Linux

It came down to right-to-repair/upgrade. I've been a mac user my whole life. The 2012 MacBook pro was the last model that users could upgrade themselves. I got a decade plus out of those machines because I could upgrade them. They actually still run quite well, but Mac no longer includes those models in their software updates and no longer allows users to easily upgrade any of their laptops manufactured since. That was it for me. Got a System76 laptop and made the move. Couldn't be happier.

It was fun to play with Linux. And it was easier to develop on. The terminal is amazing.

So I still technically use Windows, but only because I need it because of some software for school, but I still use Linux most of the time. It's mainly the small yet super annoying things in Windows that caused me to switch. Like how everything has to automatically try and back up to OneDrive until you dig into the settings and disable it, or how it constantly badgers you to use insert Microsoft product here instead of what you want to use. Plus as a computer science student, and someone who spends a lot of time in the terminal, Powershell and the Windows command line feel so old and incapable compared to the Linux terminal (WSL has helped with some of that, but not all of it.) It's just small issues that cause big issues when you run into them, because it just makes simple things harder to do than they need to be, usually for the sake of pushing their products.

A lot of the things i was doing on my pc were either done using wsl or a linux vm at some point, using windows mostly for gaming reasons. When i tried linux on bare metal again i had no issues running the games that i care about using proton or wine so i just stuck with it.

Embarrassingly enough, wanted to install Ubuntu on an external drive. It was early, still in bed, accidentally erased the notebook's main drive. Thought I might as well give it a shot. That night, tried to go back to windows. Turns out that creating a bootable Windows bootable USB is nearly impossible from MacOS and Linux nowadays.. gave up after a few hours.

So, giving Linux a forced try. I'll probably make a Windows installation USB as soon as I can get someone to lend me their Windows computer. If it takes long enough, I may not though 😞

Windows has just become worse and worse over the years. I was building a new PC and realized I wasn't going to give MS my money for a terrible OS when Linux was free.

I only used Windows because I wanted to play video games. My family computer has always been an Ubuntu machine. Since starting university I played less games and I heard that compatibility has gotten much better since the last time I tried to play video games. I decided to Dualboot for a while and decided to fully switch after using the mess that windows 11 was when it was newly released

I left Windows because of telemetry, lack of customization, and tedious updates. I just wish I had bought a machine with AMD rather than NVIDIA because I'm still on X.org for optimus-manager.

Windows 10 sounded like shit, and Windows 7 stopped being supported.

I had some experience with Linux, most things seemed to work and for the rest I decided that it wasn't worth the hassle of dealing with Microsoft.

When my last PC‌ died around 2019, I had to use a spare, hand-me-down laptop that could barely run windows 7. I was already exposed to Linux back then, and that I was counting on its reputation to run on a potato. I installed Ubuntu (kind of a bad choice, perhaps) on that ancient laptop and it ran surprisingly well! I didn't look back at that point, even after that laptop died (of old age) and I got a new PC.

I switched because Windows 2000 was total garbage, and because Linux gave me actual programming tools. I was like a kid in a candy store. Suddenly I had all these amazing professional software packages, and scripting languages that weren't fucking garbage. I'm still WAY too good at DOS scripts. The number of years I wasted learning DOS. Fuck microsoft. I'm still a little mad.

First I did it for privacy and to embrace free software.

However overtime I started to notice how much of a bloat Windows really was and my laptop runs a lot better, although I still have Windows installed because certain applications I need do not run on Linux or a virtualized Windows container unfortunately. I have also started to notice how much Windows tries to force you to use their Microsoft products like Edge Cortana and whatnot and force you into making a Microsoft account now, I mean shit I have a local account setup and one time when I was booting into Windows it asked me to create a Microsoft account, but luckily there was an option to just say no I want to keep using my local account. Outrageous.

I've been dual booting Windows and Linux since the 00s. At some point around 2015-2016 I just stopped installing and maintaining Windows altogether and now I have a virtual machine image I just transfer around my network if I ever have to use Windows for something.

I think the real turning point for me was when they introduced UAC and ever-increasing restrictions on unsigned drivers starting with Vista. Wine was already a thing and I could run most games I cared about even back then although I still had to boot into Windows for gaming sometimes. Once steam Proton starting getting really good which was around 2015, there just wasn't a reason to be using Windows anymore. As the enshittification of Windows continued getting worse it became more tedious and time consuming to get anything done in Windows to the point you might as well use Gentoo. I do programming and game modding for fun and there's no way I could use modern Windows for this it's so bad and slows everything down with it's utter bullshit.

My intro to Linux was Google. Their chromebooks allow you to install Linux and I've played around w/ Debian. I never took it serious in terms of a viable alternative to Windows, but it was a great way to supplement the barebones ChromeOS over the last 4-5 years.

My desktop was from yesteryear (i7-2600) but could still get most jobs done outside of heavy gaming/local LLM, but I was not going to be able to upgrade to 11 which sucked since the desktop seemed perfectly functional. My plan was to ride out the Windows long-term support until 2028 and then buy a dirt cheap refurb desktop then.

On a separate track, about 3 months ago, I started my foray into front-end alternatives. I canceled YouTube Premium and started using Piped via redirector (redirects webpages to websites of your choosing) and then I found out about libredirect, which does a lot of the heavy lifting for you, and across multiple popular services including twitter, reddit, imgur, etc.

Initially I occasionally used the reddit/twitter alternatives, but as they became clearer bad actors, it became my defacto options. This nudged me to kbin and privacy-focused subreddits where Linux was not the red-headed stepchild.

The hype/reviews around Debian 12 made me curious to try the full desktop environment, so I decided to dual boot my desktop. I bricked it, bought a new W11-capable desktop and dual boot that with Debian 12.

Now, Linux my daily driver, and only use Windows 11 for workflows that are not optimized for Linux yet. The most surprising thing is the level of customization on things that I never thought about before. It can be overwhelming initially, but I'm finding the sweet spot over time.

For me I was always interested in alternative OS'. I didn't necessarily dislike windows, I just thought Linux was fascinating and liked playing around with the different ways to do things and accomplish tasks.

It was only later in life that I learned how excessive windows data collection was and became uncomfortable with using it that I began to seek out linux as a full alternative and try to decouple myself from the windows ecosystem.

My reasoning is nothing big and fancy or philosophical. Hell what had happened was: I upgraded from windows 8.1 to windows 10 and I couldn't pair my phone to my laptop via bluetooth in a way that allowed me to use my laptops speakers and the music on my phone. I started looking for a fix and ended up finding some article or forum about how to do that in linux. Installed ubuntu 17.04 or something like that because I didn't know the release cycle of ubuntu. I never looked back. After that tried Fedora then KDE Neon then back to Fedora then openSUSE Tumbleweed, and now EndeavourOS.

It’s fast, light, and I can do what I want with it. Windows forces you to do things their way whether you like it or not.

I've been dual booting on and off since 2004, but the big switch came in 2016 with DXVK making my games not run like ass.

I had enough of Windows. I had an older motherboard and the windows drivers were terrible for the sound card causing me to have to reinstall them manually all the time. Sometimes I'd leave a video transcoding and windows would reboot to update. After each update I'd spend the time to get rid of the bloat ware like King games, Xbox garbage etc. Once after an update I woke up to the windows 10 "Welcome to your computer" screen, and it decided during the night that it was going to erase my user profiles.

The most frustrating thing though, is that for all these issues I'm locked out from correcting them, or preventing them, or even checking what happened. Windows obfuscates so much in the name of "user experience" that any effort to diagnose a problem or fix a problem usually results in reinstalling being the best solution.

Also, Settings/Control Panel is a mess and really shows the lack of coherence in the OS. Linux isn't completely coherent by design, Windows is by ineptitude.

I was studying software engineering so I knew about linux for a while but never went ahead to try it as a workstation OS. I started to really dive into it when Windows 10 came out. Win10 is now regarded as one of the "good" editions but that kind of wasn't the case at release time, switching from Win7 it was bloated with a whole lot of unnecessary new "features" and weird changes. Win7 got it's end-of life announced and having Vista and more recently Win8 in memory I just about had it with Microsoft's shenanigans so I started looking for an alternative. I never really ran a doal-boot setup, I had an old little thinkpad to experiment on and in the first year I ran it through basically all major and minor distros I could find. The hopping was real 😄

I was hooked, loved everything about the freedom and it was refreshing building my own OS from scratch so I settled with arch for a while. At first with arch based distros on my main rig as training wheels (Manjaro and Endeavour) and then plain arch with Qtile and then KDE.

Nowadays especially because of my work I rather much prefer more stable experiences, I switched to Fedora after a pacman -Syu borked GIMP in a particularly annoying time (still love you Arch, no hard feelings ❤️) and just now after about 2 years I installed debian with all the RHEL stuff going on. Kinda making a whole circle in this journey.

I was just thinking about this because I have to use windows sometimes at work that linux really brought back the fun for me in computing. Despite all the flaws and issues that we are dealing with like the whole packaging question and things like that, it is just so refreshing to deal with these issues knowing that I can deal with them, rather than waiting how Microsoft will make those choices for me. For me having Windows or a Mac is like having half of a computer where I just have no choice but accept certain things as a paying customer no less.

Windows didnt Work with my Mainboard, Linux did. Eventually fixed the issue, stayed with Linux because it didnt let me down when I needed it the most.

Back in 2003 my sister needed a computer of her own to do schoolwork on. We couldn’t afford a new computer and the only other system we had in the house other then the laptop I had just bought was still running Windows 98 on a failing hard drive and the Windows install disk we had was borked.

I replaced the hard drive, started looking for options and found Ubuntu. And it made sense to me. Once I wrapped my head around the idea of the console, everything made sense in a way that Windows and DOS before that didn’t. And I had the freedom to modify anything I didn’t like, a freedom you don’t really have in Windows or Mac OS.

And it was fast! This ancient computer (AMD Athlon, 256 MB Ram, Ubuntu) was running circles around my new laptop (Pentium 4, 1 GB Ram, Windows XP).

I wound up switching my laptop from XP to Ubuntu and ran smack into why some people complain about linux being hard to use. Some of my brand new hardware just didn’t work in linux. WiFi, no go ever (proprietary firmware), audio, ditto. I liked Ubuntu well enough that I decided to work around the nonfunctional hardware with usb WiFi and a audio expansion card until the next update to Ubuntu when the built in audio just started working.

Foss software for everything that's a one click install got me. I'm surprised msft doesn't make Winget more visible

Honestly? My old laptop was having issues (not major but not ideal in terms of overall performance) running Windows 10 and it inspired me to try out a few distros. I later learned after trying a few:

• Overall Linux isn't scary at all, with an abundance of tutorials and documentation provided. (Just be aware of trying not to solve all problems with random hammers, or rather using any tutorial to fix the symptoms you're having)
• In terms of customization it's second to none. Privacy wise has been well documented, but even aesthetically via the UI you have a ton of options. (Plug for [email protected] for some inspiration.)
• Finally it's nice just to tinker with Linux as a project. There's only so much you can do with Windows or MacOS, while Linux is open and allows for a variety of programs, tools, and more. It allows you to get more comfortable with your computer and by extension more comfortable with technology in general!

everything on linux is so straight forward, it's just so calm.

Dota (1, in warcraft 3) would have a hitch every once in a while, and i'd die if it was in a fight. Cause was swap writing to disk, that you can't turn off in winxp. I was already looking at linux, so i said f it. Bdw warcraft 3 runs well on linux if you add -opengl.

When I first tried Linux more than 10 years ago, it was SUPER exciting to just get YouTube working. With fiddling with graphics drivers and installing flash player and all that. That feeling was great.
Also I just hate big corpos spying on me. To me using Linux or rather just open source software in general still feels like a tiny act of rebellion. I think that feeling will never leave me.

I first dual-booted Linux back in 2008 because I'm a musician and at the time I was a broke highschooler trying to use Ubuntu Studio to record and mix songs without dropping $500 on a Pro Tools license. After that I'd generally always have a dual boot system because I like using Linux for its flexibility.

Back in December I switched to 100% Linux Mint on my main gaming PC because my Windows 10 install was starting to die in all kinds of ways and I was gonna have to reinstall, so I just formatted the partition and went all Linux.

I also self-host a bunch of little servers for various stuff on like 5 different little single-board-computers (Pi 4, M1 Mac Mini, etc), and they all run various flavors of Linux, mostly Debian and Ubuntu but also Asahi on the Mac.

In general I find it waaaay easier to maintain, update, repair, and modify. Package managers should be available for every OS by default, not as an ugly hack like on Windows or MacOS.

I was on windows and just got tired of the larger amount of spyware in my os. The last windows I used was 8, but I did hold out on that for a long time.

Windows 11 was announced and I got scared. Steam Deck got announced and I saw a clear hopeful future. I had tried out linux a few times but always had a hiccup with my wireless wifi usb dongle, but now I'm wired with Ethernet. I had a free weekend, had a keen interest in delving, got reassured gaming is solid there, watched a few videos and I plunged.

Personally it took a couple days to get it to a desired state of usability, I have certain niche needs so finding a way to get those while learning the basics of linux took me a while, but aside from that I've loved it ever since. I feel in control, the second I have an issue with something I somehow have the freedom to fix it. It's not perfect, but it always entertains me and I have seen clear innovation in the ~2 years I've been here.

I'd been tinkering with Linux for years and never using it properly when I saw how Windows Vista performed on my new fairly high end PC and formatted and installed Ubuntu and never looked back. Of course it wasn't an entirely smooth experience, setting up X properly was fun in those days but the performance was so much better.

The things I was using my computer to do were becoming increasingly technical - I work in science, and I'm also a massive nerd outside of that. Many of the programs I was using were on both Windows and Linux, but often I was unable to find troubleshooting help for the Windows versions. I knew enough of Linux that I could jiggle things around and make the Linux advice fit into my Windows situation, but it was awkward and added another layer of uncertainty to the stressful troubleshooting.

At a certain point, it felt like a case of "you can't find Windows specific advice because who in their right mind would actually be using Windows to do this stuff?"

Who indeed

(That last part is hyperbolic, but it sort of does feel like I was trying to hammer in a nail with a screwdriver sometimes. Combine that with Windows being annoying and stressful in the personal use context too and I wasn't having a good time. Things got very messy.

Windows XP looked like such a downgrade from Windows 2000. Lacked stability. Wanted something more customizable. I liked the idea of community powered software so Linux was the solution.