Linux

I'm still on Windows 10, mainly for gaming. I probably won't switch (to PopOS or Mint) until Win10 EOL happens, primarily for gaming-related reasons.

I have an Nvidia card and can't afford to get an AMD, and most of my games are not on Steam (I really like GOG), so I'm hoping by that point Nvidia compatibility will have improved enough compared to last time I tried switching.

I mean FFS I went to PopOS like a year ago and couldn't even get Dragon Age: Origins to run, even through Lutris. It made me sad. :(

I had a two laptop: one main for gaming and a shitty computer for school. I had to code on python. It was easier to setup on linux. I liked KDE. I installed kubuntu on the laptop for school.

As soon as I stopped playing videogames on my main computer I went for linux definitely

Edit: it was 10 years ago

Honestly? I played around with Linux for a long time inside of VM, but then I moved to a new house and got into "a new life" mood. And then I just couldn't look back on Windows with anything but disgust.

At first I was tipping my toes in Ubuntu but kept coming back to Windows as I kept running into stability issues. Googling my issues very frequently kept sending me to the Arch wiki, and I thought "well if they have so much covered, why not use this distro instead". That and 196 subreddit (rule) made me try Arch, and my experience was noticeably better. Barely any crashes and improving Proton compatibility made me use it more and more. I kept a windows install for VR and anti-cheat enabled games until late 2023.

During my transition period (both in Linux and gender lol) between 2021 and now, I kept getting comments "why are you making your life harder with Linux, just use Windows where everything works". Well, nowadays tables have turned and now I get to say "weird it works for me on Linux". Except VR, it's still a mixed experience.

i was a starving college student with $20 to my name and a dead windows me desktop computer that had an entire semester's worth of school work trapped inside of it.

i had read about linux before and saw that i could buy a couple of mandrake cd's from a magazine at circuit city for $5 or borrow $169 from someone to buy a windows xp installation disk.

i bought the magazine; installed linux; and taught myself (with google's help) how to copy all of my school work onto a usb drive. i finished those papers using the school's computer laboratories; and then kept on using the linux installation from then on in 2002 until now.

Two things coming together finalized my choice to leave Windows:

• the ability to play almost every game on Linux thanks to Valve
• the fact that you couldn't create a local account during a Windows install (back when I discovered this you still technically could with some workarounds; I don't know if you still can but you shouldn't have to put in any effort IMHO)

Vista sucked so bad. I got a nice new laptop and it was constant pain. One of the real breaking points was that it would refuse to let me modify or delete some files even as superuser. If I recall correctly they weren't even system files, maybe a separate partition or something.

I tried installing XP but there was some sort of driver issue with my CD drive. It would start installing fine, but then once it tried to reboot off of the HDD to finish the installation it couldn't find the installation CD to finish copying things, so the install just crashed half-way done.

I installed Ubuntu on a partition, dual booted for a while. After a few months I realized that I never even used the Windows partition anymore so I wiped it.

I switched for good in 2019, when I realized that I was wasting more time getting windows into a usable state than the average arch user.

Privacy and usability were the biggest reasons for me.

Started learning web development.

What pushed me over the edge: the threat of Windows screenshotting everything I did.

Absolutely fucking not. Took it all to Ubuntu the day after I heard. Couple days later everything I need was set up & a few months later I haven’t looked back

Did not want to switch from windows 98 SE to XP, so went with linux instead.

I wanted to customize Windows 10. Customizing Windows was too hard and unsafe (requiring many "bloated" third party tools).

Then, after seeing some cool themes, I realized Linux is way more customizable. So I tried Linux Mint and now I use NixOS.

A mix of factors for me. Firstly, privacy concerns, settings reverting themselves after updates, and the looming threat of Windows 11 were I to get a new PC. Stuttery performance on my already 3 year old laptop at the time (I still use the same laptop. It is now 6 years old and still runs great with Linux). General bloat, driver problems, and instability issues.

I did not make the switch all at once, but thankfully my laptop has two NVMe slots, which made dual booting easier while I got more used to using Linux as my daily driver. Within about a year, I was booting into Windows less and less, and eventually hardly ever once I found ways to use Linux for everything I needed.

Recall

Steam play. I spent nine years with linux as my main work os. Then I'd come home and game on windows. Once Steam play was mature I setup a dual boot to give it shot. I think I booted into windows twice after that.

As a professional software dev, I worked with pretty much every OS daily. My personal computer was a Windows, my work laptop was a Mac, and I ran my code on Linux so I was familiar with the things I liked and disliked about each. I also ran my own set of server with my websites, mail servers, and various research projects to learn and grow.

Then I decided it was time to order a new laptop and I didn't want to go to Windows 11 because I felt Microsoft was going too much into features I didn't want like Ads, more tracking, pushing AI. Don't get me wrong, I like AI, but it was too much about forcing me to use it to justify their stock valuations.

I also was working on reducing my usage of big tech, setting up self hosted services like pi-hole, Home Assistant, starting to work my own Mint alternative. It just felt natural to get a Framework laptop and try running Linux on it.

I still have a Windows desktop for games and other things, I still use Mac at work. I still like the Mac for it's power efficiency and it doesn't get as hot. Linux has some annoyances here and there, like dbus locking up, or weird GNOME issues, or for a while my screen would artifact until set some kernel params, or the fact that my wifi card would crash and I had to replace it with an Intel card, but I'll stick with it.

I'm a leftist that doesn't like corporations or what they do to people. I try not to run corporate backed distros, too. I hate that Red Hat has such a grip on the open source world.

I'm aware that at some point sourceforge went down the toilet, but in the early 2000s it seemed to be a pretty reliable website for open source software. I had gone a few years coming across more and more evidence that any software I was downloading from sourceforge was much less likely to be a load of shit than software downloaded anywhere else. At some point I made the connection that maybe open source software is better in general. That made me curious about the experience of using an entire operating system that was open source. Either 2012 or late 2011 I installed Fedora to dual boot with windows (like 70% sure it was win7, might have been vista). Over the next year or two I sampled a bunch of other distros, and also PCBSD (not sure if that still exists) at one point. In retrospect I was really sampling DEs, but I didn't know the distinction.

Discovering the philosophy behind GNU was what led me to abandoning windows entirely. I think I had already had some of the core ideas of free software, albeit in extremely rudimentary forms (gee, these EULAs sure do seem like they're deliberately obfuscated), floating around my head for a while. The concept of free software resonated with me, so that's when I finally removed my windows partition. I stopped distro-hopping and settled on Trisquel for two or three years.

Afterwards, I decided to move to Parabola because I thought it would force me to learn things, but the main thing I learned was how to read documentation just well enough to get everything working by trial-and-error tinkering.

I've kind of moved on from free software at this point. I do still agree with the ideals, but I think the goals are somewhat inconsistent with a capitalist economy to begin with so I'd rather be concerned about that.

Today I use arch and still have no idea what the hell I'm doing, but I've had a stable system for years and I'm too comfortable with it to switch to a friendlier distribution.

My story I guess.

For a long time (until end of 2023) I used ahoy Win7 on cheap 2012 laptop (2-core 1500 MHz 6GB RAM), and influenced by mentions of Linux efficiency tried dualboot installing Arch, Manjaro, Ubuntu, maybe even Mint. Also much earlier (maybe 2009?) couple of times tried Puppy Linux on CD my dad gave me a long time ago. Ubuntu stuck, and sometimes I primarily used it, returning to Win to games (my major use case for PC). So when I finally built an actual PC I was already familiar enough to try and actually commit and install Ubuntu as sole OS. And it kinda just worked. Probably important thing is CPU and GPU used are both AMD.

Yes there are some quirks, some bugs (i.e. sometimes frozen apps in Wayland lock whole system, or still don't know how to get screen recording to work properly), also that snap drama I don't understand, also trying to use some things from Windows through Wine is pain in the ass and a huge timesink (and no guarantee it'll eventually work), specifically modding software for Win-only games. But generally, thanks to Wine and Proton, and probably also more attention of gamedevs to Linux userbase, my gaming needs are covered.

Also I joined Lemmy during big Spez drama, so I've had general influence of "another example of Win enshittification".

Also my sister has Win10 laptop, and I really don't like some things like integrated in start menu internet search, or clusterfuck the Control Panel (where are all settings should be) has become.

A lot of 'Also' here, sorry.

20 years ago somebody told me that installing Gentoo would make my computer performant enough to run video games. I no longer play video games, but I have been using GNU/Linux variants ever since.

• Open source community
• The diversity in Linux distributions
• Trying something different from Windows
• Ubuntu interested me when I read about it a long time ago in the computer school textbook, although I didn't try it in practice back then
• Experiencing Windows 11 on my father's computer .... It was a little disgusting, especially when it's not activated

-Nearly 2 years when the warranty period ends , then I can go full-time to Linux

Last year my wife said "most games can be run on Linux now because of steam deck, I think I'll switch to Linux" and I said "well I guess I'm switching too" so I un-installed windows, and I've been full time since, even starting to self host jellyfin and nextcloud. She and I have both done linux in the past, but gaming was what was holding us back. There wasn't anything WRONG with windows per se , except maybe the looming threat of windows 11, I just really love linux, open source, and being able to easily lift up the hood to peek inside

I use arch BTW. And Debian, my first love.

When I payed a decent amount for logic express and 2-3 years later I couldn't use it with the latest Apple OS.

Windows 10.

The way they rolled it out, and everything they shoved down the throats of anyone that "upgraded"

I didn't want to have spyware for an os.

Windows kept shoving their stupid Edge browser down my throat. Tried every way to remove it and it kept popping back up like malware. Kept annoying me with "upgrade to Windows 11 popups." I've used windows 11 on other people's laptops and was flabbergasted that there were ads on paid software. In addition to that I heard 10 will stop getting security updates next year so I bit the bullet and switched to mint full time. It's worked well for me so far.

Finding a good MusicBee alternative on linux. I just dual boot into windows whenever I need to convert FLACs and organize it. Otherwise I'm on Linux 99% of the time now.

My first programming experience, an online class, was in a Linux VM. Linux made programming easy and delightful, Windows always made it a huge pain. As time went on, more of what I did was easier on Linux, and now everything is.

The "AI" garbage on the horizon finally did it for me. I've been using Windows for 30-some-odd years (and DOS before that) and it always had a quirk or two but it mostly just worked, and that was enough for me. Hell, I even jumped on Win 11 when it was still in Insider Preview, just because I wanted the latest. And despite everyone always complaining about 11, for the most part, it did for me as Windows has always done - it just worked, so if it ain't broke, why fix it?

Not that I hated Linux, I just always seemed to have an excuse. "Oh, the last time I tried to install it I was stuck at a CLI" sure, almost 20 years ago. "Well, I'm a huge gamer and Linux just doesn't have the support", "Man, KDE Plasma on the Steam Deck runs great and looks a lot like a fresh Windows install... ahhh, it'd be such a pain to migrate though."

Anyway, I set up Arch on a "dual boot" partition a couple weeks ago I say "dual boot" because I haven't booted into Windows in a week. Feels good, man. I should have done it sooner.

I will say though, if any other potential Windows refugees are reading... Migrate your Steam library to an ext4/btrfs/other Linux partition. You can successfully mount your Windows NTFS partitions. You might even be able to get them to mount as read/write. You might even be able to get Steam to read the directories! But it's not worth the headache, and in my experience it's a lot easier to get Windows to mount a btrfs partition. My Windows install is the last NTFS partition on my system, and I'll keep it around for a while in case I run into something that just won't play nice with Linux, but that's it.

The pandemic and programming.

I was watching some tutorials and saw how easily people used the terminal, and how clunky cmd felt.

Next day I had ubuntu running.

There was some kind of an upgrade and it had privacy issues in the eula. I was dual booting for a while already.

I started dual booting Linux after an upgrade to an insider preview of Windows 10 soft-bricked my Windows 7 install. I later stopped booting into Windows and eventually reclaimed the partitions to extend whatever distro was installed at that point when the actual release of Windows 10 decided to attempt automatically upgrading my Windows 7 system, soft-bricking it a second time. 2016 onwards, I haven't used Windows on my systems outside of occasionally booting LTSC in a VM.

Privacy - the main reason. Besides for that were a lot of annoying and ridiculous reasons to switch like:

• BSOD in the middle of gaming/meeting/etc,

• forced updates that made it impossible to shutdown your pc without installing an update first

I could name further and further but those are the main reasons. Now I'm using Debian for 2 years and it is the best distro by far.

Ironically enough, it was gaming performance.

What makes this ironic was that this was months before the Steam Deck came out and I was not familiar with Wine and/or Proton in the slightest. I just thought, "If there are people running it as a daily driver, then it must be good enough at those things".

I'd say my transition over to Linux took years. I first learned of it when I had a laptop with 4GB RAM and 64GB Storage. When you're working with something that weak, you want to minimise wherever you can and it got to the point where the only way to reduce storage use to make this machine useful for some lighter games (also to reduce RAM usage to make the machine snappier than it was with Windows 10), waa to install Linux Mint, as it seemed like the best option. Later, when I got a new laptop of my own, I really got into digital privacy and running a Custom ROM on my phone (a practice that has continued to this day), which led me to the old familiar (well, not so familiar at the time because I was a noob who knew nothing), Linux. I played with Ubuntu, Mint and PopOS in Virtualbox and about 2 months after that (if I'm not mistaken), I bit the bullet and installed Mint. Now why didn't I do it earlier? I was busy with college. Why didn't I do it on the old machine, or over Christmas instead of 3 months later in March (2022)? Because I was scared I was going to mess up the partitioning, as I wanted to dual boot. So in March 2022, I switch, and proceed to use my Windows partition.... 2 times, until I completely wiped it because it was making my life more complicated than it needed to be and I wanted all 512 GB instead of the 128GB I managed to free from Windows' grasp. Now I had to set up temporary Windows partitions twice, where one time was about Excel (my machine wasn't powerful enough to do it in a VM, and I needed to use advanced features for college, that weren't available on Libreoffice or OnlyOffice. I don't remember the reasons for the second time anymore. I almost had to do that another 3rd time because under the same teacher in college, we had to use VS. Not Code, but Visual Studio. It is not available for Linux, and I didn't have my Windows partition at the time, so I ended up doing it in class on the college computers out of spite for Windows. These 2 scenarios really made me almost hate that teacher (her attitude and some people's dislike of her were not doing her any favours in my eye) but once I got to know her properly, she didn't match the perception of her that I was left with. Anyways, that's the story of how I switched to Linux.

I'm on Fedora now (With Hyprland). Though distros (mostly) don't matter. Peace,

I had a few false starts before, but MS force-updating me to the objectively worse and user-hostile Windows 8 triggered my latest (and successful) switch.

I switched in 1997.

The internet was taking off, and it was built on Linux and un*ces. It was just a lot more fun.

Also, C-programming. M$ had just gotten protected memory in NT4.0, but a lot of applications just didn't run on NT. It'd take another three years before protected memory hit mainstream with win2k. No novice programmer wants their computer to bluescreen every time they do a tiny little out of bounds error.