Linux

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

The need for latex, in 1999.

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. :)

Tim Cook and Jony Ive.

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

Windows.

windows "8" ..final straw. blech

Late 1990s my uni had unix workstations HPUX.

So all projects etc were expected to be done on those. Linux at the time was the easy way to do it from home.

By the time I left uni in 98. I was so used to it windows was a pain in the butt.

For most of the time since I have been almost 100% linux. With just a dual boot to sort some hardware/firmware crap.

Ham radio to this day. Many products can only do updates with windows.

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

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.

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.

BeOS went under.

Ed: I was a huge apple fan, bought an apple clone from Power Computing. Then Apple revoked the licensing that allowed all the apple clone companies to exist. That's when I went to BeOS which would run on my clone, and got a multicore intel machine too. When BeOS went under I tried Suse. Had kind of a sucky UI in my opinion, but I hung in there with linux as an alternative to windows and went Ubuntu/Debian/Arch/Nixos and I'm still on nixos now. Its pretty much my exclusive OS since I quit my job that required windows 5 or 6 years ago.

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

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.

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

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).

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.

• 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

I was interested in technology and programming and my mom recommended me to check out a raspberry pi. Her friend's son has one. So my first comouter was a raspberry pi with RaspbianOS when I got my first PC it seemd normal to install something that I was using for the last year and its free. So I installed Pop!_Os, a year later Fedora and a half year later Arch. I've been using Arch for more than 2 years now.

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.

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.

It was always obvious to me that as long as I was using closed source software that any day could come when the vendor would screw me over. In fact, it could have been running it with bundles and bundles of spyware already and I had no way of knowing it. So I pledged to start using open source software only, to make sure that wouldn't happen. First, I migrated all my desktop applications to open source alternatives. Then I finally made the switch.

I'm aware that at some point sourceforge went down the toilet, but in the early 2000s it seemed to be a pretty reliable website for open source software. I had gone a few years coming across more and more evidence that any software I was downloading from sourceforge was much less likely to be a load of shit than software downloaded anywhere else. At some point I made the connection that maybe open source software is better in general. That made me curious about the experience of using an entire operating system that was open source. Either 2012 or late 2011 I installed Fedora to dual boot with windows (like 70% sure it was win7, might have been vista). Over the next year or two I sampled a bunch of other distros, and also PCBSD (not sure if that still exists) at one point. In retrospect I was really sampling DEs, but I didn't know the distinction.

Discovering the philosophy behind GNU was what led me to abandoning windows entirely. I think I had already had some of the core ideas of free software, albeit in extremely rudimentary forms (gee, these EULAs sure do seem like they're deliberately obfuscated), floating around my head for a while. The concept of free software resonated with me, so that's when I finally removed my windows partition. I stopped distro-hopping and settled on Trisquel for two or three years.

Afterwards, I decided to move to Parabola because I thought it would force me to learn things, but the main thing I learned was how to read documentation just well enough to get everything working by trial-and-error tinkering.

I've kind of moved on from free software at this point. I do still agree with the ideals, but I think the goals are somewhat inconsistent with a capitalist economy to begin with so I'd rather be concerned about that.

Today I use arch and still have no idea what the hell I'm doing, but I've had a stable system for years and I'm too comfortable with it to switch to a friendlier distribution.

I was a curious 14yo. Tried out OpenSUSE 10.2 (10.3? Can't fully remember) with KDE 3.5 and had a blast.

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.

Honestly? I played around with Linux for a long time inside of VM, but then I moved to a new house and got into "a new life" mood. And then I just couldn't look back on Windows with anything but disgust.

When I was 13 and still watching LTT I had an extremely old dell optiplex with a 3rd or 4th gen i7 that was really starting to slow down on Windows; I just thought it was old hardware (partially true) but then LTT released a video about Pop_OS and was like "oo what's Linux" and just deleted Windows and installed it. Never looked back! Everything was super snappy and I was really shocked.

It might sound ridiculous but I switched to Linux to take ownership of the things I own.

The lesson for me was Windows Genuine Advantage in Windows Vista throwing a fit whenever I wanted to make a change to MY computer. In this moment I realized that so long as Microsoft was in my life, I will never truly own the hardware I purchased, the system I built with my own two hands. I was late-teens at the time working a dirty minimum wage job, so this was big to me.

This is a lesson I’ve carried with me the rest of my life and colours all purchasing decisions I make. I’m not giving up my hard earned money if I don’t actually own the product I’m purchasing.

I got interested in Linux in college since it’s used a bunch in physics. I even tried it a bit on my personal laptop. Fast forward to the steam deck releasing and windows just getting worse and worse, I decided to go for it. So far it fulfills all my needs on a home PC. It did require some fiddling to make it work, but now the fiddling and troubleshooting are very minimal and occasional.

I was prepared for it (relatively speaking lol) because I had used it before. I did hop between distros for a bit as well before finally settling on Pop! OS since it’s Ubuntu based, and the support on forums for Ubuntu issues is ubiquitous. I do kind of miss open SUSE sometimes though.

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.

Back in the early days of Win10, an updated messed up my system and I ended up with duplicated icons. Wasn't happy, but didn't feel that it was that big of a deal to warrant a full reinstall.

2 years ago I built myself a new desktop and decided to try installing Linux straight away. Haven't looked back since.

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.

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.

Many reinstalls of windows 10

Something in windows was causing it to be impossible to run docker containers with ease without needing to mess with some virtualization setting in some deep hidden windows settings paanel

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

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.

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.

I bought a steam deck

I had used Linux almost exclusively between 1999 and around 2005 and then went back to Windows for games. Stayed there until recently and switched back to Linux because of the enshittification of Windows. I even had a pro license and hadn’t gotten everything pushed into my face but it was still too annoying what Microsoft did.

While not everything is working smoothly yet (especially Wayland and sound), it feels a lot smoother and is so much more fun. I was especially surprised how great the games work. If I had know that I would probably have switched back to Linux sooner.

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).