Linux

Windows.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

Tim Cook and Jony Ive.

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.

windows "8" ..final straw. blech

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I was just bored during the pandemic

Vista, that's what ruined it for me. I had XP Pro, and I loved that it had all the features (IIS, FTP Server, etc.). But when Vista came out, it had so many different versions, each one a gatekeeper for different features. That was just too much. XP was the last one I used for my personal use. I jumped into Linux, head first, and I've never looked back.

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).

Windows Vista and curiosity.

• 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

...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

i never even liked w10 and then i got to experience w11 on our school machines, and realized i can't go that way. saw so many people praising linux here so i split my ssd and tried to install linux on the other partition. fukked up and formatted the whole damn ssd, so i became a linux only user. soon i accidentally removed nvidia drivers so i went back to windows. not a month later i noticed my school logo on the start menu and they also seemed to control some windows settings, i freaked out and went back to linux. been like 1½ years now.

Tbh my uni gave me a PC with no OS on it. I wasn't going to pay for an OS for work so I installed Ubuntu. I liked it, so I also switched on my private laptop.

TLDR: it being free, then liking it

Windows 11's TPM led me to believe I wouldn't be able to upgrade my machine without windows thinking I need a new license, as it had happened for windows 11. I found a workaround but didn't know if it would work for Windows 11 as well. I want to control my machine so I went with Linux.

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'd been dual booting with Windows 2000 Professional for a while but XP came out, I didn't like it so fully switched.

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.

My first couple of computers had AmigaOS and even from the start Windows felt like complete garbage in comparison, but eventually I had to buy a PC to keep up with the times. After that I kept looking for alternative OS:es, tried Linux dual booting but kept going back to Windows since all the programs and hardware I needed to use required it. When I finally decided to go full time Linux, some time between 2005 and 2010, it was because I felt like I was just wasting my life in front of the computer every day. With Windows it was too easy to fire up some game when I had nothing else to do, and at that time there were barely any games for Linux so it removed that temptation. But that has ofc. changed now and pretty much all Windows games work equally well on Linux :)

I had been considering switching for years, I even made a list of things I had to find alternatives to and tried to widdle it down. With proton making gaming viable, I decided to dual boot, and accidentally destroyed my entire windows partition when trying to back it up with dd. Just said fuck it and went full Linux.

Ages ago in the Vista era, all our Windows computers had an issue where our internet would say "limited or no connectivity" and just stop working. That happened on my desktop and I decided "to hell with it" and switched to Linux (Ubuntu, specifically).

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.

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.

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

Curiosity and desire to learn.

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.