Linux

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

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.

Many reinstalls of windows 10

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.

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.

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 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.

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

I bought a steam deck

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

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.

Bitlocker.

I'll decrypt it one day...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Recall

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Started learning web development.

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.

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).

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. :)

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 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.

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. :(

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.