My dad played (and still plays) heavily modded Cities Skylines. After upgrading his RAM to 32GB, he'd run afoul of Windows 7 Home Edition's 16GB limit. I offered to check out Linux on my own computer to see how well Cities Skylines played. I never went back.

Windows was becoming increasingly bad for people that use mainly keyboards, and my laptop's HDD nearly dying and me having to use a Linux distro to recover files I couldn't lose gave me an window and interest to try out a distro closer in UX as Android, thus I found Ubuntu almost 5 years ago.

I didn't move away from Windows, Windows moved away from me.

I would have been happy to stay on it if it hadn't continued to get shittier and shittier.

I just felt increasingly like I didn't have control over my system. And Gnome 2 was looking sick to me at the time, I loved the look. 👌

Started with Ubuntu for a few years and now I've been on Arch for over a decade I believe.

ideological reasons. windows creeps me the fuck out. i've been using linux since the slackware days. sure i've been on win 3.1 and all the way up to XP as my OS because of gaming, but I have dual booted with linux since around 2003. I haven't had Windows installed on any device since 2013 - and frankly, I am so fucking happy with fedora and the steam deck finally kicking the door down and making linux 100% viable for everyone.

But yes, I'm too old now and I really can't be arsed to deal with the constant patchwork of the olden days and there is no way I would ever look back at anything since switching to fedora 2 years ago. It's insanely good (finally). Not even mint could deliver an equally flawless experience after all these years in comparison. I actually just dropped mint from my last holdout device earlier this week, replacing it with Fedora.

The Year of Linux Desktop is finally here!

for a long time i had a lot of windows machines and linux machines, but as of late ive fully committed to linux. i started doing linux back in like 2002 or something, and i mostly liked it for keeping old machines working on low specs and while remaining fairly secure (i wasnt the richest kid growing up so i was constantly trying to squeeze juice out of everything i had available). i still use old 2003 hardware for simple tasks like displaying pdfs for cooking in my kitchen.

these days, it can more than handle being a daily driver, i think that started around 3-5 years ago. there are no issues in the vast majority of applications and games, open source has caught up to many closed source applications in many contexts, and proton is so absurdly good at what it does now. the only thing it lacks are games that rely on excessive kernel level anticheat, which frankly you shouldnt play ever for security reasons. and soon enough, through lepton itll be able to run android apps as natively as possible, which will make it fundamentally the most versatile desktop operating system.

Windows users seem to want to just buy, have, and use a computer, whereas Linux users seem to enjoy problem solving and tinkering for fun.

Can people please just stop with these terrible generalizations? Lots of windows users consider themselves "computer people" and tinker with their computer and solve problems. Plenty of Linux users aren't doing shit but using it as it comes. It feels like a terrible rip off of the old apple ads "I'm a Mac", "and I'm a PC". It's crap.

Windows Updates

Got an update while finishing a large project for work. Tried to postpone updates, Micro$oft said no and reboot anyway. Rebooted and waited 2 hrs for the "Please Wait" to go away.

Oh yeh and also the in your face OneDrive adware. I swear, every single time I update, the laptop keeps asking if I want to sign into onedrive.

Irritated enough to learn

Basically, im getting old and weird and less willing to abide corporate fuckery.

So that I'd have a clever answer to this question

Because I hate MS CEO

Because if my operating system is going to break in stupid ways I want it to be my fault or at the very least something I could fix if I knew shit about fuck. Seeing as I don't know that the main perk is Linux keeps getting better as windows keeps getting worse.

I'll admit I'm a lazy bastard who likes the convenience of things just working. I also really like using Solidworks for CAD drafting. The things Microsoft has been doing with breaking its OS in stupid and privacy-invading ways pushed me over the edge now. It's been a struggle to learn the intricacies of Linux in order to set up whatever distro I'm trying at the moment. I'd still rather struggle with a difficult to master OS at this point than go back and let Windows 11 get worse with AI bullshit and sell out my privacy for greater shareholder value though.

In my experience so far all I can say is I prefer mutable distros that make it easier for me to install and run a VPN, even if it makes it hard for me to access my local NAS because of it.

Because Windows customization was too hard and weird. To install a custom theme, I had to browse DeviantArt for some god forsaken reason(????) and trust this random person's theme, which could contain malware for all I knew! I just wanted to choose colors and change transparency!

Stupid default software: What's up with Micro$oft Edge? Why do they push it so hard? Just let me set Firefox as the default browser for everything! I want to be able to uninstall things I don't want on my system, and use whatever apps I want.

So, around 2022, I tried Linux Mint and fell in love with it. I'd heard Apple devices were pretty locked down so the thought of buying a Mac hadn't crossed my mind (I could not afford one anyways).

I then went on to, over time, try other distros, such as: ArcoLinux (now discontinued), Debian, Artix, KDE Neon, Void, and nowadays I run NixOS on my desktop and Arch on my laptop. (I did try Fedora Sway for a few hours before installing Arch on my laptop though).

I was a Windows user since 95, but I was increasingly feeling that my Windows PC was not my PC. That my personal information was being sent to some MS server. Then they started pushing recall and shoe horning in copilot. The sledgehammer that broke the camel's back was when my perfectly good PC was deemed not good enough for an upgrade to Windows 11. I went Linux and am never going back.

Because I can tell it to do whatever I want. I get to control the device I own. Pretty basic. Same principle for my others devices, so deGoogle Android phone, earbuds with open source firmware, keyboard with open source firmware, Zigbee for IoT, etc. My stuff should do what I want.

2001 first introduced to Fedora (1?) A friend installed on my laptop. Used it for a little; but it didn't do the things I wanted. A little while later I was back on XP.

I tried Ubuntu 6.04; it wasn't ready. Back to XP.
I tried Ubuntu 8.04; it was really close. Back to XP.
I tried Ubuntu 10.04; and have had Linux ever since. I have jumped to various distros over the years, I kept coming back to Mint though. I currently have a couple of computers running Bazzite and the rest on Mint.

I do keep Windows VM's around; XP, 7 and 10. But they barely get turned on these days.

I haven't had Windows installed on a machine in 16 years; even in 09 it only lasted a couple of months till I got time to replace it.

I dabbled with Linux on and off several times over the last 20 years but never stuck with it for long, usually because of some giant pain in the ass getting some piece of hardware to work properly, plus I like to play games too and that used to be a huge stumbling block.

Microsoft’s escalatingly shitty behavior around Windows 11, combined with how much desktop Linux has matured with things like Proton/Heroic Launcher/Bottles solving most of the compatibility problems finally pushed me over the threshold for a full switch to Linux.

I’ve been running Linux-only (first Mint, then Fedora) on my laptop for about 2 years now without problems, and finally took the plunge on my desktop PC about a month ago. Massive props to Proton for making this feasible now. I have Windows 11 installed on a spare 256GB SSD that I had just in case there was some kind of show-stopper that I needed to go back to, but haven’t booted back into it since making the switch except for one time to check that it works.

Once the gaming problem was solved (I’m not worried about kernel level anti-cheat because I’m not into that type of game), the last thing tying me to Windows was Adobe Lightroom. I do miss Lightroom and I’m not as skilled using the FOSS alternatives to that product, but I just decided ‘fuck it’, Adobe are assholes with them making Lightroom subscription-only anyways.

It is so nice not being nagged to use one drive or sign in with a Microsoft account and have bullshit slop content shoveled at me by my operating system any more. Seriously, fuck outta here with that no-local-accounts horseshit.

Anyway, not going back any time soon.

Because of Windows.

As silly as this is, licensing was the straw for me.

In high school, I built my first desktop and pirated Windows XP. In college, i built a PC for both my wife and myself and purchased two Windows 7 licenses really cheap with a student discount. In 2019, my PC died so I built a new one, re-used the license, and saved a lot of the old parts. In 2020 I got my wife a new PC (barely managed to buy the parts as the pandemic was starting).

So as the pandemic was in full force, I had enough functioning spare parts to make one gaming PC that would have been mid-tier 6 years prior. I put it in our unfinished basement and planned to mostly use it for playing videos or music while I worked out, maybe do some light stuff like personal email or web browsing or light gaming- since I started working remote full-time I didn't want to spend much time in my office when I wasn't working anymore.

So I had to choose an OS for it. Pirate Windows? Buy Windows? At that point I was constantly running into issues with Windows on our machines. Updates forcing themselves on us. My wife's machine has upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 8 on its own somehow and was pretty terrible until she moved to Windows 10. I had tons of driver issues with the audio interface I used for music production. Windows had been getting slower and less responsive and had been rough on the older hardware. So I installed Mint Cinnamon.

There's still a lot of things that are frustrating and annoying. More advanced things that almost no one would ever want to do are way easier, while simple everyday tasks make you jump through hoops. Installing programs from the default repository is great, but good fucking luck if what you want isn't there. But it performs way better, is way more customizable, doesn't have the spyware. Works way better with my audio interface.

Eventually I got an OrangePi and set it up as a Pi-Hole with Debian. I got a steam deck and love it. My wife got a laptop with Windows 11 and hated it so much I set it up to dual-boot Mint Cinnamon too.

Linus Torvalds pointed a gun at my head and said "give up Windows, or else..."

Linux requires tinkering and Windows doesn't? Is that some alternate-universe version of Windows? In my experience, the difference is social/psychological. When Windows fucks up, "everybody uses it," so the blame falls on the masses, not the user, who was just going along with what's normal and expected. People sort of mentally elide memory of the Windows fuck ups, because that's just how Windows is.

Linux is different and weird, and you have to stray from the herd to use it. Straying from the masses is scary, because when Linux fucks up, it's your fault for being contrary. That threat to one's place in the social order is quite memorable. Hence the reluctance of Windows users, who hate it, to even consider trying another OS that they know nothing about.

I never switched from Windows. I never used Windows as my main OS. I had an Amiga, then learned Unix on SunOS, so I was used to being weird. Once I got a PC, I used FreeBSD. It did require a lot of fiddling back in those days, and when I got tired of that, I switched to Ubuntu, which was amazing in that it Just Worked(tm). (Aside from manual installation of the Windows driver for the PCMCIA WiFi card with NDISWrapper.)

(I still do tinker with it, and sometimes break it, but the base OS has been rock solid. I noticed the other day that my main PC was installed with Ubuntu 18.04, and upgraded to 24.04.)

Windows is such a horrible experience and MS is such a horrific company.

First it was for performance, OpenSuse back in like 2004, since then its just what I'm familiar with. I don't feel like I need to fight the OS like I do on windows machines.

Sometimes I have to use windows in a VM or I need some Software that only works on 2000/XP (psxn00b sdk) and for that I have an old machine that I use.

I was always curious but never moved over completely because I had this idea that it was difficult to run things (games, etc). I had a laptop with dual boot with Ubuntu for the longest time, then I started to use WSL to code.

The thing that made me finally switch was the steam deck. It showed me it was possible and now we don't have a single machine with Windows at home.

Thinking about it now, I don't know why everyone kept recommending to use Ubuntu, it was probably one of the main reasons why it took me so long to switch.

Freedom. No company tells me what I can and cannot do with MY machine.

poverty; i couldn't afford a windows license.

told this story before but windows 10 force rebooted overnight after spending hours fucking with it so it doesn't, while still being able to update manually.

lost me quite a bunch of work that was rendering in the background and the important deadline. lost the will to further put up with microsoft.

wiped a windows partition with grub while trying to install an iso to a usb stick (just woke up and thought that was a good idea to be doing), realised my mistake, had bad ram at the time and so i bit the bullet and installed linux cause windows wouldn't get past the initial install screen, 2 pcs later and i'm still rocking linux. switched in the tail end of october 2018 and i laugh at the state of windows ever since then.

I have been a casual user of gnu/linux since Ubuntu, and was very curious and interested by the concept of libre/ open-source. I'm still a casual user now, but have fully switched to Manjaro when Proton became official and I could finally just start gaming on linux. It was rough at first, but now I can play seamlessly on a system that isn't bloated and doesn't require a live colonoscopy to even work. I love Manjaro for its ease of use. Even my mother can use it.

I was an edgy teenager and wanted to be different. I was already kind of into coding and it made it quite easy to try out different languages and environments.

In those days I had fun finding equivalents to Windows-only apps like MSN, and finding games that worked in Linux like UT2004 and TrueCombat:Elite. It was never a perfect solution so I always kept, and still do keep, a Windows installation around for gaming. I don't give a shit if MS harvests my data - what are they gonna do, advertise to me? Good luck with that. But for day-to-day stuff I am far too used to how Linux works to go back. I figure Windows has improved a lot in terms of reliability and usability since those days (and if you don't care about data harvesting or really old hardware, those are the remaining major reasons not to want to use Windows nowadays) so it might be that if I were in the same position today I'd never make the switch, but hey.

It means I don't really like the religious OS wars that erupt here. Like OK, there are MS irritations we're not dealing with, but what I am dealing with is that some esoteric combination of events means that a couple of times a week my laptop stops recognising my dock and all USB devices connected to it until I reboot - including if I plug the devices in directly to the laptop!

If I were just some random user who had just switched, that would send me back to whichever OS I had come from in an instant. So I feel like it's important to be sensitive and empathetic to that.

Multiple reasons. Performance issues, bloatware, bullshit system requirements, forcing unnecessary and often times useless features on it's users, restricting how much control the user has over the OS, and a lot of smaller issues that just ruin the over all user experience.

While I will admit that Linux isn't perfect, the experience I've had with Linux overall has just been so much better. There are also a lot of small benefits to Linux that Microsoft will never offer. For example, if you have a computer with an older GPU, not only will it still work with newer Linux distros, it may also support newer versions of OpenGL and Vulkan. The first computer I ever used Linux on had an Intel HD Graphics 3000, and on top of getting surprising performance on Linux compared to Windows, the supported version of OpenGL went from 3.0 to 3.3, which doesn't seem like much but, at least at the time, a lot of applications had OpenGL 3.3 as their minimum required version.

As for why I didn't use MacOS or ChromeOS. I've heard that MacOS is mostly fine but I'd have to buy a brand new computer to run MacOS and their computers are just too expensive for me. And as for ChromeOS, I am aware that I could have used ChromeOS Flex but in addition to the fact that it still has some of the issues I have with Windows, I have concerns about how much I actually be able to do with it. Google is very vague when it comes to explaining the differences between ChromeOS and ChromeOS Flex.

If ChromeOS Flex allows the use of android apps just as much as the main version of ChromeOS, then I do think that might be a good choice for people who want to drop Windows but don't want to use Linux. I do have limited experience with ChromeOS because my mom owns a Chromebook and it seems fine and they are pretty cheap, but I'd imagine that most people don't want to buy a new computer just for a different OS.

I want meaningful errors I can troubleshoot. "Oopsie poopsie" error messages tell me nothing.

I like to tinker, I like to have a level of control (or at least the option) of things I own, I like to learn, I like the idea of open source, and from Windows 2000 on I didn't like the direction it was going.

Honestly, I grabbed linux because I wanted something that worked and wouldn't change.

Windows keeps changing, a lot. Now getting to the point where none of my computers could handle 11. So I just said screw it, kept my hardware and now I run Ubuntu

Was not as disruptive as I thought