Linux

Windows.

Tim Cook and Jony Ive.

Privacy - the main reason. Besides for that were a lot of annoying and ridiculous reasons to switch like:

• BSOD in the middle of gaming/meeting/etc,

• forced updates that made it impossible to shutdown your pc without installing an update first

I could name further and further but those are the main reasons. Now I'm using Debian for 2 years and it is the best distro by far.

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

I started dual booting Linux after an upgrade to an insider preview of Windows 10 soft-bricked my Windows 7 install. I later stopped booting into Windows and eventually reclaimed the partitions to extend whatever distro was installed at that point when the actual release of Windows 10 decided to attempt automatically upgrading my Windows 7 system, soft-bricking it a second time. 2016 onwards, I haven't used Windows on my systems outside of occasionally booting LTSC in a VM.

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. :)

What did it in were the semi-annual mandatory feature updates, which restored the invasive settings and bloat I worked hard to remove. Already being acquainted with Linux at that point, I began dual-booting and later having Windows on an entirely separate machine for a few stubborn programs I needed for work.

What made me acquainted with Linux was looking for alternatives after the loss of theming options and the start menu in Windows 8. That eventually brought me to my present Debian setup with the Chicago 95 theme, which recreates (and even improved) the workflow and stability I had grown to love in Windows 2000.

The first time I ever booted into a Linux iso, however, was to migrate files off of my machine, which was excruciatingly slow to transfer files under XP.

Ironically enough, it was gaming performance.

What makes this ironic was that this was months before the Steam Deck came out and I was not familiar with Wine and/or Proton in the slightest. I just thought, "If there are people running it as a daily driver, then it must be good enough at those things".

I'd say my transition over to Linux took years. I first learned of it when I had a laptop with 4GB RAM and 64GB Storage. When you're working with something that weak, you want to minimise wherever you can and it got to the point where the only way to reduce storage use to make this machine useful for some lighter games (also to reduce RAM usage to make the machine snappier than it was with Windows 10), waa to install Linux Mint, as it seemed like the best option. Later, when I got a new laptop of my own, I really got into digital privacy and running a Custom ROM on my phone (a practice that has continued to this day), which led me to the old familiar (well, not so familiar at the time because I was a noob who knew nothing), Linux. I played with Ubuntu, Mint and PopOS in Virtualbox and about 2 months after that (if I'm not mistaken), I bit the bullet and installed Mint. Now why didn't I do it earlier? I was busy with college. Why didn't I do it on the old machine, or over Christmas instead of 3 months later in March (2022)? Because I was scared I was going to mess up the partitioning, as I wanted to dual boot. So in March 2022, I switch, and proceed to use my Windows partition.... 2 times, until I completely wiped it because it was making my life more complicated than it needed to be and I wanted all 512 GB instead of the 128GB I managed to free from Windows' grasp. Now I had to set up temporary Windows partitions twice, where one time was about Excel (my machine wasn't powerful enough to do it in a VM, and I needed to use advanced features for college, that weren't available on Libreoffice or OnlyOffice. I don't remember the reasons for the second time anymore. I almost had to do that another 3rd time because under the same teacher in college, we had to use VS. Not Code, but Visual Studio. It is not available for Linux, and I didn't have my Windows partition at the time, so I ended up doing it in class on the college computers out of spite for Windows. These 2 scenarios really made me almost hate that teacher (her attitude and some people's dislike of her were not doing her any favours in my eye) but once I got to know her properly, she didn't match the perception of her that I was left with. Anyways, that's the story of how I switched to Linux.

I'm on Fedora now (With Hyprland). Though distros (mostly) don't matter. Peace,

My first programming experience, an online class, was in a Linux VM. Linux made programming easy and delightful, Windows always made it a huge pain. As time went on, more of what I did was easier on Linux, and now everything is.

Commodore going bankrupt.

Valve releasing Proton.

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

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 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.

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.

Windows Vista and curiosity.

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

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.

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

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.

Curiosity and desire to learn.

I was just bored during the pandemic

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.

windows "8" ..final straw. blech

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).

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

Bitlocker.

I'll decrypt it one day...

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.

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

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

• 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.