Technology

When I switched to Linux (year 2011), jumping through hoops reduced significantly, because:

running games on builtin Intel cards etc, that is, kinda second-class citizen hardware, was anyways PITA ;

it made my stuff run terribly faster ;

those hoops are not too different in complexity from installing mods for games under Windows ;

for trying to learn programming Linux is much less problematic (have ADHD, so didn't learn much back then, but) ;

the main issue of uninstalling McAffee went away for free ;

I was at school, so didn't have any problems with office suites' incompatibilities and such ;

and also Linux in 2011 was in general easier, don't believe RedHat fanboys and such, it was very nice before PulseAudio, systemd and widespread adoption of GTK3, say, to change colors you just needed a 20-line .gtkrc-2.0 and .Xresources, and your WM's config file, it's 20 minutes from fresh install to feel normal ;

the community was friendlier, somehow back then RTFM was considered acceptable, but people rarely used it, now everybody behaves as if RTFM was very bad, but also too many people use it, sometimes to avoid admitting that they are wrong and a certain thing is absent in TFM.