Linux

Windows Registry

I had recurring issues with registering Bluetooth devices, where they would pair initially but refuse to connect again after a reboot. I couldn't remove the device from saved connections, and registry edits wouldn't save or persist. I'd have to completely uninstall the driver, change the registry, and reinstall the drivers, with restarts between each step, to get it to work for 1-2 days.

Now, having to troubleshoot isn't what turned me away from Windows to Linux. I knew I would run into that plenty on Linux as well, but I came to hate the registry. If I was going to have to go through all this trouble to get things to work, I might as well do it on a system I had more control over. I had worked with different distros on VMs and dual booting before, so when I built a new system, I just skipped Windows entirely.

Honestly I got started due to curiosity and well, it turned out Linux was a rabbit hole and so down I went.

For me personally, it was mostly due to programming on Windows was a painful experience. I was using MinGW compilers, which were quite good but I wanted the latest and greatest GCC. The other options were using MSVC or clang, but I believe clang is just a frontend to MSVC (I'm not sure.. please correct me if I'm wrong).

WSL was an option, but I was doing graphics programming at the time. And I needed to upgrade to WSL2 to run GUI applications or something, which required Windows 11. So at some point I got fed up and just thought to myself, why not run the real thing. This is probably one of the few instances where the technical merits of Linux is what actually got me to switch in the first place. I didn't hear anything about software freedom, privacy, or even care about any of those reasons at all when I did the switch.

As a Windows user for a very long time, using it from my childhood, I wouldn't have switched no matter how unethical it was to use Windows if Linux was too difficult to use. So I'm glad that ended up not being the case. :)

Forced to use it in a VM in uni. Went down the rabbit hole and liked it.

Windows ME

What pushed me over the edge was how much worse the user experience became with 8 & 10.

I really disliked the lack of control over updates, settings and defaults being reverted after minor updates, and the constant pushing of Microsoft accounts and services. The data collection and privacy issues certainly didn't help either. I switched from 7 to 10 for a period of time, but eventually started using Linux for everything except for games. I started realizing just how good Linux gaming was getting, and I eventually had one too many issues with my Windows partition and just quit using it entirely.

I don't remember having a lot of the frustrations I hear some talk about when switching, but I think that was because early on I realized I just needed to start figuring out the Linux way of doing things rather than bringing my Windows experience over.

it rebooted itself while i left it overnight doing an important render.

thats after i fucked with it for hours to turn automatic updates OFF.

i would probably still be on windows 10 if it werent for microsoft going out of their way to make it shitty.

Been 100% Linux on all my personal devices for about 4 years.

I just got tired of being treated like I was either an idiot or a criminal by Microsoft. Plus the way they kept forcing their bloatware and trash ads on the OS that I already paid for!

I decided I didn't care what I had to give up, it was worth it to be rid of Microsoft's clutches forever. Switched to Linux and I've never looked back.

Turns out, I actually didn't have to sacrifice much at all, and the few things I don't have anymore are nothing compared to the benefits of using Linux and FOSS software.

Everything works better for me too, more stable, updates are rarer and wayyyyy faster when I push them. No more fighting with AMD driver hell in Windows, no more weird lockups or crashes, a million times more customization options, and zero bloat or spyware installed by default on my system.

I bought my mother a laptop and it came preinstalled with a bunch of games and software that it threw me off, like wtf I dont want or need this what happened, I had a mac at the time and felt limited to what it can or cant do. So last year I built myself a pc and before installing windows I was already looking at steam decks and noted that it seems games runs quite well, so I went with Mint, and there where some features that lacked but discovered I could modify on my on and it just works! I do have to admin that it was a bit different in my work life, since do graphic design, but its been interesting switching over to inkscape and gimp.

My final straw was getting a new MacBook Air (I was at that point fine with how UNIX-y macOS was) and realizing I couldn’t dock the laptop to more than one external monitor without some weird hacky third-party software fix. Why, you ask? Well not at all because the laptop technically couldn’t do it, but because Apple said it can’t, because they want to overcharge you on a Pro.

I promptly returned the MacBook, bought a Framework on eBay, and learned NixOS.

10/10, I haven’t looked back since.

Videos of the Steamdeck showed me how good gaming on Linux had gotten and that's when I started looking into switching.

I already hated using Windows 10 so didn't take me much convincing to look at alternatives.

I'm not a programmer or work in the I.T. field in anyway. But I have been messing around with computers since I could remember so I'm no stranger to tweaking, breaking and trying to repair things.

I replaced windows on my laptop with Ubuntu and stopped using it after realizing how unimpressed I was with the difference. Years later I took the OSCP course, and they required using Kali.

From there I fell in love. Things that would have taken hours and weird 3rd party installers to do in Windows came with the OS or were in the official repos. The CLI showed me unimaginable power over every bit of the computer, and in windows the Conmand Prompt CLI is pretty mediocre; Powershell is better, but is more about data processing than running software. Linux has SSH and Python installed with one sentence, windows graphical installers are a bloated nightmare. There wasn't random shitty third party software installed by the OEM who struck a deal with the OS maintainers.

After that, it was a cascade of disillusionment. Those nasty 3rd party apps I didn't install showing up in my start menu? Actually ads, I was just using cognitive dissonance to avoid admitting that. And the proprietary programs aren't better, they update more frequently just to introduce ads, harvest more data, and change their layout to make it seem like they did anything to help the end users.

Why does changing any meaningful settings require tampering in the registry? Why is this low level stuff documented so poorly? Why can't I turn off telemetry completely? Why can't I check what code is running in the kernel that I purchased and am running ON MY COMPUTER??? IT'S MY COMPUTER, NOT MICROSOFT'S. Why the FUCK should I let them run code that I can't legally review, much less change, on it?

If someone offered you a meal but refused to tell you about any of the ingredients, you just wouldn't eat it. Not "you'd be suspicious," it goes beyond that: you'd be too suspicious to eat it. If someone offered you a home security system that you could have "spy on you minimally" you'd tell them where they could stick it. If it came with your house, you'd remove it immediately. If either of those people tried to charge you for it, you'd laugh in their face.

Yet for some reason, when it's our computers doing the spying and whatever else we can't verify, we've learned to just put up with it? This is BULLSHIT.

And I have too much pride to be treated like a mark, I won't take being scammed lying down anymore. I'm not a hapless dipshit who just lets people have their way with her because it's "too hard to learn new things." I've always said I have some integrity to protect, so I better prove it or forever be a hypocrite.

I already use only Linux at home, I'd have to get my company to switch to let me run it at work.

My first encounter with Linux was in 2007, I installed Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon on my dad's computer out of curiosity - I was intrigued by a notion of free OS you can deeply customize.

I have spent countless hours fiddling with the system, mostly ricing (Compiz Fusion totally blew my mind) and checking out FOSS games.

Decades later I switched to Linux full-time. After 12 years of daily driving OS X and working as a developer, I wanted a customizable and lean OS that is easy to maintain and control. Chose Arch, then Nix, havent looked back ever since.

Windows 10 update. They nagged about it, and for security I relented. It did a few things: made our proprietary CAD slow (not just one machine or one company, but every customer running it complaining), made home machine slow for everything. Made my wife's older laptop a useless brick. The UI was so slow it seemed frozen. So I searched what Linux Distro supported the Proprietary CAD. Which was SUSE and RHEL. Since OpenSUSE was close enough and free I installed it. CAD was back to normal W7 speed, and my wife's laptop was faster than on W7. Currently I moved her laptop to NiXOS, it is snappy and runs apps & zoom calls as well as my newer Workstation

Bitlocker.

I'll decrypt it one day...

I've been keeping an eye on Linux since the late 90s. It took me not having to use any non-Linux software or hardware on the computer in question. Currently I have two laptops running Linux, one has Windows in case I need it (which so far has turned out to be never), and I have a workstation that has Linux as a secondary OS but I'm always in Windows on that one because of software and hardware.

When I was a CS student in the early-mid 90s, my college had Unix only and we had to fight to get a free terminal to complete our assignments.I had a good 486DX with Windows 3.11 and I had heard of Minix, so I could do my assignments in the comfort (?) of my dorm room.

I went to my local technical library to see if they had a box (that sort of places used to carry boxed OSes and specialized software back then). They didn't, but they had this CD with Slackware written on it and the store owner said it was better. So I bought it on a whim.

After many hours and a lot of recompiling the kernel and libraries right and left, the thing finally booted and ran surprisingly stable. My roommate saw it and immediately installed it on his machine. The next days we went buy a couple of 10base2 NICs, some coax and a pair of terminator, and before you know it, we had NFS going.

It was our own Unix network and it was way better than college's :) I never looked back.

I did work with DRDOS as a kernel dev a few years later, which involved reverse-engineering bits of MSDOS 7 (yes, that's the version of MSDOS Windows 95 ran on top of). That's as close to working professionally with MS stuff as I ever got. Other than than, I'm a pure product of the Linux generation baby!

I'm glad to see other people go into Linux for positive reasons instead of just hating Windows. What really got me was Compiz. Initially, it was all the crazy effects like wobbly windows, but soon I realized how much I liked the "Workspace" paradigm and then being able to customize things as much as I wanted. Then, the whole free software thing, distro-hopping, the great communities, etc.

I'd been using linux for work for a couple years and it was going fine. I had a pretty crappy laptop at home with limited storage and I was constantly wrestling with Windows storing update stuff, installing adware during updates, etc.

I'd heard of proton and about how well it was going with it, so I had an idea linux gaming was possible.

Eventually something happened during a windows update that required I reinstall the OS and I just pulled out the flash drive I used to install linux on my work machine and tried it out. Eventually I did have to dual boot (on a bigger drive) for some games, but nowadays I'm all linux everywhere.

For what would make me completely move, I just want my games to work, I know a ton of effort has been made on that front, but Nvidia drivers kinda stink so performance is a bit worse or completely unusable in certain programs on wayland at least.

Stuff like Wabbajack Skyrim/FO mod organizer modlist support for Linux too, along with modding other games in general usually requires windows because of dll hooking being very common.

I knew Windows sucked since, I dunno, XP? It took me forever to hack bloat out of Vista to make the fucking thing just work without all kinds of bullshit background services calling home. Then came Win 8 with the useless Metro "everything menu" and I was out.

My Surface Pro 4 was getting long in the tooth. My best friend, who uses Arch btw, kept nagging me about switching until he gave me his old laptop when he upgraded. Soon after that, my cat knocked over a beer into it and killed it. So I bought a Framework 13" and put PopOS on it, and also got a Steam Deck. I'm all in on Linux now, except for an old desktop that gets rarely used.

And now I keep my beer on the floor.

Nothing, actually. I just decided one day I was going to install Arch Linux for no reason in particular, and now I'm on OpenBSD. I wish I had that kind of determination these days.

I'm more or less determined to make the jump on my next gaming rig build. I assessed my needs, and frankly, there's nothing I need that Windows offers and Linux doesn't. I don't game competitively, I don't have any real software needs outside of gaming or a browser with appropriate extensions.

Also, I'm a Windows admin at work, and coming home to more microsoft bullshit is getting old.

Edit: honestly the more I think about it I'd probably be better off migrating sooner than later. New gaming rig is a long ways off (GPU prices are batshit crazy and have been for every generation since the 1080TI) and it would do me good career-wise to familiarize myself with linux. Might be a weekend project for me.

If you mean what made me uninstall Windows, it was actually just not being able to do anything I wanted to do on Windows. I was already using WSL for most basic things and tried to set Windows up to be as similar to a Linux distro as possible eg only installing things with a command line package manager and looking into trying to get it to behave like a tiling window manager.

The biggest things were not being able to use some of my preferred software, e.g. my preferred PDF reader Zathura, and just having no clue what any of the commands were whenever I had to use PowerShell or CMD. I only really knew how Unix-like systems worked and was frustrated with my lack of familiarity with Windows and how their OS works.

The only reason why I kept a Windows partition was for gaming, but at this point Proton is so good there's really no need for a Windows partition. And I rarely play video games these days anyway.

If you mean why I started using Linux, no reason, I've just always used it from a young age.

When Microsoft started enforcing online accounts to use my computer. It was then that I fully jumped ship. I was using Linux way before that for my media server, HTPC, etc., but it was that and the Steam Deck that made me finally fully jump.

My laptop had 32gb of emmc from factory; it came preinstalled with windows 10; windows 10 pretended at least 64gb and constantly kept the emmc at 0bytes free; i was sick of it. + windows 10 on that poor celereon was miserable.

Windows 7 being discontinued.

I migrated my HTPC to Linux several years ago, and since then just transitioned more and more of my machines over.

My desktop is the only machine left running Windows at this point due to there being no Freetrack implementation on Linux for sim games

I had this old laptop I bought when I was in high-school. The fun thing was it was a laptop with Ubuntu installed. But at that time I had no idea of what linux was, or even the idea of operating system was not very clear to me. I was pretty afraid of trying something new and asked someone to install windows on it. For 4 or 5 years it worked great. Then, suddenly the keyboard started to have lots of problems. Even after sending it to repair 3 times the problem remained. At that time I came to know about Linux and used it a fair bit in my university and became pretty fond of it, so I just decided, fuck windows, and installed Ubuntu. Although, this was not exactly a full time switch to linux. After the lockdown was lifted, I bought a new laptop with Windows installed (at that time I couldn't a laptop other than Mac that didn'thave windows installed) and I used windows for like 1 year. The laptop being 2in1 was a bit skeptical about how good the linux support will be. But I eventually had to switch to linux for my dissertation and never looked back.

It's not like I hate other operating systems, I just really like the idea of FOSS and try to use it whenever possible.

I was tired of Microsofts monopolistic shenanigans. So when Ubuntu 5.10 came out in 2005, and was extremely well done, it was time to switch to Linux. Because Linux was finally polished and functional enough to actually be at least as good as Windows.
Admittedly there were a period of dual booting for games. But that isn't necessary today, as we now have thousands of games that work on Steam.

You can say that what it took for me, was for Linux to become good enough to use as a daily driver. I'd say today it's a no-brainer.

When Gnome 2 was discontinued, it was a major pain in the ass though, KDE was buggy and Gnome shell was hell (IMO). So I can't say I never looked back, because I did install Windows 7 in frustration. But that was a very short adventure, because Windows is simply so horrible when you get used to Linux. The idiocy of Windows is momentous, and the jumping through hoops fighting Microsoft stupid security features, that won't even allow you a simple thing as changing your default text editor, becomes insanely tiresome and frustrating very quickly.

So it was back to Linux faster than you can say oops (almost).
Now the desktop has become less relevant to me, because I do almost everything through hotkeys. So I rarely navigate the desktop, so as long as I have a decent file manager, I'm 90% OK just having that.

To be fair my Windows experience was far simpler than Linux, if less fulfilling. What got me was a combination of constant attacks on privacy, W11 and the enshittification of the UI as well as general Microsoft corporate tomfoolery (have dealt with them for work, not a fan of their monopolistic EEE tactics).

Commodore going bankrupt.

It was the Windows XP upgrade debacle for me. That was a bridge too far. I lost the ability to use critical hardware with (at the time) no ability to obtain updated drivers. I went to the local big-box computer store to browse the Apple section. When I saw the price tags I thought, "Oh well. Mac ain't it." On my way back up to the front of the store I stopped by the operating systems shelf and stumbled upon boxed Red Hat and SUSE Linux distros. I can't remember which one I purchased first (I believe Red Hat), but I eventually acquired both. Long story short, I spent several years going back and forth between Linux and Windows while hanging on for dear life while riding the learning curve. I eventually decided to go full-time Linux around 15 or so years ago and have not looked back. Over time I also developed other key concerns that kept me away from Windows, a few of which were security/privacy and the open nature of Linux (to do what I wanted to do with my OS and interface). My most recent computer is a gaming laptop that has two hard drive slots, so I dual-boot Linux and Windows. I keep Windows mainly to perform firmware updates that can be touch and go in Linux (and some gaming, but very seldom).

Curiosity and desire to learn.

Valve releasing Proton.

I really started to dislike Windows and projects like Bazzite made it incredibly easy to make the jump. The wife is now gaming in Linux for the same reasons.

The final straw for me was Microsoft reinstalling software I had removed with updates, as well as installing crapware like Candy Crush, all in the background and without permission or notifying me. I left Windows back in August 2021 for Arch.

Until recently I had kept a Windows VM with a GPU passthrough set up until I decided I was done with Destiny 2. Now the only remnant of Windows in my life is a simple desktop in my living room that has a game I can only play on Windows, which is currently being ported to PS5. Once that port is released, it'll be converted to a server running some atomic distro and become a fully dedicated server, and Windows will be fully removed from my life, ignoring PCs outside of my control like embedded systems.

I was toying around with the idea of doing my classes and early dev work on linux, hearing it's got a lot less roadblocks and annoyances, and that checked out.

I've been running it on all of my systems as main OS since not too long after that, and don't intend to go back

Windows 11 serving me ads in the OS was a step too far. Windows 10 already had them as apps in every update that annoyed me, but 11 took them to a new level that was too far for me.

It wasn't clear that windows 95 would beat OS/2, and OS/2 was clearly the better so I installed that over windows 3.1. Then in college I got introduced to BSD. I still prefer BSD, but sometimes linux has things that BSD doesn't so I use linux in places.

Curiosity and an Ultrabay Caddy (Thiccpadders will know) with some random old SSD I had lying around

Windows Vista and curiosity.

windows "8" ..final straw. blech