Linux

It's not like I hate other operating systems, I just really like the idea of FOSS and try to use it whenever possible.

Windows kept shoving their stupid Edge browser down my throat. Tried every way to remove it and it kept popping back up like malware. Kept annoying me with "upgrade to Windows 11 popups." I've used windows 11 on other people's laptops and was flabbergasted that there were ads on paid software. In addition to that I heard 10 will stop getting security updates next year so I bit the bullet and switched to mint full time. It's worked well for me so far.

Been 100% Linux on all my personal devices for about 4 years.

I just got tired of being treated like I was either an idiot or a criminal by Microsoft. Plus the way they kept forcing their bloatware and trash ads on the OS that I already paid for!

I decided I didn't care what I had to give up, it was worth it to be rid of Microsoft's clutches forever. Switched to Linux and I've never looked back.

Turns out, I actually didn't have to sacrifice much at all, and the few things I don't have anymore are nothing compared to the benefits of using Linux and FOSS software.

Everything works better for me too, more stable, updates are rarer and wayyyyy faster when I push them. No more fighting with AMD driver hell in Windows, no more weird lockups or crashes, a million times more customization options, and zero bloat or spyware installed by default on my system.

Windows 98 really sucked and running Unix at home became an option.

i was a starving college student with $20 to my name and a dead windows me desktop computer that had an entire semester's worth of school work trapped inside of it.

i had read about linux before and saw that i could buy a couple of mandrake cd's from a magazine at circuit city for $5 or borrow $169 from someone to buy a windows xp installation disk.

i bought the magazine; installed linux; and taught myself (with google's help) how to copy all of my school work onto a usb drive. i finished those papers using the school's computer laboratories; and then kept on using the linux installation from then on in 2002 until now.

I got a new PC. I installed Windows on it. I felt dirty, so I said fuck it, and installed Linux instead.

It wasn't any one specific thing, but a lifetime of windows frustrations adding up, on top of a growing frustration with enshittified tools and services in general

That was 4 months ago.

Solid gaming support

The pursuit of Freedom led me to Linux.

What pushed me over the edge: the threat of Windows screenshotting everything I did.

Absolutely fucking not. Took it all to Ubuntu the day after I heard. Couple days later everything I need was set up & a few months later I haven’t looked back

it rebooted itself while i left it overnight doing an important render.

thats after i fucked with it for hours to turn automatic updates OFF.

i would probably still be on windows 10 if it werent for microsoft going out of their way to make it shitty.

The pandemic and programming.

I was watching some tutorials and saw how easily people used the terminal, and how clunky cmd felt.

Next day I had ubuntu running.

The turning point was when Windows was no longer set and forget. Windows 7 was the last time that was the case before I had to put any real work into it.

I put up with Windows 10 for a bit and wrote a script to neutralise bloat and configure the OS to some saner settings, then I could keep things consistent between installations. That was fine for a while.

But over time Microsoft became more unhinged and my script evolved into several larger scripts in order to deal with the BS. It became an endless cat and mouse game and I found that I was wasting too much of my time maintaining it just to have a OS that was clean of crap.

The last straw was when a botched update gutted the performance of my PC, and Microsoft took several months to fix the issue. I installed Debian which just worked, and it was good timing because Windows 11 was announced shortly afterwards. I've experienced it at work and it's hands down the worst OS I've ever used, and I've used pretty much every version of Windows since 3.1. I think I'd even take Me over it. At least that OS sucked because it was poorly designed. Windows 11 is intentionally hostile to its users.

It wasn't my first rodeo with Linux since I've been on and off with it since 2007. Still, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it works out of the box these days.

A few months later and I had built my new machine. I didn't even bother to install Windows on it. Now I use Arch btw and haven't looked back.

At first I was tipping my toes in Ubuntu but kept coming back to Windows as I kept running into stability issues. Googling my issues very frequently kept sending me to the Arch wiki, and I thought "well if they have so much covered, why not use this distro instead". That and 196 subreddit (rule) made me try Arch, and my experience was noticeably better. Barely any crashes and improving Proton compatibility made me use it more and more. I kept a windows install for VR and anti-cheat enabled games until late 2023.

During my transition period (both in Linux and gender lol) between 2021 and now, I kept getting comments "why are you making your life harder with Linux, just use Windows where everything works". Well, nowadays tables have turned and now I get to say "weird it works for me on Linux". Except VR, it's still a mixed experience.

Windows 11 serving me ads in the OS was a step too far. Windows 10 already had them as apps in every update that annoyed me, but 11 took them to a new level that was too far for me.

Windows 7 being discontinued.

I migrated my HTPC to Linux several years ago, and since then just transitioned more and more of my machines over.

My desktop is the only machine left running Windows at this point due to there being no Freetrack implementation on Linux for sim games

I really liked having a login screen, so I switched to Mandrake from Windows 95

I'm glad to see other people go into Linux for positive reasons instead of just hating Windows. What really got me was Compiz. Initially, it was all the crazy effects like wobbly windows, but soon I realized how much I liked the "Workspace" paradigm and then being able to customize things as much as I wanted. Then, the whole free software thing, distro-hopping, the great communities, etc.

Microshit flipping back privacy settings on win11 among other bullshit.

Tried monitoring network connections, there is no way tell what windows is doing. Blocking them will break the OS... I was done.

Honestly I got started due to curiosity and well, it turned out Linux was a rabbit hole and so down I went.

My final straw was getting a new MacBook Air (I was at that point fine with how UNIX-y macOS was) and realizing I couldn’t dock the laptop to more than one external monitor without some weird hacky third-party software fix. Why, you ask? Well not at all because the laptop technically couldn’t do it, but because Apple said it can’t, because they want to overcharge you on a Pro.

I promptly returned the MacBook, bought a Framework on eBay, and learned NixOS.

10/10, I haven’t looked back since.

No longer being able to run Windows 7, the pinnacle of Windows.

Becoming a Communist.

That, and increased gaming support, and a Thinkpad that struggled over time given renewed life with Arch.

I replaced windows on my laptop with Ubuntu and stopped using it after realizing how unimpressed I was with the difference. Years later I took the OSCP course, and they required using Kali.

From there I fell in love. Things that would have taken hours and weird 3rd party installers to do in Windows came with the OS or were in the official repos. The CLI showed me unimaginable power over every bit of the computer, and in windows the Conmand Prompt CLI is pretty mediocre; Powershell is better, but is more about data processing than running software. Linux has SSH and Python installed with one sentence, windows graphical installers are a bloated nightmare. There wasn't random shitty third party software installed by the OEM who struck a deal with the OS maintainers.

After that, it was a cascade of disillusionment. Those nasty 3rd party apps I didn't install showing up in my start menu? Actually ads, I was just using cognitive dissonance to avoid admitting that. And the proprietary programs aren't better, they update more frequently just to introduce ads, harvest more data, and change their layout to make it seem like they did anything to help the end users.

Why does changing any meaningful settings require tampering in the registry? Why is this low level stuff documented so poorly? Why can't I turn off telemetry completely? Why can't I check what code is running in the kernel that I purchased and am running ON MY COMPUTER??? IT'S MY COMPUTER, NOT MICROSOFT'S. Why the FUCK should I let them run code that I can't legally review, much less change, on it?

If someone offered you a meal but refused to tell you about any of the ingredients, you just wouldn't eat it. Not "you'd be suspicious," it goes beyond that: you'd be too suspicious to eat it. If someone offered you a home security system that you could have "spy on you minimally" you'd tell them where they could stick it. If it came with your house, you'd remove it immediately. If either of those people tried to charge you for it, you'd laugh in their face.

Yet for some reason, when it's our computers doing the spying and whatever else we can't verify, we've learned to just put up with it? This is BULLSHIT.

And I have too much pride to be treated like a mark, I won't take being scammed lying down anymore. I'm not a hapless dipshit who just lets people have their way with her because it's "too hard to learn new things." I've always said I have some integrity to protect, so I better prove it or forever be a hypocrite.

I already use only Linux at home, I'd have to get my company to switch to let me run it at work.

Windows ME

For me it was partially Windows 10 placing suggested apps and ads in the UI. The other part was just curiosity. After some distro hopping I landed on Mint, then Fedora and finally Arch where I've been for about two or three years.

I had a few false starts before, but MS force-updating me to the objectively worse and user-hostile Windows 8 triggered my latest (and successful) switch.

I really started to dislike Windows and projects like Bazzite made it incredibly easy to make the jump. The wife is now gaming in Linux for the same reasons.

When I was a CS student in the early-mid 90s, my college had Unix only and we had to fight to get a free terminal to complete our assignments.I had a good 486DX with Windows 3.11 and I had heard of Minix, so I could do my assignments in the comfort (?) of my dorm room.

I went to my local technical library to see if they had a box (that sort of places used to carry boxed OSes and specialized software back then). They didn't, but they had this CD with Slackware written on it and the store owner said it was better. So I bought it on a whim.

After many hours and a lot of recompiling the kernel and libraries right and left, the thing finally booted and ran surprisingly stable. My roommate saw it and immediately installed it on his machine. The next days we went buy a couple of 10base2 NICs, some coax and a pair of terminator, and before you know it, we had NFS going.

It was our own Unix network and it was way better than college's :) I never looked back.

I did work with DRDOS as a kernel dev a few years later, which involved reverse-engineering bits of MSDOS 7 (yes, that's the version of MSDOS Windows 95 ran on top of). That's as close to working professionally with MS stuff as I ever got. Other than than, I'm a pure product of the Linux generation baby!

Windows Registry

I had recurring issues with registering Bluetooth devices, where they would pair initially but refuse to connect again after a reboot. I couldn't remove the device from saved connections, and registry edits wouldn't save or persist. I'd have to completely uninstall the driver, change the registry, and reinstall the drivers, with restarts between each step, to get it to work for 1-2 days.

Now, having to troubleshoot isn't what turned me away from Windows to Linux. I knew I would run into that plenty on Linux as well, but I came to hate the registry. If I was going to have to go through all this trouble to get things to work, I might as well do it on a system I had more control over. I had worked with different distros on VMs and dual booting before, so when I built a new system, I just skipped Windows entirely.

Finding a good MusicBee alternative on linux. I just dual boot into windows whenever I need to convert FLACs and organize it. Otherwise I'm on Linux 99% of the time now.

Programming in C and C++ just seemed way easier on Linux at the time.

The assistants at university would frequently distribute virtualbox images with Ubuntu within which we were supposed to do the homework. At some point I decided that just putting Ubuntu on my laptop directly would be easier because GCC is just right there in the repos, plus I was a little interested anyway.

Then it just kept being easy, for Java, Haskell, Scala, Python, everything was just supported nicely. The network simulators we used were Linux native, the course where we were reverse engineering binaries used GDB, Android development was simple with the tools and simulator being in the repos.

That said for gaming I still use Windows. And my workplace forces me to use macOS.

My reasons were more hardware related. When I was a bit younger my parents gave me a netbook which had 32 GB of storage, and Windows used almost all of it. I wanted to do creative projects in my free time, but I couldn't install programs or save any of my work. I would often restart to clear log files and gain a bit more working storage, which was extremely annoying because it took like 5 mins for the computer to finally settle down and be usable.

I eventually got a 32GB flash drive which helped a lot, but it was not enough. With 4GB ram I could only have about 3 browser tabs open, and not all the programs I wanted could be run off the flash drive. It was still resource management hell.

Somehow, some way, I learned about Linux. I got a 128GB microSD, put Mint on it. It truly set me free. I could install the software I wanted, I could make the things I wanted to make, I could open more programs at once, and I could do it all without unbearable lag. I never looked back since.

What pushed me over the edge was how much worse the user experience became with 8 & 10.

I really disliked the lack of control over updates, settings and defaults being reverted after minor updates, and the constant pushing of Microsoft accounts and services. The data collection and privacy issues certainly didn't help either. I switched from 7 to 10 for a period of time, but eventually started using Linux for everything except for games. I started realizing just how good Linux gaming was getting, and I eventually had one too many issues with my Windows partition and just quit using it entirely.

I don't remember having a lot of the frustrations I hear some talk about when switching, but I think that was because early on I realized I just needed to start figuring out the Linux way of doing things rather than bringing my Windows experience over.

I just wanted the wobbly windows back in 2007.

The "AI" garbage on the horizon finally did it for me. I've been using Windows for 30-some-odd years (and DOS before that) and it always had a quirk or two but it mostly just worked, and that was enough for me. Hell, I even jumped on Win 11 when it was still in Insider Preview, just because I wanted the latest. And despite everyone always complaining about 11, for the most part, it did for me as Windows has always done - it just worked, so if it ain't broke, why fix it?

Not that I hated Linux, I just always seemed to have an excuse. "Oh, the last time I tried to install it I was stuck at a CLI" sure, almost 20 years ago. "Well, I'm a huge gamer and Linux just doesn't have the support", "Man, KDE Plasma on the Steam Deck runs great and looks a lot like a fresh Windows install... ahhh, it'd be such a pain to migrate though."

Anyway, I set up Arch on a "dual boot" partition a couple weeks ago I say "dual boot" because I haven't booted into Windows in a week. Feels good, man. I should have done it sooner.

I will say though, if any other potential Windows refugees are reading... Migrate your Steam library to an ext4/btrfs/other Linux partition. You can successfully mount your Windows NTFS partitions. You might even be able to get them to mount as read/write. You might even be able to get Steam to read the directories! But it's not worth the headache, and in my experience it's a lot easier to get Windows to mount a btrfs partition. My Windows install is the last NTFS partition on my system, and I'll keep it around for a while in case I run into something that just won't play nice with Linux, but that's it.

It used to be just because I was interested. Then life got in between and I ditched it a bit, until Microsoft announced that "find anything you ever did"-feature. I installed Ubuntu again after quite a few years and stayed because I finally did not have to spend 3 days to get my video card working "kinda" and I found out my games actually work. No need to use Windows anymore.

I never “switched” in the sense that yesterday I was windows and today I am linux.

It just happened. I’ve always had some distro or other running on another drive or partition. This includes things like os2 warp that weren’t linux.

But about 4 or so years ago, my games were playable easily on steam, I was able to find Linux packages for work stuff (like teams), and things just generally behaved with no hassle (up until then things worked but they came with hassles).

Meanwhile, windows became a hassle. Microsoft borked my windows install because it forced their crappy store onto a game (literally trashed my installation by clicking “install” - PSO2), every time I turned the pc on I was faced with an update and restart, some of those updates failed (one of them still doesn’t work) - how does an OS update become so poor quality - it’s an OS update, and general enshitification such as ads, nags, and crappy OS design with the clicks…

I just found myself not wanting to use windows, and wanting to use Linux. It happened over time. The last time I logged into windows was three or four months ago just to update the install and keep it fresh. It was a painful 1/2 hour and I’m dreading going back.

EndeavorOS Gnome, light use of the AUR, heavy flatpak use.

I started my career on PDP-11/44 and moved to Xenix/Unix/Solaris as I progressed my way through several employers. Windows 3.1 had me as it was a step up from GEMOS and the affair lasted until Windows 95 when I got fed up with having to refresh every computer in my household annually and having to clear out the bloatware. All this time I was missing the low cognitive overhead of running Unix.

An SUSE CD made its way to me and I switched immediately. I was home! And I stayed that way until macOS came out with its BSD core which gave me both a tight GUI and *nix frameworks.

Windows is popular only because of its heavy-handed approach to OEMs and businesses, not because of its technical prowess.

Videos of the Steamdeck showed me how good gaming on Linux had gotten and that's when I started looking into switching.

I already hated using Windows 10 so didn't take me much convincing to look at alternatives.

I'm not a programmer or work in the I.T. field in anyway. But I have been messing around with computers since I could remember so I'm no stranger to tweaking, breaking and trying to repair things.

2 very good reasons: privacy and Big Tech.

I had a two laptop: one main for gaming and a shitty computer for school. I had to code on python. It was easier to setup on linux. I liked KDE. I installed kubuntu on the laptop for school.

As soon as I stopped playing videogames on my main computer I went for linux definitely

Edit: it was 10 years ago

Back in the days I used to use Windows, I did use Linux as a developer sometimes, yet I was sticking to a daily usage of Windows... Until Windows 10, when Windows started to be aggressive on how it won't let me control my own machine (e.g. I couldn't disable updates the way I wanted, I couldn't run some softwares, I couldn't this and I couldn't that). Then I said "enough" and started using Linux on a daily basis, firstly Ubuntu, then I started to experiment on other Linux distros, until I finally landed on Arch Linux, as it's highly customizable and let me have full control of my own machine, not being stuck to specific DEs (I know that distros like Ubuntu allow the user to uninstall the current DE, or install other simultaneous DEs, but Arch comes without any DE from scratch). I've been using Linux on a daily basis for almost a decade now and I don't miss Windows.

Valve releasing Proton.

Commodore going bankrupt.

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. Distros (mostly) don't matter. Peace,

The need for latex, in 1999.

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.

Windows 10 update. They nagged about it, and for security I relented. It did a few things: made our proprietary CAD slow (not just one machine or one company, but every customer running it complaining), made home machine slow for everything. Made my wife's older laptop a useless brick. The UI was so slow it seemed frozen. So I searched what Linux Distro supported the Proprietary CAD. Which was SUSE and RHEL. Since OpenSUSE was close enough and free I installed it. CAD was back to normal W7 speed, and my wife's laptop was faster than on W7. Currently I moved her laptop to NiXOS, it is snappy and runs apps & zoom calls as well as my newer Workstation