Linux

My internship supervisor. I did an internship back in 2006, I had this supervisor that was very very pro open source. He asked anyone on the team to use a Linux distro for work. I used Ubuntu for work for a long time. Slowly I started liking my personal laptop with windows less and less. So at some point (I think 2010 or 2011) I just went to Linux for my laptop as well. At first a dual boot, but I booted in Windows less and less. So on my next laptop some years later I skipped windows entirely.

I don't miss windows at all, but I do really hate I have to work with teams. It's the only app on my laptop I really hate on Linux.

I love tinkering through and through. Started learning about Linux on raspberry pis a long time ago, jailbroke a chormebook to make it usable, and went "hey wait, tinkering with this and having more control is so much cooler." Don't need rainmeter when the desktop has customization built in

For me it's the ability to use my hardware as long as I want after a tech company's EOL. When I was on Windows 7 and it reached EOL my machine was unusable. Couldn't go back because I waited to long. Then I updated my machine and Windows 10's EOL was set and again, machine will be not be safe to use. I switched to Linux before that release date but the way Microsoft does with these EOL dates, for me isn't sustainable. I dont need to buy a new machine every few years. I want my machines to be a usable and secure for as long as I want it to with minimal impact to my finances and stop simply just throwing old machines away. And if I run into a distro that my machine isn't beefy enough for, I have distro-hopped around enough to be able to go to something else but still be in the Linux-verse.

The stuff like, better for privacy, open source etc., those benefits came after.

Wobbly windows, rotating cube workspace switcher, and a flaming bonanza animation when a windows was closed.

The year was ~2003

I'm a non IT user interested in usability. I left Windows 7, on my home PC, over 10 years ago, as Linux has a good selection of Desktop Environments to choose from. So I get to try different ways of working. Windows has loads of tweaks. But no serious alternative desktops. Work PC is Windows only sadly.

What did it in were the semi-annual mandatory feature updates, which restored the invasive settings and bloat I worked hard to remove. Already being acquainted with Linux at that point, I began dual-booting and later having Windows on an entirely separate machine for a few stubborn programs I needed for work.

What made me acquainted with Linux was looking for alternatives after the loss of theming options and the start menu in Windows 8. That eventually brought me to my present Debian setup with the Chicago 95 theme, which recreates (and even improved) the workflow and stability I had grown to love in Windows 2000.

The first time I ever booted into a Linux iso, however, was to migrate files off of my machine, which was excruciatingly slow to transfer files under XP.

Lots of little things, but the straw that broke the camel's back was the constant pop-ups asking me to try out Copilot in Win10, harassing me daily on both on my personal PC and my work laptop.

Windows has been on thin ice since the trash fire that was Win8, and I'd only stuck with it for Nvidia driver support for gaming. I've been watching Proton development for years now, and putting it through its paces on my older PCs every few months, so I knew I was ready to make the switch for about a year before I finally pulled the trigger. I justified putting it off with the thought that "I can build my next PC around an AMD graphics card amd make the switch then."

Then Win11 and all its garbage was announced, AI took off, and Microsoft started pushing their slop on my machine harder than ever. It was too much. I switched to Mint DE on my current machine and haven't looked back.

I've been on Mac for around 10 years and the price of the hardware was a huge motivator. The 13" Framework came out and I jumped on that modular bandwagon. I do still use my Mac as a video ripping station but otherwise I earn all my money as a dev on Fedora 40 and have a secondary tablet with NixOS on it, because the draw of an easily reproducible system is strong.

Now Apple just continues to do stupid shit and I just want to own my computer without them looking over my shoulder and charging me a huge price to do it.

I do need to upgrade the Framework (started with the cheap i5 chip) to the fastest AMD variant available so that streaming works better without the fan spinning up, or just build a desktop for streaming and video work.

Wal-Mart had redhat 5 on sale and the xplane screenshot on the back handled the rest.

Something in windows was causing it to be impossible to run docker containers with ease without needing to mess with some virtualization setting in some deep hidden windows settings paanel

When I switched it didn't even have anything to do with the enshittification of Windows. I just thought it would be cool to try another OS. Pop_OS was really nice to use and this just so happened to be right around the time Proton was getting really good. I think the only game I was playing that didn't work was Siege, and I ended up preferring using Linux to playing it.

Windows sucks, I love open source, built my own computer didn't want to pay a 100$

Many reinstalls of windows 10

My reasons were more hardware related. When I was a bit younger my parents gave me a netbook which had 32 GB of storage, and Windows used almost all of it. I wanted to do creative projects in my free time, but I couldn't install programs or save any of my work. I would often restart to clear log files and gain a bit more working storage, which was extremely annoying because it took like 5 mins for the computer to finally settle down and be usable.

I eventually got a 32GB flash drive which helped a lot, but it was not enough. With 4GB ram I could only have about 3 browser tabs open, and not all the programs I wanted could be run off the flash drive. It was still resource management hell.

Somehow, some way, I learned about Linux. I got a 128GB microSD, put Mint on it. It truly set me free. I could install the software I wanted, I could make the things I wanted to make, I could open more programs at once, and I could do it all without unbearable lag. I never looked back since.

For me, Windows 11 mandatory account, and Internet on setup. Yes there are bypasses, yes I could upgrade from 10. But where I'm from, having the internet isn't always a given.

So imagine dropping $500-$1000 on a new laptop booting it up for the first time, and learning that its now a brick since Windows refuses to let you use it since you have no internet. No Pro license can unbork you from this.

Even MacOS isn't that dumb (for now).

The account thing is a personal beef I have with windows. I.e. my PC my account, why does it need to be online, I have no reason for it.

So my plan was to migrate to FOSS or proper cross platform software for work, see if Linux works, and if it doesn't move to MacOS. So far Linux Mint has been stable.

Software dev was nicer & easier + digital art tools being more than servicable (where Adobe had just moved to a subscription service in 2013) while the philosophy matches my own for privacy & freed. I don’t like compromising on that philosophy unless absolutely necessary or being cost-prohibitve (where convenience is a low priority). In 2016 after seeing the Nvidia 10 series GPU numbers (still primary GPU ha), I built a new PC & vowed that this wouldn’t be a dual-boot machine, & the rest was history.

Funny that windows fucking your audio outputs is a big deal but ridiculous stutter in games in a highend machine is a minor inconvenience.

Windows 8.1. I switched to Linux because of Windows 8.1.

Back in the early days of Win10, an updated messed up my system and I ended up with duplicated icons. Wasn't happy, but didn't feel that it was that big of a deal to warrant a full reinstall.

2 years ago I built myself a new desktop and decided to try installing Linux straight away. Haven't looked back since.

I just wanted the wobbly windows back in 2007.

I started my career on PDP-11/44 and moved to Xenix/Unix/Solaris as I progressed my way through several employers. Windows 3.1 had me as it was a step up from GEMOS and the affair lasted until Windows 95 when I got fed up with having to refresh every computer in my household annually and having to clear out the bloatware. All this time I was missing the low cognitive overhead of running Unix.

An SUSE CD made its way to me and I switched immediately. I was home! And I stayed that way until macOS came out with its BSD core which gave me both a tight GUI and *nix frameworks.

Windows is popular only because of its heavy-handed approach to OEMs and businesses, not because of its technical prowess.

I wanted to create a development environment, so Linux was the natural choice. Then I realized how great current Linux is after I struggled with it in the past. Nowadays I read daily of Microsofts fuckups and am so glad that it doesn't concern me anymore. I deleted my windows drive after half a year and turned it into another Linux machine for my living room (htpc). Best time to switch was yesterday. Second best time is today.

I got interested in Linux in college since it’s used a bunch in physics. I even tried it a bit on my personal laptop. Fast forward to the steam deck releasing and windows just getting worse and worse, I decided to go for it. So far it fulfills all my needs on a home PC. It did require some fiddling to make it work, but now the fiddling and troubleshooting are very minimal and occasional.

I was prepared for it (relatively speaking lol) because I had used it before. I did hop between distros for a bit as well before finally settling on Pop! OS since it’s Ubuntu based, and the support on forums for Ubuntu issues is ubiquitous. I do kind of miss open SUSE sometimes though.

Constant BSODs in Windows XP (probably caused by NVidia drivers), and then by now that's half a lifetime ago and Linux is just my default with Windows being "the alternative that can mostly do the same thing but in less intuitive ways"

Ads. Specifically, a popup served by the OS about chrome and switching to bing or edge or something like that. I didn't even use chrome, just having it installed was enough for them. Any ads baked into the OS is unacceptable, but that's just so far over the line that I find it insane anyone still uses Windows at all.

I contacted support to complain and their "solution" was to reinstall the OS, so I installed a better one instead.

I really liked having a login screen, so I switched to Mandrake from Windows 95

It used to be just because I was interested. Then life got in between and I ditched it a bit, until Microsoft announced that "find anything you ever did"-feature. I installed Ubuntu again after quite a few years and stayed because I finally did not have to spend 3 days to get my video card working "kinda" and I found out my games actually work. No need to use Windows anymore.

VMs are what really did it for me. I was working at a health care job doing IT. Whenever someone wanted a new server I'd have to buy the hardware install the hardware load Windows server on it load the middleware on it, connect it to the SAN, add it to the complicated backup schedule. Literally anything anyone wanted took me a month.

I threw an ESXi box in connected it to the SAN once, worked out a mirroring backup solution. Now I could slice up one decent size box into dozens of smaller boxes. My real limitation was Windows licensing. Server and CALs and middleware gets pricey quickly. But I can install as much community-based open source as I want.

I started running Linux of the desktop to keep up with technology. Before long the vast majority of my servers were Linux.

Two things:

1. I have an old refurbished Thinkpad that I originally bought as a backup navigation computer for a month-long sailboat voyage. It had Windows originally and was "fine", by which I mean slow but acceptable for navigation purposes. When I was forced to update to Windows 10, the performance was no longer tolerable, so I hardly used it for about four years. I also had a Windows gaming PC, so no big deal.
2. About a year ago, I got a shiny new Windows gaming PC. I was trying to decide what to do with my old gaming PC, which had the same problem as my laptop: it could barely crawl under the weight of years of Windows OS "upgrades". I got it into my head that I should build a media PC with it since Netflix kind of sucks now. That lead me down the self-hosting and Linux rabbit hole.

Before I knew it, I had my old gaming PC running Proxmox and attached to my main television, I bought an old Dell Poweredge server (also running Proxmox), an old Compellant storage shelf with 20 SAS drives, a Tripp-Lite UPS, and a 24-port network switch. I also discovered Docker. So, now I fucking love Linux and I'm a fiend for self-hosting and media streaming. And how do I centrally control all of this infrastructure? That's right, my old Thinkpad got a new lease on life running Arch and I can run all of my server infrastructure using the terminal, emacs, and web interfaces. Fuck yeah.

And what happened to my beautiful, expensive new Alienware Windows gaming PC? After playing a couple hundred hours of Cyberpunk, it just sits there. Now I'm addicted to Dwarf Fortress on my old Arch Thinkpad and I don't think about high-spec AAA games much.

I had no idea this would happen when I started this Linux journey. Life is strange.

gamescope

Back in the days I used to use Windows, I did use Linux as a developer sometimes, yet I was sticking to a daily usage of Windows... Until Windows 10, when Windows started to be aggressive on how it won't let me control my own machine (e.g. I couldn't disable updates the way I wanted, I couldn't run some softwares, I couldn't this and I couldn't that). Then I said "enough" and started using Linux on a daily basis, firstly Ubuntu, then I started to experiment on other Linux distros, until I finally landed on Arch Linux, as it's highly customizable and let me have full control of my own machine, not being stuck to specific DEs (I know that distros like Ubuntu allow the user to uninstall the current DE, or install other simultaneous DEs, but Arch comes without any DE from scratch). I've been using Linux on a daily basis for almost a decade now and I don't miss Windows.

For me it was partially Windows 10 placing suggested apps and ads in the UI. The other part was just curiosity. After some distro hopping I landed on Mint, then Fedora and finally Arch where I've been for about two or three years.

I'd used Linux a bit out of curiosity in the Windows XP era

Windows Vista came out and was completely unusable on the computers I or anyone around me owned. It was also harder to configure than Linux and the new UI looked worse than the Linux UIs at the time

So I switched and haven't been back to Windows since

Bought a Raspberry Pi back in 2019 or 2020 with the intention of making a little handheld emulation game console. I tried Ubuntu on it and thought it was neat enough to install on a secondary drive on my main computer to tinker with. At that point, I didn't care so much about the FOSS/Unix philosophy, I was just fascinated by the technical aspect; my computer can run an entire other OS besides Windows, which was the only thing I knew for almost two decades.

Now I exclusively use Linux and would only use Windows if it was an absolute necessity.

Been meaning to make the switch for years now. Was going to do it before Windows 11 either way. Second full screen popup telling me I should switch to Windows 11 I downloaded an ISO, put it on a USB and haven't looked back. NVMe made it that much faster.

I've been playing with Linux distros for over 25 years now. I can't recall what made me go exclusively to Linux,but it had to do with me wanting more control over my devices. I remember that I ended up killing Windows entirely after dual booting 7 (I did not want to move to Windows 10 and EOL for 7 was rapidly approaching) with Linux Mint in 2019 on an Alienware laptop. I started running as much software as I could on Mint, getting to learn LibreOffice pretty well, but I still had to keep a VM for work, as the in-house platform was Windows only.

About 3 years ago my company accepted to provide me with a Windows 365 cloud computer, and I've been solidly using Linux exclusively since then (except for work, but that's going away too as the new platform is fully Web based).

Truth is that I never liked Windows because it's and incredibly intrusive OS, so I have not missed it one bit.

I was a curious 14yo. Tried out OpenSUSE 10.2 (10.3? Can't fully remember) with KDE 3.5 and had a blast.

It was always obvious to me that as long as I was using closed source software that any day could come when the vendor would screw me over. In fact, it could have been running it with bundles and bundles of spyware already and I had no way of knowing it. So I pledged to start using open source software only, to make sure that wouldn't happen. First, I migrated all my desktop applications to open source alternatives. Then I finally made the switch.

I was always interested in computer programming, and was doing so much in WSL and several VMs that I installed Cygwin. I was then like, “What the heck! If I want a Unix terminal, I might as well use Linux.”

The turning point was when Windows was no longer set and forget. Windows 7 was the last time that was the case before I had to put any real work into it.

I put up with Windows 10 for a bit and wrote a script to neutralise bloat and configure the OS to some saner settings, then I could keep things consistent between installations. That was fine for a while.

But over time Microsoft became more unhinged and my script evolved into several larger scripts in order to deal with the BS. It became an endless cat and mouse game and I found that I was wasting too much of my time maintaining it just to have a OS that was clean of crap.

The last straw was when a botched update gutted the performance of my PC, and Microsoft took several months to fix the issue. I installed Debian which just worked, and it was good timing because Windows 11 was announced shortly afterwards. I've experienced it at work and it's hands down the worst OS I've ever used, and I've used pretty much every version of Windows since 3.1. I think I'd even take Me over it. At least that OS sucked because it was poorly designed. Windows 11 is intentionally hostile to its users.

It wasn't my first rodeo with Linux since I've been on and off with it since 2007. Still, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it works out of the box these days.

A few months later and I had built my new machine. I didn't even bother to install Windows on it. Now I use Arch btw and haven't looked back.

2 very good reasons: privacy and Big Tech.

Windows.

I’ve been using and working with Linux since 1999 (big box Redhat 5.1). It was a hobby at first, but then it became a tool in almost every job I’ve held.

Now, on my personal PC I’ve bounced between windows and Linux (and some mad attempts at hackintoshing) since 1999.

But Windows Recall changed that.

Microsoft is doing what they’ve always done — try to control everything under the guise of “this is what the user wants” when not one damn person said “oh I want my operating system to take screenshots of everything I’m doing, AI-analyze them, store the data in an insecure database, and trust that Microsoft will never phone home about any of this”

So now I run Linux full time at home and all the games I play and want to play work perfectly fine.

...Windows me... Iykyk

I didnt leave because I was tired of windows, i stayed because it was better for development. I learned about other benefits later once I started using it