Linux

First thing that ever made me switch was MacBook Bootcamp drivers weren't available for a time, and things just worked great on Linux, even the broadcom wifi drivers right out of the box. What made me stay was the infinite amount of customization I can do, and that all of it is stored in one of two places and can be so easily backed up wherever needed.

It wasn't anything big that caused me to switch. It was just a general feeling of "oh, maybe I'll switch" and annoyance at Windows, and then I got a new SSD.

Basically when Windows became pay-per-install. PCs stopped coming with an install CD so if you needed to reset from scratch you couldn't. I first tried Linux out of necessity because that was all I had to put on the machine in the house, and ended up never looking back.

When I was 13 and still watching LTT I had an extremely old dell optiplex with a 3rd or 4th gen i7 that was really starting to slow down on Windows; I just thought it was old hardware (partially true) but then LTT released a video about Pop_OS and was like "oo what's Linux" and just deleted Windows and installed it. Never looked back! Everything was super snappy and I was really shocked.

Went travelling back in 2015 and my laptop was already a 2011 model and starting to slow with Windows. I wasn't buying a new one just to travel with, money I'd rather spend on the trip.

I only needed it for movies and social media etc, maybe downloading photos from my camera.

Installed Ubuntu, so much nicer to be on and fun learning experience and then just never looked back.

Been 9 years and I havent moved home and I'm still on Linux (nixos now).

When they announced when windows 10 support would end. The writing was on the wall and each update was a toss up whether it would add a useless feature.

I knew from experience many years ago that windows would delete grub if it so much as looked at it funny. So I got an amd card and cut windows out cold turkey.

Linux has a whole host of weird quirks and issues, just like windows. But it's either something documented, fixable, or will be fixed in an update. I'm more excited to click update in Linux than I am with windows too.

Few pieces of software don't work with either wine or a windows VM as backup. But so far I'm not missing much. Missing out on some games because of anti cheat sucks though. Even though I hate anti cheat, I still love a good game of league.

It happened really slowly for me, over a period of years. We have multiple PCs (several media PCs, a home server, and our personal PCs) that we've built over the years. Aside from our personal PCs, the OS chosen was always just whatever was free to us at the time. Over time this became overwhelmingly Linux. But the real turning point for me at least was the end of 2021.

Our oldest media PC still had Win 7 on it and it was showing it's age. We'd had a lot going on in our lives when Win 7 support ended, and upgrading it was just not a priority until then. Long story short, I put Ubuntu on it.

While I definitely had my gripes about Ubuntu (which caused me to move to Mint a few months later), it was nothing compared to the problems I'd had with Win 10 on my personal machine a couple years prior. Compared to Windows, everything was just so... Easy. I didn't have to fight for my right to just change shit I didn't like. Installing applications was a fucking dream. Most games I cared about playing worked as well or better than they did on Windows.

So I put Mint on my personal machine and never looked back. Moved over to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed a few months after that, but I'm thinking about going back to Mint now that 22 is out.

TL;DR I was real tired of paying for software that would try to tell me what I could and couldn't do. Thought Linux was "too hard," found out it's not (at least for me).

Tim Cook and Jony Ive.

For me I got super annoyed by the taskbar not hiding and unhiding correctly. Other one was the search not working correctly on start menu and many times just stalling and nothing happening.

Those were the ones that broke the camel's back.

It's just that i wanna learn more about computers. At the time with Windows I didn't think i could really understand what is going on behind the scene. It hides too much stuff from the users and there was a weird idea in my head that the advanced use of computers is supposed to be in the command line, Windows just doesn't seem to be the right choice. I don't play much games or even heavily use computers in general, so my laptop basically became a big toy for me to tinker with.

I had used Linux almost exclusively between 1999 and around 2005 and then went back to Windows for games. Stayed there until recently and switched back to Linux because of the enshittification of Windows. I even had a pro license and hadn’t gotten everything pushed into my face but it was still too annoying what Microsoft did.

While not everything is working smoothly yet (especially Wayland and sound), it feels a lot smoother and is so much more fun. I was especially surprised how great the games work. If I had know that I would probably have switched back to Linux sooner.

Nothing really, I started dual-booting and jumped from one to the other depending on what I wanted to do. One day I realized I hadn't booted in Windows for months and had never needed it, so I just got rid of it.

I think it was around the time of the windows 10 beta, I was trying that out and also dual booting with Linux mint.

I remember being a little frustrated with getting games to work great on Linux, but even more frustrated just using Windows. So I thought "Linux makes me less mad, I'm just going to use that"

I was dual booting Linux and Windows 10 like 4 years ago, and then Windows somehow got rid of GRUB entirely, pissed me off enough to remove Windows, haven't used it on a personal computer since then.

when I realized my hardware no longer worked for me it worked for microsoft and dell and hp etc. I was done.

I bought a steam deck

When I was a kid, windows XP was having stability issues and I wanted to play minecraft. Switched to Linux and had no issues.

Windows update would always start doing stuff whenever I turned on my PC and would slow it down to a laggy crawl until it finished. This increased the pressing the power button to doing what I need to do time to 15 minutes.

I knew that Linux updates worked differently so I tried it out. And I was right. Oh so right

Wanted to hack WiFi when i was teenager, right now already close to decade of daily driving linux

Windows was actually quite good when I made the swap. It was during the height of windows xp.

I did it because I am a curious guy, and wanted to know what it was all about. I've been full-time and had fun with it since then. :)

Was curious about the increased customisation so I went dual boot around the time of windows 7.

Went full time Linux when windows 8 came out. Windows has only continued its enshitification since then, so it really paid off.

Every machine I'm currently running would run like dog shit with windows, but runs like brand new with Linux Mint.

Never really have gone full Linux.

I run MacOS, Windows, Ubuntu, Fedora and BSD depending on the need of the box.

The one thing that lead me onto Linux, however, was the full hardware access in Docker.

It might sound ridiculous but I switched to Linux to take ownership of the things I own.

The lesson for me was Windows Genuine Advantage in Windows Vista throwing a fit whenever I wanted to make a change to MY computer. In this moment I realized that so long as Microsoft was in my life, I will never truly own the hardware I purchased, the system I built with my own two hands. I was late-teens at the time working a dirty minimum wage job, so this was big to me.

This is a lesson I’ve carried with me the rest of my life and colours all purchasing decisions I make. I’m not giving up my hard earned money if I don’t actually own the product I’m purchasing.

When Windows 10 came out, half of the Windows 7 system got borked. Mine was one of them.
The next day I flashed Ubuntu on a USB stick

I was interested in technology and programming and my mom recommended me to check out a raspberry pi. Her friend's son has one. So my first comouter was a raspberry pi with RaspbianOS when I got my first PC it seemd normal to install something that I was using for the last year and its free. So I installed Pop!_Os, a year later Fedora and a half year later Arch. I've been using Arch for more than 2 years now.

I've played with it for a long time, but I still had a laptop that dual booted Windows. I upgraded the thing to Windows 10, and it became unusable. I went with disabling the anti-virus and firewall. Then I tried to update and the update service didn't work because it tries to go through the firewall service, which is disabled.

I forgot what I did to do that, so my system is essentially broken. I only used Linux on that laptop from then on and only installed Linux on my other machines

A multitude of factors aligning together.

I was aware windows was kinda shit for quite a long time, but as a gamer linux was just not good for me back in the day. (This assumption that I couldn't game stayed until after the switch)

Fast-forward to university, I was given by my parents an old laptop with an old unsupported Linux Mint version on it, didn't quite like it I thought it looked ugly and old and I was still assuming it worked like Windows, which kead to a bad experience, but it didn't bother me too much since I mostly only used firefox and libreoffice, then that laptop broke and got a new one with windows. For this laptop I had assumed that playing videogames wasn't an option, laptop wasn't powerful enough but still managed to run a few games.

A year~ish later one of the courses teaches a very little basic python, I started to like programming things and started using the WSL because it was so much easier to work in there, but I found it to be annoying to have to copy and paste every time I edited something, so I watched a few YouTube videos and did some research, waited to finish my STALKER Anomaly game and then ended up switching to Linux, no dual boot. I already used mostly FOSS software like LibreOffice and Firefox so it was not too hard. Linux also got me more interested in learning computers in general (I was already somewhat tech savvy but way more now) so after 1 and a half years I am definitely not looking back.

Also swotched my desktop, and found out that gaming works perfectly fine too now and all of my games run, so I literally have no reason to use windows any more.

I was able to play ubisoft games online with my friends. That was my last use case for windows.

Nothing special. It was a natural progression to move from UNIX, Solaris, SunOS, and VMS to Linux.

Why I switched to Linux (on one laptop, so far) from Windows:

1. Enshitification: Such as login interstitials trying to get me to switch to Edge over and over, and more naggy features added to the task bar and stuff

2. End of support: I was on Win10 (Win11 has even more enshitification), so if I was going to be forced off of Win10, I may as well migrate away from Windows (and sooner rather than later).

3. WSL2 sucks (yet more enshitification): it's more isolated from Windows than WSL1 (and other options, such as Cygwin).

Now, I've only switched to Linux on my laptop (full time; no dual boot!), but I see that as a first step towards migrating other computers in the house to Windows. I'm expecting difficulties when I switch the others (like webcam drivers, or lack of ability to use device configuration or firmware update software like for my Logitech Brio webcam). I also use Blue Iris NVR, which is Windows only, and Linux options don't look as good. So 0% Windows is not looking likely for a while.

Programming in C and C++ just seemed way easier on Linux at the time.

The assistants at university would frequently distribute virtualbox images with Ubuntu within which we were supposed to do the homework. At some point I decided that just putting Ubuntu on my laptop directly would be easier because GCC is just right there in the repos, plus I was a little interested anyway.

Then it just kept being easy, for Java, Haskell, Scala, Python, everything was just supported nicely. The network simulators we used were Linux native, the course where we were reverse engineering binaries used GDB, Android development was simple with the tools and simulator being in the repos.

That said for gaming I still use Windows. And my workplace forces me to use macOS.

I started with Ubuntu in the 2005-7 timeframe on very slow old hardware. Shortly after, I bought an eeepc as I was a poor college student at the time and couldn't afford much else. I dual booted for years until windows 8 irritated me into giving up Windows for non-gaming completely, I've been using various forms of Linux as my primary OS since then.

Tl;Dr tried Linux because my hardware was very modest, stayed because Windows was getting worse in various ways.

When IBM killed OS/2

I wanted to learn programming and I heard Linux was nice. I remember setting up Java on Linux was pain (2012) and I decided to try Linux and see what happens.

I decided to go for a learning experience and installed Arch, I got through the installation and was shown KDE and I was amazed until something weird broke. The utter bliss of customising the UI to my liking was so good.

I then tried Ubuntu, it worked but I was disappointed it wasn't KDE but I liked the part where all the guides online were basically geared towards Ubuntu/Debian setups.

So I checked out KDEs website and I saw KDE Neon and thought "That's the one for me. Based on Ubuntu with latest KDE." not wrong, but not right either. I entered KDE Neon when it was still a dev distro without knowing. Stuff broke every now and then but nothing major. KDE Neon since v6 has been amazing. I've had a couple of Wayland crashes but the bloody thing restores everything in the exact same place, same activity, virtual desktop, size and all and it has only happened once since v6.

KDE just keeps getting better.

I was starting college (comp.sci, natch) and a hard req for the program was "Your own personal computer, with an Ethernet card and an OS that had a TCP/IP stack for remotely accessing classwork." I didn't have a great deal of money (most of it was tied up in tuition and housing) and ethernet cards were expensive (I think I paid $140us for it at the time). I couldn't afford Windows and didn't have a warez hookup for '95. A BBS I used to call had Slackware disk images for download.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Windows XP deciding not to boot one day and not being able to find the OEM recovery disk