Linux

Windows XP. Jumped onto the Linux bandwagon in 2007. I've used newer versions on other's PC's and don't get why people tolerate that shite.

Windows 7 Ultimate for me. I still kept it as a boot option on my main PC until about a year ago because I thought I still needed it for a couple windows apps and games.

I tried Win8 at one point and hated the changes. I also tried Win10 and one of those "forced bloody updates" bricked my machine so I said 'fuck that' for good.

I've dabbled in Linux for 20 years, and run Ubuntu on my living room HTPC for at least a dozen. My main PC runs EndeavourOS now and even gaming has been pretty great.

Changed only a few weeks ago from Win 11, all the AI crap was creeping in. Using Ubuntu and really enjoying it!

What was the last version of Windows you used before hopping on over?

Windows95

I got sick of constantly dealing with the BSOD.

I switched to Linux permanently in 2008. Last OS I used before Linux was Mac OS X version 10.4 "Tiger" (if I recall correctly) which is what came with the Macintosh PowerBook that I had bought roughly in the year 2004. I have never used Microsoft software unless someone was paying me to, but at the time, Windows XP was still all the rage even though Microsoft was trying to get everyone to switch to Windows Vista. (Vista got a lot of well-deserved hate too, sort of similar what we see with Windows 11 right now, actually.)

Anyway, I was a die-hard Apple fanboy, but getting more and more into free software and I kept on using Macports/Homebrew to build Linux stuff I found online, but back in those days a lot of apps I wanted to try did not have good support for the Darwin kernel build of GCC which was pretty old compared to what Linux was using at the time. Occasionally a build would fail, and I would try to port the software on my own, with the idea of maybe submitting a package to Macports. But after a while I realized, "if I want to use Linux software, why not just use Linux?"

So I bought a Netbook (Dell Inspiron Mini 10) with Ubuntu pre-installed. I really loved that little computer, I used it for a good 5 years until I needed a more powerful computer. I still have it, actually. I never went back to Apple until this year when I took a new job where they wanted me to use a MacBook Pro. (Again, not using proprietary software unless I am well paid.)

I can say with confidence that Linux is considerably better than Apple's operating systems. I use Aarch64 Debian 12.5 in a QEMU on that MacBook for most things, only switching over to Mac OS when I really need to.

Windows Vista

Windows 10, but before Windows 11 was even leaked I believe.

Windows 10, about 6 years ago. My main PC shit the bed after a Windows update. I'd been getting more into Linux through work so I figured I'd give it a shot since I was going to have to reimage it either way. Turned out I didn't need windows for anything I wanted to do, so I never went back.

Windows 8.1 was my last version before I made the switch. Windows 8 was horrible. The Metro UI broke all my habits from Windows XP from 7 while also making it harder to tweak my system. By the time 8.1 came out, I'd found enough ways around the main annoyances that its improvements were moot, but many issues remained, such as the bloatware bundled with my PC, and frequent slowness and instability.

As for why I switched, I was attracted by the free software ideal, and trying to get away from Windows, and I had watched and read several things that further convinced me it was superior, but I think the ultimate reason was that I had become hyperfixated on Linux. Thankfully, in this case, autism did not steer me wrong. My level of obsession with Linux has declined, but I still enjoy using my computer much more than I ever did or would on Windows.

This includes the Linux greybeards too.

I never switched to Windows, but switched directly from AmigaOS to Linux, in 1994.

Vista because of license shenanigans. I tried to upgrade from XP and the license wouldn't activate. Support told me my upgrade license wasn't compatible with my XP license, like pro vs home or some crap. I was reinstalling Vista every 30 days for a while, I even got it down to like 15 minutes using a slipstreamed DVD with all the stuff I cared about being installed with the OS. It was manageable but annoying since I paid for the OS and the upgrade but couldn't really use it. Then I took intro to unix and found out linux is free, I'd heard of linux but didn't know it was free. I didn't know what a distro was, I wasted a bunch of time trying to download linux from kernel.org and I couldn't figure out how to get linux to work. Eventually I stumbled upon Ubuntu. Folks, you might not believe this but once upon a time Ubuntu used to be great for newbies. I can still hear the startup music (which was the style at the time) and the african drums. My printer just fucking worked. Firefox and libreoffice just worked, although I quickly learned to turn in deliverables as pdf exports. There were some learning pains but nothing that was any more difficult than random shit that pops up in windows, at least with linux I might get a useful error to point me in the right direction and there was always someone out there smarter than me that posted how to fix it. I haven't looked back.

Like many, it hasn't been a clean "yesterday windows, today linux" thing for me. In 2004, I switched from a Dell Latitude (Windows) to a Mac, but continued to use Windows for work (because it was required), then I switched my most recent Macbook Air to Linux, kept another Mac around running macos, and still use Windows at work (because it's a requirement). I expect I'm going to be Linux-first from now on (so macos's days are numbered around here), but still use Windows at work.

I'm kinda bummed about moving on from macos, but the iOSification is just awful. The OS feels confused and bloated now. I honestly think Apple is due for a pretty serious reset and consolidation of operating systems.

Um, iirc it was Win8? I've had to open a couple Win10 installs since then (mostly to prep the machine for a Linux install) and I can tell it's only gotten worse.

Back then I could probably hack a Windows install down to my preferences in a week or so, disabling or removing as much bloat and spyware as possible — but the amount of hoops I had to jump through to have a tolerable system was just becoming oppressive.

Vista bricked my laptop after a year without a reliable way to recover. Made the switch over in 2009.

Win10. Because I don't liked ads in my tile menu. I switched my PC in 2018, and I also switched my laptop. Though I found a 2015 MacBook Pro on which I hackintoshed MacOS Sonoma through OCLP.

Windows was but a brief interlude between AmigaOS and Linux.

I left Win8 to go full time on Linux. For several years before this, I used to host web sites professionally and build them so I was used to Centos and Debian servers but not comfortable enough to be able to manage them deeply. In other words, just enough to make them work, but more complex troubleshooting was not my strong suit.

I later landed a job where their primary systems are Linux based and through that training and learning, I became more comfortable in the CLI and have never looked back.

The last Windows version I used was Windows 7 I guess, but merely to play some games. In daily use, the last Windows version I used was Windows XP

Windows 98 second edition By then i was bored with windows and a friend told me about Linux and i haven't looked back.

Windows 2000

Windows 7 starter

I was still using XP when Ubuntu 5.10 was released, and when I saw my audio worked out of the box, I switched :-) I had been using Mandrake Linux (since 1999) but only for servers and other work related stuff.

Last Windows I ran full-time was XP, ran Win7 for a couple of months before switching Ubuntu 10.04; still used Win XP and Win7 in VM's for years for specific applications.

Win10 is the OS on the work machines, some of it is really nice, but so much feels backward. I don't get why there is still control panel and the settings app. Why is notepad so shit....

I used Win11 recently, it looks quite nice, more consistent than 10 at least. But everything I have read makes me want to stay away.

Ran Ubuntu LTS's finishing with 20.04, have since been running Mint. Snap's made Ubuntu a worse experience for me.

Windows 10. It was during the pandemic (late 2020), and I saw a Mutahar video of his desktop (at the time, I did not know of KDE Plasma, just gnome, unity and cinnamon) and I was like "Whoa, his desktop looks so much better than when I remember using linux. I should install Arch because that is what he used to get that desktop."

I have used linux before on Fedora, Mint and Ubuntu, so installing arch using a youtube tutorial was not going to be that hard. Although it did take 2 days (Mostly procrastination and fear).

I will say this: I have a 98 computer and an XP computer for me to use, and I found those UIs better than in Windows 10. When I switched to linux with KDE Plasma, the oldschool UIs could not compete. Plasma is just THAT good.

I was also madly in love, with me calling KDE Plasma like being in a dream, and using Windows 10 is like waking up to the cold old stale office life.

What great timing too, with Proton kicking off right at the same time too, eventually me removing the need to dual boot.

TL;DR: I switched because I found out about KDE Plasma, and linux gaming was becoming infinitly better.

For personal use it was probably Windows 98 SE.

For professional use i'm currently forced to use Windows 10.

I've flirted with Linux for years, all the way back to Fedora Core 6. I still use Windows, so 11 is my most recent version, but it's stripped down using the AME playbook. I use it to play some games with anti-Linux anticheat. I also have a minimal Windows VM on my desktop for playing Destiny 2.

That being said, my primary computers run Arch (custom built desktop) and Fedora (Framework laptop) and I have zero intention of ever using Windows as a primary OS ever again.

Greybeard here.

I worked for a company with a wild mix of DOS, Win 3.1, and Win 3.11. Then we got new PCs, some ethernet hubs and switches (instead of the damn coax cable with terminators) and started to move to Win95.

Win 95 was a beast. It came in a bunch of floppies. It took ages to install, and you'd find after one hour that the last floppy was corrupt. Also, on our cheap hardware (Siemens-Nixdorf Pentium PCs) sometimes the sound card or the ethernet card would go missing. Nothing short of a reinstall would solve it. Temporarily, of course.

The Win 98 came along. All our problems were solved. It was a 32 floppy install job, if memory serves. No, no CDs on our company. Still, it crashed a lot, and Microsoft Office had a tendency to simply destroy 100+ page documents when it was not crashing.

At home I used Windows, because how else am I going to play games, right? But I kept experimenting with Linux, and liked what I saw. There were many pieces missing (no USB for a very loooong time, for instance), but what was there was rock solid compared to Windows. And you could COMPILE YOUR OWN DAMN KERNEL, fer chrissake! How powerful was that?

Eventually, distros started to emerge that made some pain points go away. I remember Corel Linux, Caldera Linux, Mandrake, RedHat, etc. I settled with Debian because 'apt-get dis-upgrade', of course. Then Ubuntu came along and made Linux more pretty and usable for simple folk. They even sent you a free CD by mail if you asked them.

I got ever more tired of Windows nuking my boot sector, the viruses (virii?), the hunting around for drivers, the having to throw away good peripherals because windows thought were too old to support.

I made a choice and dropped Windows. I missed a lot of the gaming scene until Wine and Steam caught up with the state of the art. In the mean time I made use of emulators and had a good time playing console and arcade games.

Oh I was teased about it. Fellow IT workers (proper MSCE type people) would give me a hard time because "Linux has no future", "Unix is dying". I guess the future proved I was right. I now earn more that they do.

Win7. I use LMDE+Cinnamon now and I have it looking suspiciously like how I had Win7. Old habits and all that.

Though you didn't ask, Win2K was the probably the best Windows, IMO. Then came the bloat and the ugly UIs. (I've kind of got used to bloat these days. Storage is cheaper than it was, and LMDE isn't exactly the slimmest distro.)

Maybe I would have liked Win10. Similar to how it was with the old Star Trek movies, it seems like every other version of Windows is terrible, and if that remains true, maybe 12 will be better than 11. Probably not going back to find out though.

Windows XP. Windows itself was fine, I only moved because the programming languages I wanted to use ran better on Linux and ran in a way that was more likely to be the same as in production.

I used 11, but had tried linux when I used 10. I was never really trying to switch, more just distrohopping with windows in the mix, and eventually I just never went back.

Windows XP. The moment I realized the mess Windows Vista was going to be, I knew I had to switch over.

The last Windows I used was Windows 2000 Professional. I bought a new PC, didn't like XP so I switched to Linux full time as I'd been using it more and more anyway. Windows has only gotten worse since then so I've never looked back.

XP..my laptop was an old Acer my mom passed to me and couldn't run vista so I never got it.. Hopped on Ubuntu 09.04

Windows wasn't my first operating system. I don't even remember what my first was, but it ran on top of DOS and had a 5 and a quarter inch floppy drive. I've used pretty much every windows desktop version since 3.1, but really only installed or maintained XP, 2000 server, and Windows 10 on my own hardware. But I've also installed and maintained various Linux and BSD distros since about the turn of the millennium, including a brief relationship with a Mac laptop with OSX.

There was never a switch. I always ran whatever I could get working that would get the job done. For some tasks that was Windows, either because it was good enough and came pre-installed or it was required by the software I needed to run for school or work. I've handed in many assignments on 3.5 inch floppies. I haven't maintained a server with windows since Windows2000 server. I've tried Slackware and Corel Linux. I bought SUSE Linux in a box from a big box store. I've gotten those brown Ubuntu install CDs in the mail. I remember being delighted with the development of BitTorrent because now my downloads would check themselves for consistency as they downloaded the ISO. No more getting to the end of a download only to discover the md5sum failed to check. I've used Knoppix and Clonezilla for system recovery.

There was never a change. I'm a tech nerd that likes Linux, not a Linux nerd that likes tech. But, it was the way windows kept destroying my Linux partitions that drove me away from dual booting and installing windows on anything in general. Also the windows situation with viruses, updates, and lack of security that drove me away unless compelled. Now windows lives on its own hardware or in a VM for me.

I had dabbled with Linux before, both at home and work. Stood up a server running Ubuntu LTS at home for serving my personal website and Nextcloud. But, gaming kept my main machine on Win10. Then I got a Steam Deck and it opened my eyes to how well games "just worked' on Linux. I installed Arch on a USB drive and booted off that for a month or so and again, games "just worked". I finally formatted my main drive and migrated my Arch install to it about a week ago.

I'm so glad that I won't be running Windows Privacy Invasion Goes to 11.

For me it was the jump between Windows 7 and Windows 8. I hated the UWP apps, the "simplified" control panel an d the full screen and tiled start menu. It worked great as a phone UI but terrible on desktop. I used it for like a month and switched to Linux Mint, which I felt was closest to W7 at the time.

I had Windows 8.1 but as the end of its maintenance was approaching I saw the writing on the wall with Windows 10 and especially 11 and I wanted no part of that. When 8.1 was put to pasture I returned to Linux and I have been content ever since. Seeing where Microsoft is taking Windows I'm more and more convinced that Stallman Was Right. I control my software, not the other way around.

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Vista. Tried to make Ubuntu work for a while but that was a shit show back then... Moved over to OS X and I was home - a beautiful UNIX where everything just worked. Stayed there for close to a decade (Lion-Mavericks-El Capitan-High Sierra-Mojave), mostly on non-Apple hardware.

Sadly, the iOS-ization ramped up so I had to rip tons of iCloud related stuff everytime I did a fresh install and then Catalina killed off 32-bit apps and brought other irritants, so I tried Fedora 35 and escaped with close to no issues.

And here I am, on Fedora 40 five years later.

Was using Tiny 10/modified Windows 10,but switched to Linux Mint beacuse of low system requirements and low resource usage,as I have 15 year old PC

First moved from 7 on home PC as a daily driver

And then later once I stopped distro hopping (stopping at Arch) and could do my work in full from home... ( by porting time tracking app to Linux )

Moved from 10 on work PC

Windows XP pre-SP1 at home. For Work I always had to use Windows.

I used Windows 7 before, but my first computers all ran Linux. (Raspberry Pi 2b with Raspian; First 64-bit PC ran Ubuntu Mate)

Windows 10