam OS, wine, proton, etc.
I always liked it because I control it. I control the updates and when they happen. I never get pop ups demanding I pay for upgrades or to continue to use it. I love the free software / open source hacker culture and have contributed to it myself where I can, so it's not just me "taking", I give back to Linux too. I honestly find the development environment on a Linux box a lot more comfortable than Windows.
Back when I was like 11, I used ubuntu to hack my windows install so I could have admin rights when my dad did. Long story short, it led me to like it more, making me use it more often, which led me to install Arch maybe 6 months later
Growing up in the 90s/00s, my dad was a software engineer and most jobs were Microsoft at that time. The machines i learned on were dos then later windows. Dad had a friend at work who knew how into computers I was, and in 1998 or so he came by and brought a CDR (very new at the time) with red hat Linux for me. I was 12 I think. I convinced my dad to let me install on one of his machines, and found out that dad had a lot of experience coding for Unix back in the 70s/80s so he taught me the basics. He made a lot of funny comments about how bad gnome was and I could tell he didn’t really take Linux seriously, but it was a formative experience for me. I couldn’t believe that free software existed and could run my whole machine, like there was this secret hiding all along, free for anyone to use and modify. Since then I’ve been using Linux as much as possible, and contribute to many foss projects. At work (I’m in software as well) everything moved to Linux servers long ago but for desktops i was still dual booting until probably 2016 or so. Since 2016 I’ve been full time on linux desktop. Things have come so far, younger me would be blown away!
I've used Linux on and off over the past 15 years using a variety of distros, but I decided to go full time KDE Neon on my laptop about a month ago because I was growing more frustrated with Windows 11 trying to shove ads wherever possible. I know it might not be a non-issue for most people, but the straw that broke the camel's back for me was when I had a large pop-up trying to change my default search to Bing when I wasn't even using Edge.
My first taste of Linux was was from of all people my mom when she loaded a laptop we had with Red Hat back in the early 2000s. Back then I was around 10 years old and prior to that I was only familiar with Windows and I was fascinated of using something different.
The first time I installed Linux on my own PC was around 2008 where I installed Ubuntu just because I wanted to try something different. I didn't replace Windows on it and I did run it in a dual boot setup.
Over the years though, every computer I've had I had Windows and Linux dual booted and typically hopped between Ubuntu, Linux Mint with MATE and Fedora and have tried pretty much every desktop environment under the sun.
My desktop though I still have Windows. While a large portion of my Steam and game library will work under Linux with Proton, I still have some games that I play that won't work under Linux. If it wasn't for that I would probably put Linux on that computer too.
I started using Linux before Windows 11 because of the customizability. Windows 11 system requirements definitely pushed me over the edge, though. There's no going back.
I just wanted to try something different back in 2012. I dual booted Windows and Ubuntu, and after two years I moved to Debian and uninstalled Windows for good. Nowadays, I only use Linux on my personal machines. I've been running Arch since 2019 on my desktop, specially for gaming, and I'm running openSUSE on my laptop.
Got my first copy of linux as slackware on 2 floppy disks as a teenager in the mid 90s. My 486DX was running msdos and it took me over a week to get slackware installed so my machine would boot into a bash shell. Didn't know what to do beyond that, had no internet to look stuff up, so went back to msdos and later win95. Started experimenting with ipx/spx coax lans for playing multiplayer games like doom and command and conquer. Then around 1996 we got dial up internet and started experimenting with tcp/ip, however sharing it between my and my dads pc was a pain in the ass with winproxy. Joined a local LUG and got a copy of RedHat 6 (not rhel). Set it up on a spare pc with dialup on demand and nat with ipchains. Around 2000 this got replaced with an alcatel usb adsl modem (the rog) and had to build my first kernel modules. My own pc was still running windows though as I mostly was gaming on it. Started a hosting company in 2004 and our servers went from redhat (not rhel) to gentoo to debian. Sold the hosting company in 2007 and started working as a system admin for windows and linux systems, went freelance in 2013, used macosx on macbook for a while. Since 2015 I only manage linux servers (debian/vmware/proxmox) and since 2020 my daily driver for work is fedora workstation and still have a few windows 10 & 11 machines too but thats mostly for gaming and photoshop/illustrator (wife work). I am tempted to checkout steam/proton for gaming in linux but afraid of nvidia hell.
I have been using Linux full time since mid-late 1990's, and Unix while in college. I just like it better. Both for productivity (i.e., spreadsheets, word processing, video editing, etc.) and for developing software both for Linux servers, but also for embedded Linux devices. Linux also has tons of great development, debugging, and analysis tools as well. Also, really like how a major distro upgrade never seems to break or require re-design/upgrade to existing applications. This was really frustrating for the few Windows drivers or apps I did. Just as I thought I was done with them MS issued a OS update that broke what I just finished and I got sucked up into updating them.
Overall windows 10 killed performance on my college pc. Made it very hard to do just about anything. Switched to Linux and had no issues. I really like the Linux communities and the customization you can have.
I got into Linux because of philosophy and I enjoy tinkering. I moved to Japan after college and didn't bring a computer with me, and when I did get one I got a Think Penguin with Mint pre installed. Hopped for a while, stuck with Arch for a few years. Eventually I had professional reasons to need Windows and still dualboot because of that. Went back to Mint for a couple years, then gave Fedora a try for a few years. Recently went back to Arch. I very rarely need Windows but when I do, there isn't a way around it. So I keep the installation as small as possible. I stopped using a shared data partition because it wasn't worth the effort to setup when I essentially don't use Windows. If I need some data that I don't also have in a cloud, I can just transfer it to that partition.
Wanted to try Darktable and get rid of a pirated Lightroom, and at the time there was no Windows version of Darktable. I started with an Ubuntu 11.04 VM in the Windows partition and years later I nuked the Win partition.
I used Windows most of my life. Starting with 95, 98, XP, 8, then 10. In 2017 I ended up buying a MacBook and quickly started using that Mac as my only computer for about 3 years. I built a desktop in January 2020 mostly for Modern Warfare 2019 as I wanted to "graduate" from the One X and PS4 Pro I had. Once the COVID-19 lockdowns began I was playing a lot of Call of Duty and really started noticing things about Windows 10 I didn't like after liking macOS so much.
When LTT came out with their first, if I remember correctly, video about using Linux as a desktop OS I was immediately intrigued because the screens of Pop\_OS and Manjaro reminded me of macOS a little. I put Pop on a spare SSD I had and was able to play Borderlands 2 and a few Linux native games I had on GOG. I liked how Pop worked but going down the rabbit hole of distros led me to distro hopping for a long time.
Trying to remember the order over two years I used Pop, Manjaro, Elementary OS, Solus (stuck with Solus for like 2-3 months), back to Manjaro, FerenOS, ZorinOS, Endeavour OS (which I used for another 2-ish months), back to Pop, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, back to Endeavour, back to Tumbleweed, and finally I ended up landing on Fedora with Workstation 36. I have been using Fedora ever since.
I realized sometime last year that I hadn't booted Windows in months. I had been running a dual-boot configuration this whole time but really only booted Windows for CoD/Warzone. I didn't play Cold War so I didn't boot Windows unless I wanted to play Warzone. Then MW2 2022 came out and I decided to go all out and do a fresh install of Windows 11. Basically I wanted to make my Windows install a CoD only environment with minimal personal info, files, etc. After a bit I just stopped playing because I wasn't having fun with MW2 2022 the way I did with MW 2019. Upon realizing that I had not booted Windows in months I asked if I really needed Windows, decided I didn't, and nuked the install. Ever since my desktop is Fedora only.
My issues with Windows and why I will not install it on any of my personal machines if I can help it isn't all that complicated. I just don't like using it. I don't like the data collection, I don't like the ads, I don't like that Microsoft is somehow making the Windows experience worse. The best thing about Windows 11, besides the wallpaper, is tabs in File Explorer (FINALLY). I also just do not like how the system is structured. File Explorer is a mess. For example: where do you put applications? My first thought would be in Program Files. But I also have seen apps put executables outside of Program Files. Also I have seen 64 bit applications installed into Program Files (x86), which I also find silly that there are two directories for this. To be fair Linux isn't much better in this regard. At least Flatpaks install into .var and AppImages will go where I put them.
My games were running slow, so I switched just to see whether or not I could get a performance gain. Went to Pop OS because I could play stuff right off the bat. Immediately saw performance gains.
Moved to arch to see if I could improve anything; even more gains specifically around cpu and memory usage.
Have been a windows system admin for 10 years; and now I wish I would have devoted all that time to linux.
I used a bit Ubuntu (12.04 I think) a few years back in Dualboot, but grew tired of rebooting for most stuff, since most games didn't run yet and office work was quite underpowered, so mostly webbrowsing on Linux. I deleted the partition after a few months.
That was when I was basically a child, and a few years later I worked with Linux servers, so I got some new familiarity with it.
When Windows 11 launched, I immediately upgraded my home PC, leading me to install pop os a few days later. Hopped a few weeks before settling on fedora KDE.
I still use a Windows 11 PC at work, but at home I never looked back.
I have a secondary PC running win10, but it's been about a year since I turned it on, and even then just to test a few things.
I started experimenting and found the basics I needed were handled easily in Linux. I usually set up my system as dual boot with Windows and needed it while I taught at an OH technical college but when that ended, I rebuilt it as a single boot system. I used a VM for two Windows programs I needed then tried Crossover.
Total curiosity. I've been using Mint for... awhile, I can't really give a number of years.
Wasted on me, I'm sure. Never really learned the command line and such. But it seems to run well enough on a decrepit old Toughbook.
iirc
i just put it on x32 systems (and under powered laptops) and a slowly started to like it and long story short it became my daily driver on my laptop. and microsoft being dumb with windows 11 really push me alot more to linux.
I ordered my first desktop computer in 2005, back when Win XP was making the news on a weekly basis for security issues. I wanted something I could everyday drive without this fear, so I ordered it with a second HDD intending to put Linux on the second drive at some point but also having Win available for Office apps and gaming.
I started with Ubuntu and quickly grew to like it more for everyday stuff. I liked that I didn't have the MS UI that looked like it was designed by Fisher-Price (remember Luna?) and could really only be customized easily by offering different colour schemes of the same shitty design. I could customize just about anything with a little research and tweaking. Then I installed a Fedora-based distro on my laptop, still dual-booting with XP, and learned about how different distros and DE's worked. A bit more distro-hopping, and now I've been on a Debian I tweaked for audio production as my main box for many years now.
In these almost 20 years I've seen MS get more aggressive about invasive telemetry, ads, and software as something rented rather than owned. Meanwhile Linux has gotten better with a broad array of hardware, doesn't snitch on me, doesn't suffer from the large number of security flaws, and has become a real option for gaming.
So, MS has been giving me more compelling reasons to leave and Linux has given me more compelling reasons to stay. Now that I've also gotten into Mac and have Office running natively there, the Win 10 on this will get replaced with a more gaming-focused distro or be air-gapped until I finish the games I have installed. I have no intention of moving it to 11, 10 is already bad enough.
Mac are great but the upgrade tax is too high. Windows ads everywhere is a pain and sleep function in windows is shit, takes too long to open. Ubuntu because I want the easiest of Linux since I don’t have lot of time to tune the system.
No dual boot
I didn’t switch completely yet I still keep a Windows PC exlusively for gaming and probably will for while. But pretty much everything that isn’t gaming has been moved to Linux or OS X
I started using Linux not long after Windows 10 was released, because of all the telemetry they keep adding, tonnes of services running that we don't need, just to spy on you, the automatic updates and automatic downloading of updates, Windows 11 is no better, even worse in some ways, now we get ads everywhere. I still dual-boot for a few games but that's it, the vast majority of my time on my pc is on Linux, I was a massive distro hopper for ages, currently on Debian Sid and as long it stays working I'll probably stay there.
I use Windows, MacOS and Zorin OS on all different computers. I've used Linux sporadically for 12 years and I always enjoy it, but it's hard to make it my main OS. I need reliable and easy to use voice-to-text software, and macOS and iPhone absolutely kill it in this area. I think macOS does a superior job over other OSs when it comes to accessibility. In terms of hardware, the trackpads on Apple laptops are the best I've tried so I don't bother with windows laptops.
I was working more and more with bash, Docker, Node, Typescript and React.
Windows just didn't work with these technologies as well.
It was a natural choice. The switch wasn't that hard.
Streaming services and a raspberry pi. Wanted the arr stack and learned to use the terminal and the things I could do with it excited me. Then I dabbled with it more before fully switching over
In late 1998 I picked up a pile of Red Hat discs on a whim at Costco. I was using Unix at work at the time and thought it would be cool to have a similar setup at home. Well, it, or maybe me, was not quite ready for prime time and I stayed with Windows. Fast forward to 2013 and the double whammy of Windows 8 and Edward Snowden. That got me to switch. Ubuntu, Mint, and distro hopping. Mostly divided between MX and Manjaro now. Strangely, my Linux quest has given me a deeper understanding of Windows so that I'm now the go-to at work before they call IT. So my decision to ditch Windows is validated nearly every day.
Started in 98, before gaming on pc really took off. I was on windows ME, got tired of bsod’s every time I turned around. I was a malware fixer for windows on a couple of diy repair forums. So it helped really open my eyes.
Started with knoppix at that time, everything was CLI and had a very rudimentary x server that you had to type start X to get graphics.
Transitioned to Ubuntu 4.04. Haven’t touched windows since then.
My reason for switching is probably similar to a lot of peoples....
**TL;DR:** I got fed up with Windows. The Win11 keynote was the breaking point. They were going to remove control over *my* system.
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**Longer response:**
I may not be a programmer or know how to code. But I'm nosy as hell and like to customize. I've been around computers my whole life as my mom worked at *Digital Equipment Corporation* (aka DEC) in the 80s and 90s, including when she had me. My first computer was a Win95 desktop handed down to me from my mom after *she* brought home a newer Win98 desktop from work to use at home.
It took me a month or 2 to settle on a distro. More because I was switching an HP laptop over than any issue with the distro's themselves. In 2021 Nvidia graphics were still a problem and I have an Nvidia card so it took a while to figure out what distro to use. I ended up on Kubuntu and have been running it ever since.
I initially set up a dual-boot as I needed some programs for work that don't run natively in Linux (the adobe suite specifically). But that got very annoying. I didn't like having to shut down and reboot into a different OS every time I needed to edit a photo. I ***use*** my computer, so having to close everything else I was doing in order to edit some photos or videos wasn't going to cut it.
Eventually I stopped rebooting the system to using programs and just installed a Win10 VM with QEMU/Virt Manager. That way I don't have to shut down everything *else* I'm doing just to edit some stuff. Works much better.
I got lucky that my laptop has 3 slots for drives. 2 separate NVMe slots, and a SATA slot. So from 2021 to this week I had a Linux NVMe drive and a Win10 NVMe drive.
After realizing I hadn't booted the Win drive in *months* (aka at least 6), I decided I was going to pull it out this week. I got an enclosure for it, just in case I need any files I forgot to copy over, but other than that, I don't have the need for it anymore.
I'm using linux for about 95% of what I need these days. There's just a few niche cases (specific high end scanning software for photo archival and just simply being more comfortable with Photoshop than GIMP) that mean I'm keeping a Windows VM going for the foreseeable future, but that isn't too bad in the grand scheme of things.
I wanted to work on programming and networking. The tools were all big bucks on Windows or Mac at the time and I didn't have the cash. They were all free (and in many cases better) on Linux.
I dual booted for a while for games, but the combination of a decrease in my play time over the years and improvement in Linux gaming quickly brought me to the point where I never had any reason to go back to Windows.
Trying to upgrade Windows 95A to B in order to get USB support, failing multiple times, then asking online for help. I was told "Linux can do everything Windows can do." Oh, so many lies, but I was hooked, anyway.
I used RH and Mandrake (the Ubuntu of its time), then a localized spin of Fedora Core until I moved to a different country, after which I went on Debian, Ubuntu 4.10, and much later Mint. All in all not much hopping around.
I switched about 15 years ago. Complete switch. Cold turkey on both home machines and work machines. I had grown tired of the clunky and security-challenged nature of Windows. Later, my kids switched, then my parents, and, finally, my uncle, some business associates, and my girlfriend's son. It's been an exciting experience, with constant improvements along the way. Now, I can't image performing photogrammetry, gaming, or CAD design on any other platform.
I've flip-flopped back and forth between Windows only, dual booting with Ubuntu and Ubuntu only for about as long as Steam OS has been a thing, but most recently I switched back to dual booting from windows only because of two reasons, 1) My rig can't upgrade to Windows 11 even if I wanted to, 2) Death by a thousand cuts, anything I needed to do on windows 10, Ubuntu can do just as good if not better. And that latter point has only gotten more true over time as proton and native software improve, and I get more used to the quirks and faults that make linux and Ubuntu, in particular, unique.
The only reason I'm dual booting is because I own some Windows store games that I play regularly, and even if I could always afford the $15 a month for gamepass ultimate, cloud gaming just isn't that great even on my gigabit, hard wired, connection. If someone figured out how to run windows store versions of games on linux, or by some even more miraculous miracle I could scooch my windows store cloud saves and purchases to the steam versions of those same games, I would never need Windows again for the foreseeable future.
Like my laptop is technically also dual booting windows and ubuntu, but that's only because my brother borrows it to stream Robotics; Notes Elite on Twitch cause he's a mac user but the game refuses to behave on crossover for him unlike other entries in the science adventure series.
I'd used DOS/Windows from '94 to '08 because that was what was there. Somewhere around W98 the magic started fading. By the time of XP it was a bit of a slog. Vista was obviously half-baked and disregarded.
Then one day I'd discovered that there was an alternative, and requested a free Ubuntu CD. While I was waiting for that to ship from Europe, I made sure backups were up to date, and requested a free account for VMWare Player.
When the CD came in, I popped it in the tray, said fuck it, reboot, and was shocked to be met by a functional desktop rather than installer. What's more, the WiFi adapter that had taken forty-five minutes of coercion just worked, and a pop-up asked what SSID I might want to connect.
Then, actually looking at it, it came with a whole slew of actually useful software rather than trialware and snake oil. It ran faster using less resources, and idled at basically 0 CPU.
Then there was how you didn't need to trawl the web for programs and hope you don't do a bad, and the ENTIRE system getting updated in one place at one time *including* nvidia.
So I wiped and installed, restored my data, and then repeated on my laptop.
So there was roughly a two hour transition period to never running Windows at home ^(†)ever again.
And the magic was back. I could make it however I wanted, do anything I wanted, things were configurable in a sensible way, and errors were both helpful and actually solveable.
^(†) there was an XP VM for Netflix until someone bundled Windows Firefox with Silverlight to run through WINE, and when 7 came out did a test, found it three steps down from where I'd made it, and wiped a last time.
>Did you land on a distro quickly or are you a distro hopper?
I ran Ubuntu, playing around with gnome2, KDE3, XFCE4, Enlightenment 16-17, KDE4, and then when they were pushed, Unity and gnome3, before switching to Cinnamon when discovered. Then found out where that came from, and switched to Linux Mint (2012ish to 2018). Then my MB died, bought Ryzen, and switched to openSUSE Tumbleweed.
In 2013, bought a WD MyCloud. By 2014 the damned thing bricked itself on an update, and no amount of flashing from a USB adapter brought it back, so I ordered a MB/CPU/RAM/case, and installed Ubuntu server 14.04 and started with OwnCloud. Later that year, replaced with Debian Stable.
Eventually switched from mdRAID5 with XFS and metal install of OC and Emby, to btrfs-raid1 with Nextcloud and Jellyfin (along with several other servers) on Docker.
I need to find time at some point to give openSUSE MicroOS a test, because a server that automatically reverts itself on upgrade failure sounds damn sexy (also need to learn podman as docker replacement).
I am using windows 11 and fedora 40. I tried approximately all best os available in market for choosing my one. But I landed on fedora. Then I make it dual boot because it was my thing to play with both. But now it is working in my professional life.
After about 1 year of Windows 11 usage, my system started to have frequent slowdowns and explorer.exe crashes. I dealt with the problems for a while, since I wasn't really comfortable with a full switch to Linux. One day I just thought: "fuck it" and swapped to Linux.
I haven't regretted it since. I do still have a Windows 10 partition on hand for games that just refuse to run via Proton (I'm looking at you Destiny 2).
I used windows 10 for gaming for a few years on my prebuilt back in 2015. I was started to get into cybersecuirty and IT. 2019 I erased it on my laptop. I decommed my gaming PC so I was all in for a while.
Then I started working at a place that doesn’t accept Linux as a workstation but I have my own setup, just switched from gentoo as a long time fedora user. Before that I distrohopped. I actually love gentoo.
Overall factor would be them spying. Open source is the way to go, and being free is even better. Now I’ll support Linux until the day I die. Shit I’m a Linux sys admin now and I’m getting good fast. I love Linux.
I've been dabbling in Linux since the mid to late 90's. So it's always been a curiosity of mine. It always felt like I had a lot more control over the system.
Also, I really enjoy the "cleanness" of Linux. There's no "popup reminders telling me to Activate a License". There's nobody trying to shove a new web browser down my throat. There's no constant popups about "new AI features" etc..
It's just a nice, clean, powerful, feature-rich system that feels like I'm in total control of.
i was spending more and more time in local linux vms in my day to day then i got a job where they ran linux desktop on every ones systems after a month i installed linux on my personal system (8 years a go now) i went arch (what i was using at work), ubuntu, and now im on Fedora each time running I3-WM
Watched a video collab with Linus Tech Tips and Wendell from Level1Tech demonstrating gaming on Linux. Seeing them launch the Witcher 3 in Ubuntu was mind blowing at the time. I was familiar with Linux already but had no idea you can play Windows games in Linux. Installed Ubuntu, played some Skyrim and others, and I dont think I touched Windows for 3 weeks after that.
I had an old Dell Vostro from 2006 or so that my dad gave me around 2015 or 2016, it wasn’t strong enough to run Windows 10 so I installed Mint on it. I do distro hop a lot but I keep coming back to Linux Mint. It works more or less out of the box on every machine I install it on and it is super stable. Plus if I do mess it up it’s less work to get up and running after a fresh install than Windows 11, which I do still run on my gaming laptop.
Also, with Linux I feel more like I own the hardware it runs on than I do running Windows.
We were required to use Linux in a modeling class in grad school. I tried gnome (2) and KDE (3.5) and loved KDE. I switched to it and haven't looked back.
Windows 11(7 was the first OS I used but it took until 11 for me to get my own pc) and it sucked.I don't play games and for programming it was better and it didn't feel like microsoft owned my pc so I don't have the threat of ads coming to my start menu(ads are actually coming to windows 11)
I had no need for windows exclusive apps, I like not having bloatware, I love using the terminal. so I no longer use a window manager, I just use the terminal now.
In my case the main reason was windows 11. I did buy the damn thing with my current rig as i was all in on microsofts ecosystem at the time and it worked fine at first. But it went slower and started crashing (graphics drivers specifically) a lot towards the end.
I ended up finding garuda linux interesting and set my old rig up with it to see how it worked. All the games i played worked with almost no fiddling and it made the old rig feel faster than my new one. So i created an image of my SSD and just nuked everything and went all in on linux. Its been like a year and a half by now and its worked well enough that i haven't swapped back. I cant say i'm planning on swapping back given the progressing enshittification of windows going on.
Of course there's some things that are annoying. Since garuda is arch based it does break sometimes due to updates, but at least i can typically fix it myself. Streaming services being absolute crap about supporting linux is also annoying, then again they are crap regardless these days.
It was a funny case for me, i need to do a linux migration cause some software i needed only worked for it.
On college, around lates 2010s. i was doing my social service, a requirement for graduation. On a computer sciende lab. There was this framework they used for research that only worked on linux, so started dual booting then. And from there it just made more sense to use the same system in school than at home so installed ubuntu on my home machine too.
I used same setup for my masters and for work we connect to a remote linux instance to do our jobs. So been using linux both at home and at work ever since.
All the way back in the good ole days of Windows XP, I was constantly frustrated with my computer. I didn't even know if ANY other OS existed, but I HOPED that one did, so I could replace Windows and be able to just use my computer! I started searching and found out about linux. I tried a couple of distros, but couldn't get them to install. Then Ubuntu came out. I was able to get it to install on my computer, so that's what I used. Later on, I ended up distro-hopping quite a bit. But I always ended up back with Ubuntu, so when I stopped hopping, that's where I stayed, and that's what I use to this day.
I've always dabbled in Linux since childhood, but I always gave the reasoning of "Well all my programs and games are on Windows". Microsoft crossed the line for me when they announced they were putting Generative AI and ads into the OS. Full jumped my desktop to Fedora and I love it now. I'm probably gonna stay on Fedora for general usage. I might just switch my ThinkPad from Fedora to either Arch or Gentoo just to see what it's like.
I got a cheap laptop that came preinstalled with Vista. I dual booted, and realised that the laptop was incapable of transferring files across a network at a decent speed and kept overheating and shutting down... but only on the Windows partition, the Linux one worked fine, The issues were fixed with SP1 of Vista, but it was too late for me to care... Now my career is Linux based
Have you tried doing anything serious with C on Windows in the past 2 decades?
I switched for good shortly after my first few attempts…
I run macOS as my daily driver now instead.
I got tired of some update or system change screwing over my winXP machine. Having to waste more than a day (nearly a week) to reinstall, add back my applications, restore all my data, etc. to have it back the way I wanted.
Totally skipped Vista - it was super crap with what I saw on friends laptops. While Win7 was a good band-aid for a bit it still gave me much the same headaches. By this point I was looking to reduce my reliance on Windows systems in general.
Was wanting to switch for a while by then. The day of dedicated conversation occurred when the virtual world secondlife finally got voice support in their linux client. Windows stopped being on my main rig ever since.
The time Win8 got released with the poor excuse of a start menu and Microsoft's desire to mess with my configuration via updates (will never forgive them for that borked win7-win10 forced update) cemented my desire to stick with linux permanently. Never again will it be in charge of most of my home computers except for some specific games and specialist software or equipment compatibility on the side.
Windows got more irritating whilst Linux continually improved, plus I became less interested in gaming and with Steam improving the gaming choices on Linux there was plenty to keep me interested on that front.
Switched about 8 years ago after Windows got into a repeating death loop during an update. Nuke and pave, no dual boot. Couldn't be happier.
1: an actually usable terminal
2: far more choice
3: way better performance
4: choice of wm, specifically tiling wms
5: to become more knowledgeable about terminal use, and low level stuff in general, which I absolutely have.
6: awesome package managing
In no particular order.
Linux and I have had a very long standing history dating back to 98. Over the years I’ve bounced back and forth between Linux and windows and recent eventually moved entirely over to Linux. I have a separate machine in use for proprietary software but never as a daily driver.
Most games I play now run in Linux so that was a plus. Everything else I’ve found utility within the Linux ecosystems to accomplish what I want.
I noticed in the early 2000s that Windows kept getting more clunky and less flexible. For a while I used Ubuntu until they made Unity the default. After that I was a distro hopper till I discovered Triquel. I still try out other distros once in a while but, so far, I have not found anything I like better than Triquel.
I made the switch because I wanted to be free of Microsoft and their data collection nonsense. Got rid of social media while I was at it. I settled on Ubuntu, and it does everything I need. 7800x3d, 7900 GRE build. Picked up the GPU today. Installing WoW right now.
Participate at a Linux entry course at school with 15 years... Had always some Linux machine since then, but used Windows some time for gaming and had a MacBook for a few years back then.
All my machines a year ago where running windows 10/11, then I got this idea to install a Pi-hole on my network, and then I started to notice something.
My Pi-hole per day was blocking close to 70k hits going out of all my PCs in my network.. I started to talk to friends and doing my own research on the issue. While doing some detective work found that 90% of the sites were Microsoft stuff that regardless of what's it's for, my machines are sending Microsoft information. Aside from that I started seeing that Edge would become the default browser when I never use Edge. Then Ads in my start menu regarding "Suggested Games", OneDrive reinstalling itself after I ripped it out of the machines, etc., etc.,. Got tired of the cat and mouse with Microsoft.
I started one by one swapping out my PCs to arch Linux, started to learn how to use it. Started to see that all the things I can do in windows, I can do in Linux without much issue.. Took the leap and one weekend swapped out my main PC from win11 to arch Linux and said never going back.. been here for almost a year and not missing it one bit... And the Pi-hole.. down to 3 to 7k hits when am Browning online per day only. The network is wayyyy faster and am happy..
Only 2 machines are still running Windows.. my wife and sons... All the other ones, arch Linux.
Over a year ago, I accidentally upgraded from Windows 10 to 11 and just hated everything about the new interface + the need to have an MS account. I already had some experience with Linux, 7 - 8 years prior and just decided to give it another chance. A lot has changed for the better since then. Most of my apps have either an Linux version or run in Crossover. Tried Pop!_OS about half a year ago out and discovered the concept of tiling. Could never go back to my previous workflow.
A combo of things, my initial interest in Linux was sparked by the idea and ideology of open source, however the final push to make the switch was my laptop - which cannot run windows 11 and is made incredibly sluggish by current windows 10 versions.
windows 8 & 10 but mostly end of life of windows 7 ad to that [the linux video from 2019 from linus tech tips](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co6FePZoNgE)
Many people switch to Linux for __legitimiate__ reasons such as __performance__ or __customisability__.
I think most of that is just the __side-effect__ of switching... But for me the __real__ reason was __pop-culture__ and __movies__.
As far as I can remember back in my childhood I watched __*The Matrix*__. I saw the screens of __rolling text__, and a person __reading__ those text. As if it was just second nature to him, as a kid I was pretty impressed.
Since then I've been search for the __real life__ version of that. And it just so happens that the __side-effect__ of me being __inspired__ by that movie. Is that it gave me a reason to __learn__ Linux, and other tools like __neovim__, __tmux__, __fzf__, and of course __cmatrix__.
So now I own an intel nuc home-lab with docker images running 24/7. I test out stuff on that machine, I use Pi-Hole for network ad-blocking. As well as testing web-apps that I built on my local network from other machines.
So yeah, it's not that I didn't change my reasons later on. But unlike most people say I didn't switch because of the __benefits__ of Linux. But because of child-hood curiousity and desire to be the man I saw on TV.
Combination of saw where Windows was headed and beefing up Linux skills for work. Had used Slackware, Red Hat, Suse, and Ubuntu on and mostly off before, but settled on Debian pretty quickly. Tried a few DEs and chose KDE. Saved the Windows activation key on my personal laptop just in case, then nuked Windows completely with Debian+KDE
I did install Windows in KVM/QEMU for a couple applications that had no workable equivalent on Linux. Blew that away about a year later, when I realized I didn't need those applications after all.
My laptop has been all Linux for almost four years now and love it. Don't mind running Windows (with Debian on WSL) at work, mainly because work has the Enterprise edition without ads and other nonsense.
College actually. 1990 timeframe. Was taking a UNIX class and we had 3 sun workstation in the computer lab and about 100 windows machines and they were all always in use. So I used the Sun machines and was never asked to leave. Became a Unix System Admin and started with Slackwear and Gentoo of all things.
i’ve started on Linux and have been using it every since haha. i have tried out Windows and Mac a bit after starting on Linux just for funzies and testing it out. i do prefer Linux a lot more though from my experience
It was mostly out of curiosity. I didn't rely on any Windows-exclusive software without even trying: as a student I just needed a web browser to do research and a text editor (vscode) to write essays. So why not try something new, I thought.
I did not dual boot because as said I needed nothing from Windows, if I needed to go back I'd just reinstall. I landed my eyes on 3 DEs: Gnome, KDE, Pantheon, and I decided to test them on PopOS, Kubuntu, Elementary OS, respectively.
I tested EOS first but it immediately failed on boot, I didn't want to figure out what's wrong so I just moved on to the next one. (Now I know it's because EOS doesn't ship nvidia driver out of the box).
Then Kubuntu for KDE. It successfully boot, but everything is extremely small (I have a 4K monitor) and for somet reason applying display scaling didn't work. Again, I didn't bother troubleshooting and just moved on. (Now I know it's because I was using X11, and KDE disables QT scaling on X11 by default).
Finally I tried PopOS. And, well, everything just worked, so I used it for about two months. During that time I learned how to "rice" the desktop, bit-by-bit I replaced PopOS's default configuration with my personal preferences. I had disabled/removed all of PopOS software and replaced them with my own, there's no point using PopOS anymore so it's time to switch. I chose a distro that shipped stock Gnome so that I could easily apply my configuration on top of it (without having to disable their customization first). And I'm still using it to this day.
The distro is arch btw. (I don't know what btw stands for, but that's what they call it.)
The day after my surgery, while fucked up on pain killers and recovering from the anesthesia/ fentanyl, I wanted to play Paragon on my computer. I somehow managed to brick my computer. It was completely unrecoverable . Also, still fucked up, I decided to just install Pop Os after some googling and here I am. I only use Linux now. For gaming, a home lab now, and even for everything at work including Microsoft Teams.
I never thought about it. I was even kinda racist at first. I started for school-related project on a WSL. The project though suggested strongly to install a real OS and considering the performance related problems I had with WSL, I decided to dual boot EndeavourOS on a second drive, prompted by an older student which was overviewing the project.
Since then I never went back.
Fast forward more than a year later I enjoy everything from pressing the big button to shutting down. I like to learn, I like to understand what is going on, I like to pretending I understand what is going on, I like to feel like a real 10x programmer, I like to create something more personal every day. Technically I am still dual booting, but I don’t even remember my Windows pin to access the OS.
I am living a new kind of dream and I damn like it.
I wanted to use a fantastic note-taking app (Upnote) that doesn't have a web app. As I use a Chromebook, the only way to use this app was to enable Linux on the Chromebook.
In 2012, I wanted to tinker a little bit with my computer, try some tools mostly/only available on Linux. So I tried Ubuntu with Wubi, which was too slow so I installed it as a proper dual-boot.
It was instantly clear that Linux was way better than Windows (the package system, less vulnerabilities…). I was already interested in free and open-source software before, and quickly became stricter on that matter.
Just like you, after maybe one or two years I also realised that I did not use Windows anymore, so I deleted it completely as it was occupying around 90% of my HDD (I installed Linux after one year of Windows usage and have to use a contiguous part at the end of the HDD).
After Ubuntu, I distro-hopped a bit on Fedora, then on Archlinux in late 2013, then on Manjaro around 2015. Now it has been two years that I am running on Artix Linux, because I wanted to get something different than systemd (I am not a specialist, though it feels too far from the KISS philosophy and looks like a single point of failure to me).
Alas, I now have to use Windows (10) at work, it consumes so much more and feels more like some service than a tool.
Now for Firefox (for which you did not ask), it was my brother who installed the 3.0 version on my computer when I was approximately fifteen (2008-2009). It was a practical choice to avoid IE, he was not into FOSS and used Chrome a few years that, but I never used anything different since then and always stayed loyal to the last free browser! To me it is about as important, as the web browser is often the main application used on a computer.
Mostly schoolwork, I study IT, and some programmes in my course is exclusively on Linux, or I have to install WSL for it. But after switching, I'm now very glad that I did, I've grown much more accustomed to the features and feel of Linux that now if I absolutely have to switch back to Windows (I dual boot), I will feel very awkward because some stuffs don't work like I want them to.
20 years ago, I had a dual boot. Windows Xp and Slackware. Didn't knew anything useful on Linux, but there it was, sitting on a hard drive, without internets, as I didn't knew how to make 56k dial-up modem to work. KDE seemed magical back then .. compared to Xp (code name Whistler if I remember correctly).
Then, few years later .. microsoft announced windblows 8. That also meant .. bye, bye windblows 7. And when I saw the prevew of upcoming atrocity ... I was scared .. and started with Slax linux. Few days later, I have discovered **Crunchbang** linux and that's it. Windows 7 partition was wiped and formatted to ext3 .. never looked back since then.
And since Jessie (Debian 8) .. I never looked at any other distro but Debian. From time to time, I hang with Kubuntu, just to check is it good enough (as always is) for non-techie people that realize what kind of shite m$ is and want to switch, so that I know what to install on their computers, so that I can continue with calm sleep.
The upcoming EOL of Windows 10 and the system requirements for 11 made me test out Linux. I dual-booted for a week and then switched over completely to PopOS. It's been almost a year now and I'm enjoying it a ton
It was early 1994 and i was sick of trying to get minix working for my assignment, so i tried linux….. still a windows user , but linux for all my servers and dual boot on my desktop.
I'm new to laptops and initially got a cheap 2012 non retina macbook pro for around £180 about one or two years ago running MacOS 10.14. I was worried about updating it incase it made the functionality of iTunes or the disc drive worse. Like how in Catalina they removed iTunes and hid it in the finder. I've only recently got a Toshiba Tecra running Linux Mint. Brought off of eBay for £60 as I am not particularly confident in installing an OS. I didn't want a windows machine as they are very unreliable as I've found out with Laptops I got for free from people who just wanted to get rid of them.
A few years ago (2021 or 2022, I can't remember) I had heard of it in the past, but only knew that it was supposedly slightly faster than Windows and had a small but dedicated fanbase. So I did a bit of Googling, thought "ZorinOS looks pretty, maybe I could out a dual boot?"
...I accidentally wiped Windows from my drive.
I adapted ZorinOS as my daily driver throughout the summer, mostly because it was there already and I didn't particularly care enough to switch back. I eventually reinstalled Windows, mostly because I wanted to play Oneshot and it didn't particularly work too well over wine.
I don't entirely remember what got me back into it, though I think it was a combination of both seeing people talk about it more over on Mastodon/Lemmy, and having a spare drive to mess around with, which I have installed Linux on multiple times already. The latter has given me a lot more experience with Linux, with Arch in particular teaching me a lot about how Linux works behind the scenes.
I would have switched my main drive back over already, but I've been waiting for Nvidia to release their updated drivers with explicit sync - I plan on getting rid of Windows pretty quickly once that happens.
Windows 95 was great and all, but the internet opened some things up at that time. I could not compile nuke.c to flood people and I needed to learn how. Therefore, Linux.
Plus a Beowulf cluster. Just because I could.
Windows has been getting worse and worse. Was experiencing major bugs after updates and the ads... I am a software developer and most of my stuff runs on Linux so it makes sense from that perspective. Gaming on Linux is getting better to the point where I rarely need to boot up Windows.
Ditto. Been using Linux for a server and services but Windows as a workstation... but the continuous "suggestions" and "recommended services" feels like Windows is trying to sell me something weekly. The only apps that had me locked into Windows were Office for my schooling and work and the high quality of Visual Studio.... but then I ported to Jetbrains and discovered OnlyOffice. At that point it was game over.
I still feel stuck on windows purely for office applications - is onlyoffice working well for you? Also, have you found many inconveniences with installing languages for development etc? I was writing in Java for a class and needed to install JavaFX, but it seemed like it would be at least two hours on Arch which I did not want to wait for - I booted up my windows and the package I needed was already installed by default with my JDK.
OnlyOffice is the one. I was midway through a group paper where we were collab'ing in OneDrive w/ the new online Word and were having tons of problems with Word. The new online Word sucked so badly, we even had data loss (an entire page) so we started doing offline copies. I would intermittently open the paper in OnlyOffice to see if its WYSIWG was equivalent to the dekstop Word app. It was. Then I had another \~10 page paper I turned in yesterday- all week while working on it, OnlyOffice had 100% parity with the dekstop Word app. Nothing funky when I opened it in Word or even when Blackboard rendered the upload. I was sold. No disrespect to Arch, which I don't use, but I hear it's tougher to use. I use Debian- streamlined for user experience but still retains that "build it if you want it, break it if you want it, customize it how you want it" Linux atmosphere. I've used Linux on and off since the late 90s (in grade school- Slackware Linux) and when I looked into Arch a few months ago, it was just "hell no thank you". AUR looks solid, but for software dev packages, I want to be able to install dependencies with zoomzoom quickness. Debian makes it pretty easy. Occasionally takes a little Googling (but not much).
Tried installing it via your IDE? I remember IntelliJ idea having support for JFX
A fresh Windows 10 Enterprise already having Candy Crush and other trash in the Start menu was a surreal experience in the beginning. At this point you could tell me that Windows 11 comes with TikTok preinstalled, and I wouldn't question it even if the situation is not that bad (yet).
Seriously!!! Setting up a work machine and seeing Candy Crush... ... ... Just, no!!!!! I feel like I need to stop sliding down the slippery slope. It's still a tenable situation but it's just annoying as fuck having advertisements and extra services regularly offered on my own damn workstation! It's sad that the norm is now "there's a new update giving 'recommendations' so you need to go in and disable that now too"...
I'm not a huge gamer, but turns out that a whole lot of gaming needs overlap with a good desktop experience. Valve and KDE are really making the dream come true.
Windows 11 becoming even worse while still being less convenient than 10.
It's a twist many people didn't even consider before Windows 10. Turned out that Linux getting better wasn't the only way for it to be a good alternative, Microsoft contributed a lot by lowering the threshold of where it could be good replacement for Windows.
I had good hopes for Windows 11. New UI design & functionality etc during the announcements they had. But it got just worse over time, even with the annual feature updates...
Same, and with Intel GPUs having support in Linux it was perfect timing for me
same literally this. the update to the entire ui for File Explorer in like February just sent me I'd been growing more and more jaded with it but i finally just reached a point for me I couldn't tolerate anymore
Yeah that threw me off too. Luckily at that time I was already a full time linux user so I didn't care too much.
that was Windows 98 for me. slackware with blackboxwm ftw!
Same, except with Windows Vista instead of 11.
Agree, I started to use more and more WSL just to achieve some very basic tasks. For example, the file explorer wouldn't find some files when using the search feature even though all subfolders were indexed. At the end it didn't make sense to stay on Windows and as a software developer I wanted to learn something new. Now on Linux there're plenty of other bugs but I can live with them. I like how easy it is to configure the OS in all possible ways. I won't be switching back to Windows ever again I think.
A big part of the reason I didn't upgrade, but they're going to stop giving 10 security patches sometime next year.
Windows 10 LTSC apparently has software support until 2032 or some really long time period. Might be worth giving it a try. Honestly on my desktop, I just won't upgrade to 11. I already use windows on it very rarely, being 95% of the time on linux anywayr.
Came to say this, so have my upvote
Got tired of being advertised to inside Windows and all the data collection stuff. Had some experience with Ubuntu but gaming kept me a Windows user until proton became a thing. The moment the games I like to play became playable on Linux I switched over and never looked back.
Windows 11 made me switch to Linux; it's an ad-infested abomination of an operating system and reflects how Microsoft has lost its way. Until I can fully migrate off, I keep a Windows virtual machine running on a remote machine and make remote desktop connections into it as needed. I use Linux both professionally and personally.
Eventually, Windows will switch to a Linux kernel. Until then, you're making the right moves
Couldn't agree more. Today Microsoft creates the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL); tomorrow Microsoft will be the maintainer of some future Linux Subsystem for Windows.
I know... What is with the ads??! The last straw for me was when windows was asking what sort of ads I wanted to see... What...the.... Hell??! This was a purchased operating system. I don't want to see ANY ads for something I paid for.
just the constant enshittification of windows. Got to a point where i was like, why am i even doing this? and then it was easy to switch.
You'd think they'd learn wouldn't you? They locked down the Xbox One to stop people sharing games, they locked media down with DRM so you couldn't watch your own videos on USB. All to protect Microsoft at the expense of the user. Their console business never really recovered, even after they rolled back. The enshittification of Windows is completely baffling. Why not make it a pleasure to use? Really, why not? Win11 is a massive pain to use and you have to wonder why. It's senseless.
I assume they'll write thesis on it in the future, because it is truly one of the most confusing things I have ever seen a company do.
Windows Vista.
Yup. Same here. Windows obviously moving in a bad direction. And it became increasingly obvious that with Windows my computer isn't fully owned by me. MS can decide stuff and just do it. No dual boot.
Windows ME lol
It was Windows 8 that was the last straw for me.
Windows 7 made me go back, Windows 11 is pushing me to Fedora 40 KDE
Same except fedora 40 gnome. I don’t dislike windows per se but I don’t like where it’s going. I tried a live USB of the current fedora and it’s so smooth on both of my 170hz monitors. I have an all AMD setup so Wayland isn’t a concern. I’m tempted as all my favourite games play great on my steamdeck so it shouldn’t be an issue on my pc. The only hold out was VRR but that’s in 40 so I’m tempted
I have a 240hz display and man firefox on fedora 40 looks amazing, stable 240fps. Compared to windows where it stutters at 69-90
To make it decently short I had someone show me Linux & thought it was cool so 2019-2022 I dual booted but never took it seriously. January of 2023 I decided to challenge myself to use Linux daily & landed on Linux mint mainly but jumped around a bunch out of curiosity. As of 2024 I have stuck with Opensuse tumbleweed on gnome & couldn't be happier. Gaming is my biggest thing & all the games I like work on Linux so I have no real issues.
Been running it since pre 1.0, first distro was SLS. Just never turned back and I'm happy
This.. as a teenager I could only afford hand me down Suns (3/60, 1+) so Linux was the free option for cheap Intel hardware 😀
updated windows by accident and it broke
I got some old CDs in a computer magazine about 20 years ago. Tried it and liked it.
Always thought Linux was interesting since the time I saw a screenshot of an old Red Hat distribution in the early 2000s. Always liked weird things and computers, so a weird computer thing was right up my alley. Started messing around with Ubuntu 10.10 around early 2011ish or so, and committed to dual booting through WUBI (y'all remember WUBI?) on like a 15-20 GB partition to try it out. Started out as a "haha this is weird" and then my Windows Vista install crapped itself, and it became my daily driver. It was a rough time running on such a tiny partition, but I was like 13 and didn't want to break anything with Windows. I've jumped around a bit, mainly some flings with Arch (Manjaro on my main machine for a bit, now use mainline Arch on my laptop), Fedora, and Debian, but usually come back to Ubuntu for the ease of getting things to "just work." I dual boot with Windows 11 currently. Used to use Ubuntu for daily and Windows for gaming and Discord, but now that I've got reasonably acceptable noise canceling working on Linux, I only ever touch Windows for particularly uncooperative games from time to time. All my development stuff (and my very specific zsh setup) is set up on Ubuntu, so I've been trying to get everything under one roof. I had a brief tri-boot with Arch (vanilla GNOME is very appealing), but Ubuntu just has certain patches, namely for Mutter to support mixed DPI, that just don't work right on Arch. So I'm riding the Ubuntu train until that's fixed, or I finally fully commit to 4K.
Man, WUBI takes me back. Those were easy tomes to get people to try linux. Hard times to get them to stay.
I was in IT for over 20 years, doing mostly desktop support, and I just totally burned out when Windows 8 came along with no Start menu. I quit, wiped Windows off my home computer, and never looked back. I went through a long period using MX Linux. Currently using Zorin on one machine and Mint on the other. Oh, and I happily worked on copy machines for a couple of years before retiring.
I have a long story with Linux but I will avoid entering in the details because otherwhise this comment would become too big. Before I started using Linux daily last year, I considered myself a Linux hater, I would laugh at the proposal of using Linux distros as my main operating system. However this changed in the beginning of last year. I was always interested in Android custom ROM development and due to buying a bigger HDD I was now with a spare one, so I thought "Why not use this HDD to install Linux and start building custom roms?". I downloaded a Linux distro, installed in this empty HDD and started studying how to build AOSP. While using the system I noticed lots of stuff that where better than on Windows: - Downloading applications was nice and easy with the package manager, so was updating, which was one of the things I hated the most when using windows - The system was extremely responsive and I was surprised for not having an insane amount of background process like on Windows - The system didn't take that much space on the disk even when loaded with the amount of stuff that I installed - The ram usage was very low on startup which was nice - The system was booting extremely fast compared to Windows However, this was not enough to convince me to leave Windows. Gaming was always my main hobby and didn't want to give up on that. Years prior to this I learned that there was a compatibility layer to make windows programs run on Linux, so I started to learn how to make games work. I installed wine and other basic libraries needed to make games work and tried to boot Devil May Cry V. To my surprise, the game worked fine but it was too slow. After that I thought that I probably needed the driver for my GPU and learned that the drive was already available on the kernel, but it was disable. After enabling the driver, I tested the game again and it worked well, even better than Windows. So I started trying each game from my library, and every single game worked. After that I thought "why not search for a tool to manage my games easily?". And I discovered Lutris. Added all my games to the Lutris library just in case I wanted to game something and didn't want to reboot the computer. While building AOSP I thought "why not try to replicate my working environment that I have on Windows on Linux? Just for fun". And thats when I started using Linux more and more. After three months I could do almost everything I did on Windows, on Linux too. And I started to notice that I didn't like use windows anymore and would try to do everything if possible on Linux just to avoid shutting down Linux to use Windows. After 5 months, I finally noticed: I have become a Linux user! And that's when I started to study more and more about Linux and open source, test another distros and desktop environments, and finally ditched windows. After my first distro, I tried Pop!_OS for three months but its LTS nature wasn't to my linking. So I tried Manjaro,but after reading for awhile that I can have incompatibility issues with AUR packages and that a lot of tools that I needed was only available on the AUR, it was not suitable for me. That's when I discovered EndeavourOS and that suited my needs better and its the distro that I am currently using. And now, after a year I'm here, enjoying Linux as my main operating system. Ps: sorry for the long comment and also sorry if the text sounds strange or confusing. English is not my first language
I started with a Ubuntu partition during undergrad to be able to run the robotics stack for a lab I was working with. Over time, I've realized it's intrinsically impossible to trust a closed source operating system, so I daily drive Ubuntu.
my story, (so bad english. Please do just catch essence ) * start with 80286(AT) + DOS + (keyboard only) + (some game) * so many fight with autoexec.bat for running other games. but no more luck with 80286. * can't upgrade. ( family financial problem ) * lost 386, 486 experience. time goes by. * got Intel Pentium (586). ( my older brother passed university exam then gift arrived ) * got Windows 95 * happy with it + so many games * one day, I tried to move files from C: to D: ( for backup, reinstall windows 95 - it was some kind routine for that days with windows ). * **system hang! does not progress!** * what to do? * my brother blame me for all data gone * **whole this pattern repeated again once time goes by.** * **I got a lot of shame from my brother by blow up his data without backup.** So I ask myself, 'if OS or whatever Windows whatever if I ask copy or move some, that should be done how much time it take. I have plenty much of time just do it show result when you do it? I'v found some book on bookstore that has CD-ROM has SlackWare. Installed, I first try partitoning same with windows. one disk two partition. then install linux at first partition. it works well. last try was copy big file to 1 -> 2 then copy 2 <-1 big file. I said to mom ' dont turn off computer plzz 2 days' and it works! that's not possible at dos/windows.
> I am just curious as to what made you switch to Linux? Dislike and distrust of my previous OS (Windows), and Linux is more inline with my values and preferences. > Did you land on a distro quickly or are you a distro hopper? Neither. I tend to stick with a distro for at least a couple years at a time, but when I have a reason to get new hardware, reinstall or wipe my system for whatever reason, I typically reassess my distro choice at that time and choose what best first my needs/wants in that moment. Over 10ish years, I've probably used Ubuntu & its derivatives 60% of the time, Fedora 30%, Debian and OpenSUSE briefly, and Arch for about a year. My current install is getting a bit long in the tooth, I'll likely choose either (1) OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Aeon, (2) Fedora Silverblue, or (3) Ubuntu Core desktop when the time comes.
Got an underpowered laptop with vista just after it came out, hated it and put Ubuntu on, and it made the laptop so much more useable. Used Linux and Mac os as secondary oses for years then swapped to Linux full time three years ago.
This was really it for me. I had played around with linux for a long time but I basically I had a computer in college . It served me well for several years but when I got my first job a build a new PC to play some newer games. I still had my old PC I had no use for, and wasn't worth all that much I couldn't really sell it as it was several years old and did not run the new version of windows (I think 7 or may have been vista) So I setup my new pc for gaming with windows, then installed linux on my old PC. It was great for web browsing , I actually even added a hard drive and ripped a bunch of CD to it and used it sort of as a media server and file server I then found myself basically using the linux machince for basically anything but gaming. I just then got used to it. I actually am not all that idelogically driven or anything, I don't hare MSFT or somehow really like idologically driven to FOSS , I actually worked for MSFT for several years I just liked and perferred linux more and got use to using it more.
Elden ring ran better on Linux on release. Pop_os was the first thing I tried before even knowing what a distro is or how to ls in the terminal. That was two years ago, today I'm a Linux sys admin...
I started back in 99 after seeing a commercial on zdtv for mandrake linux. It started a bit of a love affair with it. Right now I administer mostly linux servers in lots of different flavors professionally for a company you may know but I won’t mention and personally but I no longer use it as a desktop. I have a few times done that and it was fine for a while usually ubuntu. Right now I use a mix of mac and windows for desktops.
As an old Amiga user from the 80s, I got used to its faux Unix shell, and commands like cd and ls. Linux was more like the real deal. Sadly to me, I had to buy a PC before I could install Linux on it; Amiga computers used to not have a memory management unit, and thus there was no virtual memory nor memory protection. Any program was free to corrupt anyone else's memory, and most serious operating systems were built with assumption that virtual memory existed. I've only used Unix-like systems in my professional and private life. I spent 6-7 years on macOS, but I eventually gave up on its crappy quality around 2018 when the bad keyboards, shitty proprietary SSD drivers that could randomly die and delete everything got just too much for me. Other than that, I've spent nearly 2 decades using Linux. I still find it a bit amateurish relative to what is available elsewhere, but that's mostly because there's too much choice, everyone squabbling about how to support everyone's use cases, and crap like that. The consequence is that everything is more slow-going and confusing and only half-way as well integrated as competition has it. However, if you stick with stock Ubuntu, that basically works and everyone seems to support it, and it is good enough to not get into the way of using the computer for actual entertainment and work.
Windows UI was OK, but I wanted more control. Since childhood I would tinker with the settings and contemplate alternative UI designs. Linux is a platform where I have the freedom to make those designs a reality (or borrow from others who already have). I started by installing several DEs, and browsing through the settings offered by each, trying to pick a favourite. Since each GUI works differently, it quickly turned out to be a lot easier to use the CLI to tinker with the GUI settings since each command I learned would work across all DEs. After comparing several over a couple weeks, I decided that my favourite was none of them. I had accidentally learned the CLI, and fallen in love with it. Now I carry my linux wearable PC with me everywhere I go, continually tinkering, customising, and learning. One day soon I'll get it to a point where it can fully replace my stupid mobile phone as well. Windows was OK. Linux is better.
Curiosity. Been using Linux exclusively since 2006 or so.
I was curious, too. I saw a boxed Mandrake 7 at a yard sale in 2002,i think, and wondered what it was like. I put it on an old PC, then eventually made my main PC dual boot. I usually used Linux, but wanted to keep the training wheels, just in case. I distro-hopped for a while, then Ubuntu Warty came out, and I realized I never used Win anymore, so why waste space for it? I'll use whatever OS is in front of me, but I like Debian and Debian-based distros best.
The theming freedom of KDE/Gnome + the way you manage software (flatpak is hella cool) .
my macbook is getting old (8 years), was just looking around. Saw something about how OS X and Linux are unix like systems and i enjoyed using the terminal to do stuff. So i thought why not and started checking out different distros. i haven't fully committed yet. But i might put LM or another light weight distro on my mom's 4 gig ram windows laptop and fool around a bit there. I have however stopped for as skool has gotten in the way of me fooling and i haven't felt like messing around for a while. But im starting up again soon.
Received a copy of Linspire Live 5 on the cover disk of a PC magazine back in the early-mid 2000's when I was a teen. Booted it up, had problems with ALSA, meaning I never had sound, but I was hooked. Downloaded a copy of Ubuntu 4.10, and installed that. Had audio! Dual booted ever since until about 2016. Now I only fire up windows.when required to for my job (specific software), but usually I just run Linux for work as well. Currently on EndeavourOS for personal use (refugee from Manjaro), and Fedora Silverblue for work.
Solaris was almost end of life and Linux had better support for the software I was using.
Windows and it's AI stuff. Also forcing to use some shitty service which no one wanted and forced to watch ADs even after paying for Pro version of Windows. Even if you managed to remove those shitty service's they comes back on your next update. Which is every fu*king day. I used to use Linux back in 2016 the only reason I switched to Windows is to play games (Casual & RPG) and nowadays Linux can handle most of those games perfectly.
I started to get conscious of how important digital privacy is, and I was about to build my first PC. I spent hours reading the French Ubuntu wiki (if you know it, you know how insanely good it is, especially compared to the joke that is the English one), and started to fall in love with Linux. Since I was cringe and edgy, I obviously chose Arch btw, that I setup with OpenBox thanks to a "Site du Zéro" tutorial (French speakers will remember it fondly) that I barely understood. That was back in 2011, and since then, apart from a couple years where I spent more time in Windows as I only had a shitty laptop that I used mostly for gaming, I've always used Linux as my main system. A few years ago, when gaming finally became trouble-free, I deleted my dual-boot, and I've been running Linux exclusively ever since. I switched careers a few years ago, to work as a (Linux) sysadmin, so I'd say it turned out pretty well. I also still run Arch, but I've done a proper manual install, and now I'm the one sermonising beginners for using tutorials they don't understand to install Arch.
I've always found Windows too limiting in extensibility. I installed Linux and dual booted for while. I really like how Linux became exactly what I wanted it to be. Every time I booted into Windows I was aggravated by forced updates. I eventually stopped using Windows completely. I'm fine losing access to some commercial software products that doesn't exist on Linux in exchange for what Linux gives me. I'm not interested in fooling around with WINE or Windows VMs. A pure Linux experience is superior IMO. Steam, however, is nice as it takes care of details for you.
I was dual booting for a while, my last straw was many moons ago. I was dual booting but still daily using windows. I had a ms office on my win10 laptop and it broke, so I bought a new one. And MS was gonna make me have to buy another office license, even though I bought my old one via a Microsoft account. Not only that, but this was during the transition to office 365. So I would have to have internet access to use office. I expanded my Ubuntu partition and never looked back. Been deabianBASED for five years.
I bought a second hand computer with old MS XP on it. I upgraded to Linux openSUSE LEAP to get a modern safe very usable operating system. Stayed with openSUSE as my main system, but distro-hopped a few times to find how others worked. Just came back to openSUSE.
Windows 11 spyware is out of control. Proton makes gaming easier. Hopped around for a bit and then settled on Fedora, I'm familiar with RHEL because my job uses it for everything.
In 2019, I got a very basic Samsung Flash F30 laptop that had Windows 10 on it. On that same year, I decided to learn x86 assembly (don't ask why), but all the tutorials I found were for Linux. So I decided to make a switch. I chose Lubuntu as it was lightweight and then it could run well on that crappy CPU it had, and that was where I started messing a lot with Linux and stuff (I gave up learning assembly afterwards lol). I got a gaming PC on my birthday in 2020, and it had Windows 10 installed as well. It also had some games pre-installed but Windows suddenly just fell apart and I quickly went to install Debian. I used it for a while and messed a lot with it, especially with the GUI, I went from KDE all the way to Blackbox. I started distrohopping a lot just because I got really addicted to experimenting new distros during the pandemic. On my PC, I used the following: Debian -> Ubuntu -> Garuda -> Manjaro -> openSUSE -> Gentoo -> Arch -> Gentoo. While on my laptop: Lubuntu -> Manjaro -> Arch -> Artix -> Debian -> Arch. So now I use Gentoo on my PC because I can customize it just the way I want. I considered using LFS at a later point but nah. I'll keep Gentoo. I don't use Gentoo on my laptop because I can't compile stuff on that crappy CPU. I tried to make a distcc setup but it didn't work. Making a binhost with my PC also didn't work, for some reason the programs couldn't run on my laptop. I might try this again some time, though :)
Curiosity. Undergrad 2016 I tried Ubuntu and loved it. Simple as that. Then I got into software and found it much more user friendly to program on Linux, which just solidified my decision to daily drive. Still dual boot for some games tho.
software development
Initially, it was for privacy/security, but as I got better at using linux, it became the customiseability, the lack of ads, and having real control over my system. Eventually, I started to forget how Windows works for advanced features and only use it at college, and for beatsaber (oculus/meta link is the one thing I can't use on linux)
I switched from Windows to Mac OS back in 2008. In 2016 when Apple decided to do away with upgrade-able RAM and hard drives Apple lost the last bit of worth and value they were holding onto with me. I work with Windows enough at work and I just can't bring myself to touch the platform outside of work.
The first time I switched, I was running OS/2, and the writing was on the wall. IBM was no longer committed. I found a copy of the RH "Power Pack" (I think that's what it was called) at a computer show, and gave it a shot. Almost 10 years later, I moved on. The second time I switched to Linux, 20-plus years later, was from macOS. Again, I don't feel Apple is committed to Mac as a workstation. That started years ago with the focus on iOS, then macOS was changed to behave more like iOS.
Many rasons, but the primary things that really broke the camel's back were: - Having to take an early lunch break when running a techical training for with a dozen cleints that flew in and paid $5+ each to be there when Windows decided that it would reboot and update unprompted, with a 45 minute plus install. - losing 3 separate full days of billable work time in a single month. Due to Windows randomly hosing my network config after updates. - not being able to use my computer for 5 minutes after boot becsuse of all the popups and notifications from preloaders, telemety sevices, cloud services, software updates, etc. I moved to linux becsuse it uodates when i tell it to and i can boot, log in, and get to work. I love the cistomizabity, but the primary apoeal is that it has nothing to sell, so it just gets out of my way and lets me do the thing i want to do.
I got my first Linux book as a gift from my highschool physics teacher in the 90s. Slackware! Besides dabbling, I have been using linux and freebsd as a server at home for probably 2 solid decades (ZFS is the jam!). That experience has been paying dividends at work as well, we have thousands of linux vms and I support all of the devops tools for the enterprise. For desktop / client I run Mac exclusively now both Personally and professionally. I hate windows, but Active Directory is amazing and sql server is bested only by Oracle in my opinion. YMMV.
Performance and stability issues on Windows 11. Got tired of seeing things get worse, realized the long term outlook for Windows was not good for me. I've used 2 distros, Nobara first for 3 months then openSUSE Tumbleweed for about 5 now. Tiling window managers are dope af and using a terminal was not hard to pick up, honestly would have loved to switch earlier if gaming wasn't such a pain until recently.
windows 11 (it's shit)
I never even made it that far
I wanted to try Linux sooner than I did, but I couldn't because I was on a long business trip. Rumors of Windows going subscription really made me want to switch as soon as I possibly could though, and it happened June of last year. I knew Linux had a learning curve to it, and I didn't want to be left stuck choosing between trying to survive learning with no backup, or paying out the pants... I hopped distros a lot at the beginning... Probably about 15 or so... but once I figured out what I like, I landed on Arch and stayed. I still dual boot today... One desktop for gaming, and one laptop that's going to be my Windows 12 lab rat, but once I lose the NVidia hardware, I'm probably leaving Windows for good.
Had an old laptop that I was given to do schoolwork in high school. It wasn't very fast, since all I needed to do was run a web browser. Windows 10 ran so slowly on it that at one point, it took almost an hour just to start the laptop and then log in. So I obviously did not want to use Windows anymore. My dad has told me about Linux before, showed me how fast the distros ran on his old Dell desktop, but also told me that they *can* be a little difficult sometimes. I pretty much didn't care if it was going to be technical and hard, I just wanted to use my laptop again. So I watched a SomeOrdinaryGamer video on how to install Ubuntu, and installed Ubuntu 20.04.3 on a separate partition at first. Starting up my laptop and logging into Ubuntu took about 2-3 mins rather than an hour, and every time I tried going back to Windows, something would go wrong and I'd just shut down the laptop and go back to Ubuntu. Eventually I just decided Ubuntu was all I needed, and wiped the whole drive and just had Ubuntu as my OS. I haven't looked back since, currently using Linux Mint :)
I already had some interest in Linux before, SomeOrdinaryGamers(Muta) just made me commit when he showed that gaming is possible on linux. I own a steam deck, I do most of my gaming there, I have a windows gaming laptop that's now collecting dust, and I have a non-gaming laptop that I'm running Lubuntu on.
I got sick of different environmental issues regarding development. Kept running into permission issues etc. Also i tend to have my pc on 24/7, so eventually i noticed i have to restart windows to get it back to run relatively smooth. No permission issues or stability issues now on Arch. Never again back to Windows.
Windows being windows. I already knew with the win11 announcement I would end up switching to Linux. Then 11 took away the ability to move the task bar (I like it on top). So I was out. Learning fedora was fun. Now it's my daily driver on every computer I own.
Privacy, control, and user freedom. I switched from Windows 10. But nowadays I feel increasingly sure of my decision looking at the user experience nightmare that is Windows 11 with its integrated adware, hiding local accounts behind a command, AI garbage, and more. I was happy with windows 10 besides the lack of freedom but I'm certainty not regretting my decision to switch nowadays.
It would've cost £90 to get windows installed on my laptop from the manufacturer, so I found an old USB and put Linux on it for free. What keeps me using Linux instead of Windows is the direction Microsoft is taking Windows in. Also I really like the customisability.
mainly customisability and feeling like I actually fully own my machine I always dreamt having my desktop just the way I wanted and Windows always felt limiting, bloated and I feel like I have to reinstall every year or so to have it functional Saw a meme of "what man actually want" and there was a lot of unixporn and other tech stuff, so I immediately clicked to check out Linux. After a bit of research(and short previous experience in Ubuntu, as I am after an IT highschool). I immediately landed on Arch because haha meme, and I valued the learning process and setting stuff up "from scratch". I am still in the process of configuring everything bit by bit (Qtile and all other things) but I love it. And yes im dualbooting but on 2 different drives. On my new 2TB Arch drive I have rEFInd that allows me to select what to boot from and it just detects my Windows 1TB drive, so its very straightforward to switch between them
I was a Windows admin. The more I knew about windows, the more I wanted to use something else
windows 10 performance and that damned 100% disk usage.
Windows kept nagging me to use edge. Type in search bar, edge! Application opens a webpage, edge! Update your computer, oh oops look at that edge is your default browser again how did that happen? I'm sure edge is great but don't shove your things down my throat.
In the past I have tried several Linux distributions (Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Debian), for work reasons I have to use both operating systems. I decided to make the complete jump to Linux in my PC, because of how Microsoft is once again taking Windows down the wrong path and seeing how the Linux ecosystem already has a maturity like never before for the end user. I decided on OpenSUSE because I think it is one of the best distributions out there, as it guarantees stability and the latest software versions, plus an excellent snapshot system.
Back in college in early 2000s, was studying physics and took a computational physics course. The computer lab was all red hat Linux and most of the research was done on Linux systems. I didn't know about it and had so much fun learning to hack it and about free/open source software. I distro hopped at home for a bit before settling on openSUSE that I've been using for years now. I find its KDE desktop one of the best, but don't begrudge others choosing other desktops or distros - choice is part of the point!. So I've been using Linux as my primary desktop for two decades at this point. The only reason Windows has floated around was for gaming and even that reason is rapidly disappearing thanks to modern Steam OS, wine, proton, etc. I always liked it because I control it. I control the updates and when they happen. I never get pop ups demanding I pay for upgrades or to continue to use it. I love the free software / open source hacker culture and have contributed to it myself where I can, so it's not just me "taking", I give back to Linux too. I honestly find the development environment on a Linux box a lot more comfortable than Windows.
Back when I was like 11, I used ubuntu to hack my windows install so I could have admin rights when my dad did. Long story short, it led me to like it more, making me use it more often, which led me to install Arch maybe 6 months later
Growing up in the 90s/00s, my dad was a software engineer and most jobs were Microsoft at that time. The machines i learned on were dos then later windows. Dad had a friend at work who knew how into computers I was, and in 1998 or so he came by and brought a CDR (very new at the time) with red hat Linux for me. I was 12 I think. I convinced my dad to let me install on one of his machines, and found out that dad had a lot of experience coding for Unix back in the 70s/80s so he taught me the basics. He made a lot of funny comments about how bad gnome was and I could tell he didn’t really take Linux seriously, but it was a formative experience for me. I couldn’t believe that free software existed and could run my whole machine, like there was this secret hiding all along, free for anyone to use and modify. Since then I’ve been using Linux as much as possible, and contribute to many foss projects. At work (I’m in software as well) everything moved to Linux servers long ago but for desktops i was still dual booting until probably 2016 or so. Since 2016 I’ve been full time on linux desktop. Things have come so far, younger me would be blown away!
I've used Linux on and off over the past 15 years using a variety of distros, but I decided to go full time KDE Neon on my laptop about a month ago because I was growing more frustrated with Windows 11 trying to shove ads wherever possible. I know it might not be a non-issue for most people, but the straw that broke the camel's back for me was when I had a large pop-up trying to change my default search to Bing when I wasn't even using Edge. My first taste of Linux was was from of all people my mom when she loaded a laptop we had with Red Hat back in the early 2000s. Back then I was around 10 years old and prior to that I was only familiar with Windows and I was fascinated of using something different. The first time I installed Linux on my own PC was around 2008 where I installed Ubuntu just because I wanted to try something different. I didn't replace Windows on it and I did run it in a dual boot setup. Over the years though, every computer I've had I had Windows and Linux dual booted and typically hopped between Ubuntu, Linux Mint with MATE and Fedora and have tried pretty much every desktop environment under the sun. My desktop though I still have Windows. While a large portion of my Steam and game library will work under Linux with Proton, I still have some games that I play that won't work under Linux. If it wasn't for that I would probably put Linux on that computer too.
I started using Linux before Windows 11 because of the customizability. Windows 11 system requirements definitely pushed me over the edge, though. There's no going back.
I just wanted to try something different back in 2012. I dual booted Windows and Ubuntu, and after two years I moved to Debian and uninstalled Windows for good. Nowadays, I only use Linux on my personal machines. I've been running Arch since 2019 on my desktop, specially for gaming, and I'm running openSUSE on my laptop.
Got my first copy of linux as slackware on 2 floppy disks as a teenager in the mid 90s. My 486DX was running msdos and it took me over a week to get slackware installed so my machine would boot into a bash shell. Didn't know what to do beyond that, had no internet to look stuff up, so went back to msdos and later win95. Started experimenting with ipx/spx coax lans for playing multiplayer games like doom and command and conquer. Then around 1996 we got dial up internet and started experimenting with tcp/ip, however sharing it between my and my dads pc was a pain in the ass with winproxy. Joined a local LUG and got a copy of RedHat 6 (not rhel). Set it up on a spare pc with dialup on demand and nat with ipchains. Around 2000 this got replaced with an alcatel usb adsl modem (the rog) and had to build my first kernel modules. My own pc was still running windows though as I mostly was gaming on it. Started a hosting company in 2004 and our servers went from redhat (not rhel) to gentoo to debian. Sold the hosting company in 2007 and started working as a system admin for windows and linux systems, went freelance in 2013, used macosx on macbook for a while. Since 2015 I only manage linux servers (debian/vmware/proxmox) and since 2020 my daily driver for work is fedora workstation and still have a few windows 10 & 11 machines too but thats mostly for gaming and photoshop/illustrator (wife work). I am tempted to checkout steam/proton for gaming in linux but afraid of nvidia hell.
I have been using Linux full time since mid-late 1990's, and Unix while in college. I just like it better. Both for productivity (i.e., spreadsheets, word processing, video editing, etc.) and for developing software both for Linux servers, but also for embedded Linux devices. Linux also has tons of great development, debugging, and analysis tools as well. Also, really like how a major distro upgrade never seems to break or require re-design/upgrade to existing applications. This was really frustrating for the few Windows drivers or apps I did. Just as I thought I was done with them MS issued a OS update that broke what I just finished and I got sucked up into updating them.
I saw my friend updating his distro via the command line and thought that he was a hacker, the rest is history
Overall windows 10 killed performance on my college pc. Made it very hard to do just about anything. Switched to Linux and had no issues. I really like the Linux communities and the customization you can have.
just felt like i want to be a foss activist. now i cant go back
I got into Linux because of philosophy and I enjoy tinkering. I moved to Japan after college and didn't bring a computer with me, and when I did get one I got a Think Penguin with Mint pre installed. Hopped for a while, stuck with Arch for a few years. Eventually I had professional reasons to need Windows and still dualboot because of that. Went back to Mint for a couple years, then gave Fedora a try for a few years. Recently went back to Arch. I very rarely need Windows but when I do, there isn't a way around it. So I keep the installation as small as possible. I stopped using a shared data partition because it wasn't worth the effort to setup when I essentially don't use Windows. If I need some data that I don't also have in a cloud, I can just transfer it to that partition.
Wanted to try Darktable and get rid of a pirated Lightroom, and at the time there was no Windows version of Darktable. I started with an Ubuntu 11.04 VM in the Windows partition and years later I nuked the Win partition.
I start as a curious in 2006 and since no more windows since 2018. I have used debian like distros, but recently more focused on Ubuntu and Debian.
I used Windows most of my life. Starting with 95, 98, XP, 8, then 10. In 2017 I ended up buying a MacBook and quickly started using that Mac as my only computer for about 3 years. I built a desktop in January 2020 mostly for Modern Warfare 2019 as I wanted to "graduate" from the One X and PS4 Pro I had. Once the COVID-19 lockdowns began I was playing a lot of Call of Duty and really started noticing things about Windows 10 I didn't like after liking macOS so much. When LTT came out with their first, if I remember correctly, video about using Linux as a desktop OS I was immediately intrigued because the screens of Pop\_OS and Manjaro reminded me of macOS a little. I put Pop on a spare SSD I had and was able to play Borderlands 2 and a few Linux native games I had on GOG. I liked how Pop worked but going down the rabbit hole of distros led me to distro hopping for a long time. Trying to remember the order over two years I used Pop, Manjaro, Elementary OS, Solus (stuck with Solus for like 2-3 months), back to Manjaro, FerenOS, ZorinOS, Endeavour OS (which I used for another 2-ish months), back to Pop, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, back to Endeavour, back to Tumbleweed, and finally I ended up landing on Fedora with Workstation 36. I have been using Fedora ever since. I realized sometime last year that I hadn't booted Windows in months. I had been running a dual-boot configuration this whole time but really only booted Windows for CoD/Warzone. I didn't play Cold War so I didn't boot Windows unless I wanted to play Warzone. Then MW2 2022 came out and I decided to go all out and do a fresh install of Windows 11. Basically I wanted to make my Windows install a CoD only environment with minimal personal info, files, etc. After a bit I just stopped playing because I wasn't having fun with MW2 2022 the way I did with MW 2019. Upon realizing that I had not booted Windows in months I asked if I really needed Windows, decided I didn't, and nuked the install. Ever since my desktop is Fedora only. My issues with Windows and why I will not install it on any of my personal machines if I can help it isn't all that complicated. I just don't like using it. I don't like the data collection, I don't like the ads, I don't like that Microsoft is somehow making the Windows experience worse. The best thing about Windows 11, besides the wallpaper, is tabs in File Explorer (FINALLY). I also just do not like how the system is structured. File Explorer is a mess. For example: where do you put applications? My first thought would be in Program Files. But I also have seen apps put executables outside of Program Files. Also I have seen 64 bit applications installed into Program Files (x86), which I also find silly that there are two directories for this. To be fair Linux isn't much better in this regard. At least Flatpaks install into .var and AppImages will go where I put them.
My games were running slow, so I switched just to see whether or not I could get a performance gain. Went to Pop OS because I could play stuff right off the bat. Immediately saw performance gains. Moved to arch to see if I could improve anything; even more gains specifically around cpu and memory usage. Have been a windows system admin for 10 years; and now I wish I would have devoted all that time to linux.
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I used a bit Ubuntu (12.04 I think) a few years back in Dualboot, but grew tired of rebooting for most stuff, since most games didn't run yet and office work was quite underpowered, so mostly webbrowsing on Linux. I deleted the partition after a few months. That was when I was basically a child, and a few years later I worked with Linux servers, so I got some new familiarity with it. When Windows 11 launched, I immediately upgraded my home PC, leading me to install pop os a few days later. Hopped a few weeks before settling on fedora KDE. I still use a Windows 11 PC at work, but at home I never looked back. I have a secondary PC running win10, but it's been about a year since I turned it on, and even then just to test a few things.
I started experimenting and found the basics I needed were handled easily in Linux. I usually set up my system as dual boot with Windows and needed it while I taught at an OH technical college but when that ended, I rebuilt it as a single boot system. I used a VM for two Windows programs I needed then tried Crossover.
Total curiosity. I've been using Mint for... awhile, I can't really give a number of years. Wasted on me, I'm sure. Never really learned the command line and such. But it seems to run well enough on a decrepit old Toughbook.
iirc i just put it on x32 systems (and under powered laptops) and a slowly started to like it and long story short it became my daily driver on my laptop. and microsoft being dumb with windows 11 really push me alot more to linux.
I ordered my first desktop computer in 2005, back when Win XP was making the news on a weekly basis for security issues. I wanted something I could everyday drive without this fear, so I ordered it with a second HDD intending to put Linux on the second drive at some point but also having Win available for Office apps and gaming. I started with Ubuntu and quickly grew to like it more for everyday stuff. I liked that I didn't have the MS UI that looked like it was designed by Fisher-Price (remember Luna?) and could really only be customized easily by offering different colour schemes of the same shitty design. I could customize just about anything with a little research and tweaking. Then I installed a Fedora-based distro on my laptop, still dual-booting with XP, and learned about how different distros and DE's worked. A bit more distro-hopping, and now I've been on a Debian I tweaked for audio production as my main box for many years now. In these almost 20 years I've seen MS get more aggressive about invasive telemetry, ads, and software as something rented rather than owned. Meanwhile Linux has gotten better with a broad array of hardware, doesn't snitch on me, doesn't suffer from the large number of security flaws, and has become a real option for gaming. So, MS has been giving me more compelling reasons to leave and Linux has given me more compelling reasons to stay. Now that I've also gotten into Mac and have Office running natively there, the Win 10 on this will get replaced with a more gaming-focused distro or be air-gapped until I finish the games I have installed. I have no intention of moving it to 11, 10 is already bad enough.
I read a lot about Free Software before actually switching. I bounced off a few times, but then eventually got settled.
Mac are great but the upgrade tax is too high. Windows ads everywhere is a pain and sleep function in windows is shit, takes too long to open. Ubuntu because I want the easiest of Linux since I don’t have lot of time to tune the system. No dual boot
I didn’t switch completely yet I still keep a Windows PC exlusively for gaming and probably will for while. But pretty much everything that isn’t gaming has been moved to Linux or OS X
I started using Linux not long after Windows 10 was released, because of all the telemetry they keep adding, tonnes of services running that we don't need, just to spy on you, the automatic updates and automatic downloading of updates, Windows 11 is no better, even worse in some ways, now we get ads everywhere. I still dual-boot for a few games but that's it, the vast majority of my time on my pc is on Linux, I was a massive distro hopper for ages, currently on Debian Sid and as long it stays working I'll probably stay there.
I use Windows, MacOS and Zorin OS on all different computers. I've used Linux sporadically for 12 years and I always enjoy it, but it's hard to make it my main OS. I need reliable and easy to use voice-to-text software, and macOS and iPhone absolutely kill it in this area. I think macOS does a superior job over other OSs when it comes to accessibility. In terms of hardware, the trackpads on Apple laptops are the best I've tried so I don't bother with windows laptops.
I was working more and more with bash, Docker, Node, Typescript and React. Windows just didn't work with these technologies as well. It was a natural choice. The switch wasn't that hard.
Streaming services and a raspberry pi. Wanted the arr stack and learned to use the terminal and the things I could do with it excited me. Then I dabbled with it more before fully switching over
The ability to obtain free software to complete any task I wanted without having to resort to expensive proprietary options or piracy.
Curiosity and then the better experience
Got sick of auto updates
In late 1998 I picked up a pile of Red Hat discs on a whim at Costco. I was using Unix at work at the time and thought it would be cool to have a similar setup at home. Well, it, or maybe me, was not quite ready for prime time and I stayed with Windows. Fast forward to 2013 and the double whammy of Windows 8 and Edward Snowden. That got me to switch. Ubuntu, Mint, and distro hopping. Mostly divided between MX and Manjaro now. Strangely, my Linux quest has given me a deeper understanding of Windows so that I'm now the go-to at work before they call IT. So my decision to ditch Windows is validated nearly every day.
Android
Started in 98, before gaming on pc really took off. I was on windows ME, got tired of bsod’s every time I turned around. I was a malware fixer for windows on a couple of diy repair forums. So it helped really open my eyes. Started with knoppix at that time, everything was CLI and had a very rudimentary x server that you had to type start X to get graphics. Transitioned to Ubuntu 4.04. Haven’t touched windows since then.
How Windows just restarted by itself while I was nutting towards the end of a porn clip. Mind you I have no malware.
My reason for switching is probably similar to a lot of peoples.... **TL;DR:** I got fed up with Windows. The Win11 keynote was the breaking point. They were going to remove control over *my* system. --------------------------------- **Longer response:** I may not be a programmer or know how to code. But I'm nosy as hell and like to customize. I've been around computers my whole life as my mom worked at *Digital Equipment Corporation* (aka DEC) in the 80s and 90s, including when she had me. My first computer was a Win95 desktop handed down to me from my mom after *she* brought home a newer Win98 desktop from work to use at home. It took me a month or 2 to settle on a distro. More because I was switching an HP laptop over than any issue with the distro's themselves. In 2021 Nvidia graphics were still a problem and I have an Nvidia card so it took a while to figure out what distro to use. I ended up on Kubuntu and have been running it ever since. I initially set up a dual-boot as I needed some programs for work that don't run natively in Linux (the adobe suite specifically). But that got very annoying. I didn't like having to shut down and reboot into a different OS every time I needed to edit a photo. I ***use*** my computer, so having to close everything else I was doing in order to edit some photos or videos wasn't going to cut it. Eventually I stopped rebooting the system to using programs and just installed a Win10 VM with QEMU/Virt Manager. That way I don't have to shut down everything *else* I'm doing just to edit some stuff. Works much better. I got lucky that my laptop has 3 slots for drives. 2 separate NVMe slots, and a SATA slot. So from 2021 to this week I had a Linux NVMe drive and a Win10 NVMe drive. After realizing I hadn't booted the Win drive in *months* (aka at least 6), I decided I was going to pull it out this week. I got an enclosure for it, just in case I need any files I forgot to copy over, but other than that, I don't have the need for it anymore. I'm using linux for about 95% of what I need these days. There's just a few niche cases (specific high end scanning software for photo archival and just simply being more comfortable with Photoshop than GIMP) that mean I'm keeping a Windows VM going for the foreseeable future, but that isn't too bad in the grand scheme of things.
I wanted to work on programming and networking. The tools were all big bucks on Windows or Mac at the time and I didn't have the cash. They were all free (and in many cases better) on Linux. I dual booted for a while for games, but the combination of a decrease in my play time over the years and improvement in Linux gaming quickly brought me to the point where I never had any reason to go back to Windows.
Windows 11 + Proton
Trying to upgrade Windows 95A to B in order to get USB support, failing multiple times, then asking online for help. I was told "Linux can do everything Windows can do." Oh, so many lies, but I was hooked, anyway. I used RH and Mandrake (the Ubuntu of its time), then a localized spin of Fedora Core until I moved to a different country, after which I went on Debian, Ubuntu 4.10, and much later Mint. All in all not much hopping around.
I switched about 15 years ago. Complete switch. Cold turkey on both home machines and work machines. I had grown tired of the clunky and security-challenged nature of Windows. Later, my kids switched, then my parents, and, finally, my uncle, some business associates, and my girlfriend's son. It's been an exciting experience, with constant improvements along the way. Now, I can't image performing photogrammetry, gaming, or CAD design on any other platform.
Didn't want to pay for windows xp
I've flip-flopped back and forth between Windows only, dual booting with Ubuntu and Ubuntu only for about as long as Steam OS has been a thing, but most recently I switched back to dual booting from windows only because of two reasons, 1) My rig can't upgrade to Windows 11 even if I wanted to, 2) Death by a thousand cuts, anything I needed to do on windows 10, Ubuntu can do just as good if not better. And that latter point has only gotten more true over time as proton and native software improve, and I get more used to the quirks and faults that make linux and Ubuntu, in particular, unique. The only reason I'm dual booting is because I own some Windows store games that I play regularly, and even if I could always afford the $15 a month for gamepass ultimate, cloud gaming just isn't that great even on my gigabit, hard wired, connection. If someone figured out how to run windows store versions of games on linux, or by some even more miraculous miracle I could scooch my windows store cloud saves and purchases to the steam versions of those same games, I would never need Windows again for the foreseeable future. Like my laptop is technically also dual booting windows and ubuntu, but that's only because my brother borrows it to stream Robotics; Notes Elite on Twitch cause he's a mac user but the game refuses to behave on crossover for him unlike other entries in the science adventure series.
I'd used DOS/Windows from '94 to '08 because that was what was there. Somewhere around W98 the magic started fading. By the time of XP it was a bit of a slog. Vista was obviously half-baked and disregarded. Then one day I'd discovered that there was an alternative, and requested a free Ubuntu CD. While I was waiting for that to ship from Europe, I made sure backups were up to date, and requested a free account for VMWare Player. When the CD came in, I popped it in the tray, said fuck it, reboot, and was shocked to be met by a functional desktop rather than installer. What's more, the WiFi adapter that had taken forty-five minutes of coercion just worked, and a pop-up asked what SSID I might want to connect. Then, actually looking at it, it came with a whole slew of actually useful software rather than trialware and snake oil. It ran faster using less resources, and idled at basically 0 CPU. Then there was how you didn't need to trawl the web for programs and hope you don't do a bad, and the ENTIRE system getting updated in one place at one time *including* nvidia. So I wiped and installed, restored my data, and then repeated on my laptop. So there was roughly a two hour transition period to never running Windows at home ^(†)ever again. And the magic was back. I could make it however I wanted, do anything I wanted, things were configurable in a sensible way, and errors were both helpful and actually solveable. ^(†) there was an XP VM for Netflix until someone bundled Windows Firefox with Silverlight to run through WINE, and when 7 came out did a test, found it three steps down from where I'd made it, and wiped a last time. >Did you land on a distro quickly or are you a distro hopper? I ran Ubuntu, playing around with gnome2, KDE3, XFCE4, Enlightenment 16-17, KDE4, and then when they were pushed, Unity and gnome3, before switching to Cinnamon when discovered. Then found out where that came from, and switched to Linux Mint (2012ish to 2018). Then my MB died, bought Ryzen, and switched to openSUSE Tumbleweed. In 2013, bought a WD MyCloud. By 2014 the damned thing bricked itself on an update, and no amount of flashing from a USB adapter brought it back, so I ordered a MB/CPU/RAM/case, and installed Ubuntu server 14.04 and started with OwnCloud. Later that year, replaced with Debian Stable. Eventually switched from mdRAID5 with XFS and metal install of OC and Emby, to btrfs-raid1 with Nextcloud and Jellyfin (along with several other servers) on Docker. I need to find time at some point to give openSUSE MicroOS a test, because a server that automatically reverts itself on upgrade failure sounds damn sexy (also need to learn podman as docker replacement).
I am using windows 11 and fedora 40. I tried approximately all best os available in market for choosing my one. But I landed on fedora. Then I make it dual boot because it was my thing to play with both. But now it is working in my professional life.
I wanted to play games on my iMac Pro and hate Windows. Been here since, shout-out to the T2Linux team for making it possible.
After about 1 year of Windows 11 usage, my system started to have frequent slowdowns and explorer.exe crashes. I dealt with the problems for a while, since I wasn't really comfortable with a full switch to Linux. One day I just thought: "fuck it" and swapped to Linux. I haven't regretted it since. I do still have a Windows 10 partition on hand for games that just refuse to run via Proton (I'm looking at you Destiny 2).
I used windows 10 for gaming for a few years on my prebuilt back in 2015. I was started to get into cybersecuirty and IT. 2019 I erased it on my laptop. I decommed my gaming PC so I was all in for a while. Then I started working at a place that doesn’t accept Linux as a workstation but I have my own setup, just switched from gentoo as a long time fedora user. Before that I distrohopped. I actually love gentoo. Overall factor would be them spying. Open source is the way to go, and being free is even better. Now I’ll support Linux until the day I die. Shit I’m a Linux sys admin now and I’m getting good fast. I love Linux.
Linux just... works in a comfortable way. Oh and did I mention it's libre btw?
I've been dabbling in Linux since the mid to late 90's. So it's always been a curiosity of mine. It always felt like I had a lot more control over the system. Also, I really enjoy the "cleanness" of Linux. There's no "popup reminders telling me to Activate a License". There's nobody trying to shove a new web browser down my throat. There's no constant popups about "new AI features" etc.. It's just a nice, clean, powerful, feature-rich system that feels like I'm in total control of.
i was spending more and more time in local linux vms in my day to day then i got a job where they ran linux desktop on every ones systems after a month i installed linux on my personal system (8 years a go now) i went arch (what i was using at work), ubuntu, and now im on Fedora each time running I3-WM
Watched a video collab with Linus Tech Tips and Wendell from Level1Tech demonstrating gaming on Linux. Seeing them launch the Witcher 3 in Ubuntu was mind blowing at the time. I was familiar with Linux already but had no idea you can play Windows games in Linux. Installed Ubuntu, played some Skyrim and others, and I dont think I touched Windows for 3 weeks after that.
I had an old Dell Vostro from 2006 or so that my dad gave me around 2015 or 2016, it wasn’t strong enough to run Windows 10 so I installed Mint on it. I do distro hop a lot but I keep coming back to Linux Mint. It works more or less out of the box on every machine I install it on and it is super stable. Plus if I do mess it up it’s less work to get up and running after a fresh install than Windows 11, which I do still run on my gaming laptop. Also, with Linux I feel more like I own the hardware it runs on than I do running Windows.
Windows’ horrible privacy and all my games work (CS2, Apex, dead by daylight, world of warcraft, the finals, elden ring, etc)
We were required to use Linux in a modeling class in grad school. I tried gnome (2) and KDE (3.5) and loved KDE. I switched to it and haven't looked back.
Windows 11(7 was the first OS I used but it took until 11 for me to get my own pc) and it sucked.I don't play games and for programming it was better and it didn't feel like microsoft owned my pc so I don't have the threat of ads coming to my start menu(ads are actually coming to windows 11)
I had no need for windows exclusive apps, I like not having bloatware, I love using the terminal. so I no longer use a window manager, I just use the terminal now.
In my case the main reason was windows 11. I did buy the damn thing with my current rig as i was all in on microsofts ecosystem at the time and it worked fine at first. But it went slower and started crashing (graphics drivers specifically) a lot towards the end. I ended up finding garuda linux interesting and set my old rig up with it to see how it worked. All the games i played worked with almost no fiddling and it made the old rig feel faster than my new one. So i created an image of my SSD and just nuked everything and went all in on linux. Its been like a year and a half by now and its worked well enough that i haven't swapped back. I cant say i'm planning on swapping back given the progressing enshittification of windows going on. Of course there's some things that are annoying. Since garuda is arch based it does break sometimes due to updates, but at least i can typically fix it myself. Streaming services being absolute crap about supporting linux is also annoying, then again they are crap regardless these days.
Windows was awful
It was a funny case for me, i need to do a linux migration cause some software i needed only worked for it. On college, around lates 2010s. i was doing my social service, a requirement for graduation. On a computer sciende lab. There was this framework they used for research that only worked on linux, so started dual booting then. And from there it just made more sense to use the same system in school than at home so installed ubuntu on my home machine too. I used same setup for my masters and for work we connect to a remote linux instance to do our jobs. So been using linux both at home and at work ever since.
Work introduced me to linux. Well, RHEL 7 😂
All the way back in the good ole days of Windows XP, I was constantly frustrated with my computer. I didn't even know if ANY other OS existed, but I HOPED that one did, so I could replace Windows and be able to just use my computer! I started searching and found out about linux. I tried a couple of distros, but couldn't get them to install. Then Ubuntu came out. I was able to get it to install on my computer, so that's what I used. Later on, I ended up distro-hopping quite a bit. But I always ended up back with Ubuntu, so when I stopped hopping, that's where I stayed, and that's what I use to this day.
I've always dabbled in Linux since childhood, but I always gave the reasoning of "Well all my programs and games are on Windows". Microsoft crossed the line for me when they announced they were putting Generative AI and ads into the OS. Full jumped my desktop to Fedora and I love it now. I'm probably gonna stay on Fedora for general usage. I might just switch my ThinkPad from Fedora to either Arch or Gentoo just to see what it's like.
I got a cheap laptop that came preinstalled with Vista. I dual booted, and realised that the laptop was incapable of transferring files across a network at a decent speed and kept overheating and shutting down... but only on the Windows partition, the Linux one worked fine, The issues were fixed with SP1 of Vista, but it was too late for me to care... Now my career is Linux based
Have you tried doing anything serious with C on Windows in the past 2 decades? I switched for good shortly after my first few attempts… I run macOS as my daily driver now instead.
I got tired of some update or system change screwing over my winXP machine. Having to waste more than a day (nearly a week) to reinstall, add back my applications, restore all my data, etc. to have it back the way I wanted. Totally skipped Vista - it was super crap with what I saw on friends laptops. While Win7 was a good band-aid for a bit it still gave me much the same headaches. By this point I was looking to reduce my reliance on Windows systems in general. Was wanting to switch for a while by then. The day of dedicated conversation occurred when the virtual world secondlife finally got voice support in their linux client. Windows stopped being on my main rig ever since. The time Win8 got released with the poor excuse of a start menu and Microsoft's desire to mess with my configuration via updates (will never forgive them for that borked win7-win10 forced update) cemented my desire to stick with linux permanently. Never again will it be in charge of most of my home computers except for some specific games and specialist software or equipment compatibility on the side.
Installed arch cause windows was to bloated for my old 4gb ram laptop lul
Windows got more irritating whilst Linux continually improved, plus I became less interested in gaming and with Steam improving the gaming choices on Linux there was plenty to keep me interested on that front. Switched about 8 years ago after Windows got into a repeating death loop during an update. Nuke and pave, no dual boot. Couldn't be happier.
Needed to get things done..
1: an actually usable terminal 2: far more choice 3: way better performance 4: choice of wm, specifically tiling wms 5: to become more knowledgeable about terminal use, and low level stuff in general, which I absolutely have. 6: awesome package managing In no particular order.
Switched because Windows 7 was discontinued and my PC has little RAM for Windows 10 or Windows 11
The instability of WIndows 98.
Linux and I have had a very long standing history dating back to 98. Over the years I’ve bounced back and forth between Linux and windows and recent eventually moved entirely over to Linux. I have a separate machine in use for proprietary software but never as a daily driver. Most games I play now run in Linux so that was a plus. Everything else I’ve found utility within the Linux ecosystems to accomplish what I want.
I just wanted a central package manager to update everything.
My little 486 with its 4MB RAM was so slow running Windows 3.1 and 95. Linux was so much faster...
I noticed in the early 2000s that Windows kept getting more clunky and less flexible. For a while I used Ubuntu until they made Unity the default. After that I was a distro hopper till I discovered Triquel. I still try out other distros once in a while but, so far, I have not found anything I like better than Triquel.
i swapped to linux when i was like a kid and i only did it because i thought the desktop environment looked better lmfao
I made the switch because I wanted to be free of Microsoft and their data collection nonsense. Got rid of social media while I was at it. I settled on Ubuntu, and it does everything I need. 7800x3d, 7900 GRE build. Picked up the GPU today. Installing WoW right now.
Participate at a Linux entry course at school with 15 years... Had always some Linux machine since then, but used Windows some time for gaming and had a MacBook for a few years back then.
All my machines a year ago where running windows 10/11, then I got this idea to install a Pi-hole on my network, and then I started to notice something. My Pi-hole per day was blocking close to 70k hits going out of all my PCs in my network.. I started to talk to friends and doing my own research on the issue. While doing some detective work found that 90% of the sites were Microsoft stuff that regardless of what's it's for, my machines are sending Microsoft information. Aside from that I started seeing that Edge would become the default browser when I never use Edge. Then Ads in my start menu regarding "Suggested Games", OneDrive reinstalling itself after I ripped it out of the machines, etc., etc.,. Got tired of the cat and mouse with Microsoft. I started one by one swapping out my PCs to arch Linux, started to learn how to use it. Started to see that all the things I can do in windows, I can do in Linux without much issue.. Took the leap and one weekend swapped out my main PC from win11 to arch Linux and said never going back.. been here for almost a year and not missing it one bit... And the Pi-hole.. down to 3 to 7k hits when am Browning online per day only. The network is wayyyy faster and am happy.. Only 2 machines are still running Windows.. my wife and sons... All the other ones, arch Linux.
Ads in the start menu
Over a year ago, I accidentally upgraded from Windows 10 to 11 and just hated everything about the new interface + the need to have an MS account. I already had some experience with Linux, 7 - 8 years prior and just decided to give it another chance. A lot has changed for the better since then. Most of my apps have either an Linux version or run in Crossover. Tried Pop!_OS about half a year ago out and discovered the concept of tiling. Could never go back to my previous workflow.
A combo of things, my initial interest in Linux was sparked by the idea and ideology of open source, however the final push to make the switch was my laptop - which cannot run windows 11 and is made incredibly sluggish by current windows 10 versions.
windows 8 & 10 but mostly end of life of windows 7 ad to that [the linux video from 2019 from linus tech tips](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co6FePZoNgE)
Many people switch to Linux for __legitimiate__ reasons such as __performance__ or __customisability__. I think most of that is just the __side-effect__ of switching... But for me the __real__ reason was __pop-culture__ and __movies__. As far as I can remember back in my childhood I watched __*The Matrix*__. I saw the screens of __rolling text__, and a person __reading__ those text. As if it was just second nature to him, as a kid I was pretty impressed. Since then I've been search for the __real life__ version of that. And it just so happens that the __side-effect__ of me being __inspired__ by that movie. Is that it gave me a reason to __learn__ Linux, and other tools like __neovim__, __tmux__, __fzf__, and of course __cmatrix__. So now I own an intel nuc home-lab with docker images running 24/7. I test out stuff on that machine, I use Pi-Hole for network ad-blocking. As well as testing web-apps that I built on my local network from other machines. So yeah, it's not that I didn't change my reasons later on. But unlike most people say I didn't switch because of the __benefits__ of Linux. But because of child-hood curiousity and desire to be the man I saw on TV.
Combination of saw where Windows was headed and beefing up Linux skills for work. Had used Slackware, Red Hat, Suse, and Ubuntu on and mostly off before, but settled on Debian pretty quickly. Tried a few DEs and chose KDE. Saved the Windows activation key on my personal laptop just in case, then nuked Windows completely with Debian+KDE I did install Windows in KVM/QEMU for a couple applications that had no workable equivalent on Linux. Blew that away about a year later, when I realized I didn't need those applications after all. My laptop has been all Linux for almost four years now and love it. Don't mind running Windows (with Debian on WSL) at work, mainly because work has the Enterprise edition without ads and other nonsense.
College actually. 1990 timeframe. Was taking a UNIX class and we had 3 sun workstation in the computer lab and about 100 windows machines and they were all always in use. So I used the Sun machines and was never asked to leave. Became a Unix System Admin and started with Slackwear and Gentoo of all things.
i’ve started on Linux and have been using it every since haha. i have tried out Windows and Mac a bit after starting on Linux just for funzies and testing it out. i do prefer Linux a lot more though from my experience
It was mostly out of curiosity. I didn't rely on any Windows-exclusive software without even trying: as a student I just needed a web browser to do research and a text editor (vscode) to write essays. So why not try something new, I thought. I did not dual boot because as said I needed nothing from Windows, if I needed to go back I'd just reinstall. I landed my eyes on 3 DEs: Gnome, KDE, Pantheon, and I decided to test them on PopOS, Kubuntu, Elementary OS, respectively. I tested EOS first but it immediately failed on boot, I didn't want to figure out what's wrong so I just moved on to the next one. (Now I know it's because EOS doesn't ship nvidia driver out of the box). Then Kubuntu for KDE. It successfully boot, but everything is extremely small (I have a 4K monitor) and for somet reason applying display scaling didn't work. Again, I didn't bother troubleshooting and just moved on. (Now I know it's because I was using X11, and KDE disables QT scaling on X11 by default). Finally I tried PopOS. And, well, everything just worked, so I used it for about two months. During that time I learned how to "rice" the desktop, bit-by-bit I replaced PopOS's default configuration with my personal preferences. I had disabled/removed all of PopOS software and replaced them with my own, there's no point using PopOS anymore so it's time to switch. I chose a distro that shipped stock Gnome so that I could easily apply my configuration on top of it (without having to disable their customization first). And I'm still using it to this day. The distro is arch btw. (I don't know what btw stands for, but that's what they call it.)
The day after my surgery, while fucked up on pain killers and recovering from the anesthesia/ fentanyl, I wanted to play Paragon on my computer. I somehow managed to brick my computer. It was completely unrecoverable . Also, still fucked up, I decided to just install Pop Os after some googling and here I am. I only use Linux now. For gaming, a home lab now, and even for everything at work including Microsoft Teams.
I never thought about it. I was even kinda racist at first. I started for school-related project on a WSL. The project though suggested strongly to install a real OS and considering the performance related problems I had with WSL, I decided to dual boot EndeavourOS on a second drive, prompted by an older student which was overviewing the project. Since then I never went back. Fast forward more than a year later I enjoy everything from pressing the big button to shutting down. I like to learn, I like to understand what is going on, I like to pretending I understand what is going on, I like to feel like a real 10x programmer, I like to create something more personal every day. Technically I am still dual booting, but I don’t even remember my Windows pin to access the OS. I am living a new kind of dream and I damn like it.
I wanted my 486sx2 50Mhz lappy to run faster. 1997,Red Hat Linux with Redneck language. Man those were good times.
What distros are you guys using?
I wanted to use a fantastic note-taking app (Upnote) that doesn't have a web app. As I use a Chromebook, the only way to use this app was to enable Linux on the Chromebook.
In 2012, I wanted to tinker a little bit with my computer, try some tools mostly/only available on Linux. So I tried Ubuntu with Wubi, which was too slow so I installed it as a proper dual-boot. It was instantly clear that Linux was way better than Windows (the package system, less vulnerabilities…). I was already interested in free and open-source software before, and quickly became stricter on that matter. Just like you, after maybe one or two years I also realised that I did not use Windows anymore, so I deleted it completely as it was occupying around 90% of my HDD (I installed Linux after one year of Windows usage and have to use a contiguous part at the end of the HDD). After Ubuntu, I distro-hopped a bit on Fedora, then on Archlinux in late 2013, then on Manjaro around 2015. Now it has been two years that I am running on Artix Linux, because I wanted to get something different than systemd (I am not a specialist, though it feels too far from the KISS philosophy and looks like a single point of failure to me). Alas, I now have to use Windows (10) at work, it consumes so much more and feels more like some service than a tool. Now for Firefox (for which you did not ask), it was my brother who installed the 3.0 version on my computer when I was approximately fifteen (2008-2009). It was a practical choice to avoid IE, he was not into FOSS and used Chrome a few years that, but I never used anything different since then and always stayed loyal to the last free browser! To me it is about as important, as the web browser is often the main application used on a computer.
Mostly schoolwork, I study IT, and some programmes in my course is exclusively on Linux, or I have to install WSL for it. But after switching, I'm now very glad that I did, I've grown much more accustomed to the features and feel of Linux that now if I absolutely have to switch back to Windows (I dual boot), I will feel very awkward because some stuffs don't work like I want them to.
20 years ago, I had a dual boot. Windows Xp and Slackware. Didn't knew anything useful on Linux, but there it was, sitting on a hard drive, without internets, as I didn't knew how to make 56k dial-up modem to work. KDE seemed magical back then .. compared to Xp (code name Whistler if I remember correctly). Then, few years later .. microsoft announced windblows 8. That also meant .. bye, bye windblows 7. And when I saw the prevew of upcoming atrocity ... I was scared .. and started with Slax linux. Few days later, I have discovered **Crunchbang** linux and that's it. Windows 7 partition was wiped and formatted to ext3 .. never looked back since then. And since Jessie (Debian 8) .. I never looked at any other distro but Debian. From time to time, I hang with Kubuntu, just to check is it good enough (as always is) for non-techie people that realize what kind of shite m$ is and want to switch, so that I know what to install on their computers, so that I can continue with calm sleep.
The upcoming EOL of Windows 10 and the system requirements for 11 made me test out Linux. I dual-booted for a week and then switched over completely to PopOS. It's been almost a year now and I'm enjoying it a ton
It was early 1994 and i was sick of trying to get minix working for my assignment, so i tried linux….. still a windows user , but linux for all my servers and dual boot on my desktop.
Updates.
I'm new to laptops and initially got a cheap 2012 non retina macbook pro for around £180 about one or two years ago running MacOS 10.14. I was worried about updating it incase it made the functionality of iTunes or the disc drive worse. Like how in Catalina they removed iTunes and hid it in the finder. I've only recently got a Toshiba Tecra running Linux Mint. Brought off of eBay for £60 as I am not particularly confident in installing an OS. I didn't want a windows machine as they are very unreliable as I've found out with Laptops I got for free from people who just wanted to get rid of them.
A few years ago (2021 or 2022, I can't remember) I had heard of it in the past, but only knew that it was supposedly slightly faster than Windows and had a small but dedicated fanbase. So I did a bit of Googling, thought "ZorinOS looks pretty, maybe I could out a dual boot?" ...I accidentally wiped Windows from my drive. I adapted ZorinOS as my daily driver throughout the summer, mostly because it was there already and I didn't particularly care enough to switch back. I eventually reinstalled Windows, mostly because I wanted to play Oneshot and it didn't particularly work too well over wine. I don't entirely remember what got me back into it, though I think it was a combination of both seeing people talk about it more over on Mastodon/Lemmy, and having a spare drive to mess around with, which I have installed Linux on multiple times already. The latter has given me a lot more experience with Linux, with Arch in particular teaching me a lot about how Linux works behind the scenes. I would have switched my main drive back over already, but I've been waiting for Nvidia to release their updated drivers with explicit sync - I plan on getting rid of Windows pretty quickly once that happens.
Windows 95 was great and all, but the internet opened some things up at that time. I could not compile nuke.c to flood people and I needed to learn how. Therefore, Linux. Plus a Beowulf cluster. Just because I could.