Linux

Nothing really, I started dual-booting and jumped from one to the other depending on what I wanted to do. One day I realized I hadn't booted in Windows for months and had never needed it, so I just got rid of it.

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.

I think it was around the time of the windows 10 beta, I was trying that out and also dual booting with Linux mint.

I remember being a little frustrated with getting games to work great on Linux, but even more frustrated just using Windows. So I thought "Linux makes me less mad, I'm just going to use that"

when I realized my hardware no longer worked for me it worked for microsoft and dell and hp etc. I was done.

Went travelling back in 2015 and my laptop was already a 2011 model and starting to slow with Windows. I wasn't buying a new one just to travel with, money I'd rather spend on the trip.

I only needed it for movies and social media etc, maybe downloading photos from my camera.

Installed Ubuntu, so much nicer to be on and fun learning experience and then just never looked back.

Been 9 years and I havent moved home and I'm still on Linux (nixos now).

It's just that i wanna learn more about computers. At the time with Windows I didn't think i could really understand what is going on behind the scene. It hides too much stuff from the users and there was a weird idea in my head that the advanced use of computers is supposed to be in the command line, Windows just doesn't seem to be the right choice. I don't play much games or even heavily use computers in general, so my laptop basically became a big toy for me to tinker with.

When Windows 10 came out, half of the Windows 7 system got borked. Mine was one of them.
The next day I flashed Ubuntu on a USB stick

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.”

Basically when Windows became pay-per-install. PCs stopped coming with an install CD so if you needed to reset from scratch you couldn't. I first tried Linux out of necessity because that was all I had to put on the machine in the house, and ended up never looking back.

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

For me I got super annoyed by the taskbar not hiding and unhiding correctly. Other one was the search not working correctly on start menu and many times just stalling and nothing happening.

Those were the ones that broke the camel's back.

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 able to play ubisoft games online with my friends. That was my last use case for windows.

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.

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

gamescope

I've played with it for a long time, but I still had a laptop that dual booted Windows. I upgraded the thing to Windows 10, and it became unusable. I went with disabling the anti-virus and firewall. Then I tried to update and the update service didn't work because it tries to go through the firewall service, which is disabled.

I forgot what I did to do that, so my system is essentially broken. I only used Linux on that laptop from then on and only installed Linux on my other machines

I started with Ubuntu in the 2005-7 timeframe on very slow old hardware. Shortly after, I bought an eeepc as I was a poor college student at the time and couldn't afford much else. I dual booted for years until windows 8 irritated me into giving up Windows for non-gaming completely, I've been using various forms of Linux as my primary OS since then.

Tl;Dr tried Linux because my hardware was very modest, stayed because Windows was getting worse in various ways.

When IBM killed OS/2

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.