Microsoft.

Honestly, the Reddit migration. I switched to Lemmy about 6 months ago. A few of the largest communities at that time were Self Hosting and Privacy related. Those naturally lead me to looking into Linux. From there I started minor self hosting on a Pi. Then, after a rather long walk through the Yongsan Electronics Market in Korea I built my own Homelab, and last week, I moved my primary desktop to Pop_OS. Honestly, It's been a blast. A few learning curves, but the ability to have near complete control over my setup, and the increased self reliance has been delightful.

r/unixporn got me interested, but the FOSS philosophy is what resonated with me.

Interest in alternative operating systems. I'm old so I got into it back when Windows 95 had just come out. Mandrake was my first distro, but I was also weirdly interested in BeOS and OS/2 Warp.

Started using it at a techno-necromancy job I had. Once I realized that you could use it to do things that Windows made needlessly difficult, I was hooked.

There was a ton of software sourcecode posted to the comp.sources.unix usenet group that I wanted to check out. The problem is all that software was in shar format, and there was no way to extract those files on msdos. I found Yggdrasil Linux on CD at a local software store and decided to check it out. Been using Linux in one form or another ever since.

Vendors don't always update hardware drivers for other versions of those proprietary operating systems. Linux doesn't depend on vendors directly for updated drivers. Now I can use my old hardware without being stuck on an old OS version.

My first Linux installation was based on curiosity, which was short lived, because Linux (Mandrake) at the time was too challenging.

I moved permanently onto Linux after I could no longer use my SCSI card on Windows 7. I find Linux a joy to use even though I don't do any programming, and rely on ChatGPT to create scripts.

Windows Vista on a laptop with 2gb ram :)

Great suggestion by a fellow IT student to try arch, so I learn the system from the ground up.

I got sick of windows being an abusive pain in the ass.

Well if I remember correctly I was actually first told to use Solaris (Unix) because I knew just a teeny bit of HTML and had done some programming on my TI calculator. I had to use a Sunray workstation and learn ssh and emacs.

My boss took pity on me and bought me a computer (to be paid off with some extra hours). I attempted to install Debian on it, and failed. I tried Ubuntu and it worked (somewhere around 2005ish). It was all downhill from there. I did try some other distributions like arch but by that point I had a laptop and while I technically did get WiFi working and it was fun, I preferred the better out of the box hardware support you got from Ubuntu back in those days.

I've stuck when Ubuntu for the most part ever since. Even though the Linux guru at my university called it "Linux for office rats". I've tried some other variants like Mint and while I liked them more eventually I'd have to deal with the fact that the trickier stuff I want to run like CUDA just seems easier to get working. Pre built packages usually target Ubuntu.

I've played with alternative window managers like i3 here and there but once again I find it hard to make sure the real basic WiFi/sound/etc works the way I want it to and end up writing my own i3 status scripts or running with some sort of gnome-session thingy.

At the moment by desktop is basically "I don't care but there are shortcuts for my browser, graphical emacs, and the kitty terminal".

I'm not an evangelist because let me tell you from experience: your in-laws will not actually thank you for installing a low resource xfce based distribution on their computer. They will be unhappy and you'll get support calls. They want windows, just free.

But for me personally it's the most productive environment for what I do. I do not find macOS to be more stable or frankly to be more coherent. I love their font rendering and hidpi support though.

The constant OneDrive ads. I could ignore the fact that W11 is essentially spyware, but it kept fucking annoying me with ads and I had enough of it. After programming in Linux, I don't want to go back to W11. Troubleshooting is so much easier bc the CLI is heavily used. Package managers make my life easier too. Linux is good 👍

I've used Windows since 3.1. I was installing Windows 10 on a laptop a few years ago. The changes they'd made to core functions were so frustrating, I felt like I didn't know how to use Windows anymore.

I figured I might as well try a new OS. It's not like I loved Windows.

I did a dual boot with Windows and Ubuntu. I never logged into Windows again.

I'm not obsessed or an evangel. I don't code. I don't mess around with the OS. I browse the internet and do some piracy. That's it.

I think it's great that Linux is mature enough that a dumb user like me can easily switch over from Windows.

I've been using Linux on my laptop and work/school computers for a while now, but what made me switch my desktop to Linux was emulator performance. Then I saw the progress Proton had achieved and news of MS putting ads everywhere and I doubled down wiping the windows partition for more disk space.

Being able to actually own the operating system I use, and being able to research and understand anything pertaining to it if I wanted to. There are too many black boxes in computing as it is.

I don't really know too much about Linux, I'm still using it fairly mindlessly as a workstation- oriented end user.

I don't really go out of my way to recommend Fedora (for example) to other people unless they're already specifically looking into playing around with a distro.

@mac
Windows was too slow on my older laptops. Installing Linux (Ubuntu) on it gave it new life.

It was free and supposedly better than Windows? 😂

Poverty - started by buying old Macs, put linux on it to do usefull stuff, stuck with it ... but not the hardware.

Security, Software Updates

The stereotypical story actually happened to me.

My parents had the habit of disabling the wifi if I didn't want to do chores.

So I looked up how to hack the neighbors' wifi. People online told me it wasn't possible, unless I installed "Kali Linux". I tried it and failed. I looked up why and people told me I should start with a beginner distro, lik Ubuntu. So I installed that.

My employer trying to force spyware on our work computers (that was only available for Win and Mac)

When I was in college, two older classmates whom I respected got into a hilarious argument of why Gnome was awesome and now eats rocks (their views, I had no views).

Their elaborate and very specific descriptions of functions and inconveniences drew up a picture of functionality and a e s t h e t i c I had never experienced on windows. So I proceeded to install a distro and take it for a ride

Servers run on linux and also don't have licensing bullshit attached. And when my desktop windows installation shit the bed, linux got installed instead.

I've always been curious, but I was working through The Odin Project earlier this year--it recommended to use Linux. Been using Windows less and less as the year has gone on.

I started on an AT&T 3b2 running SVR3 before windows existed. It was a natural progression.

The realization that Windows was stealthily making dozens of internet connections. I don't know what they were for and there was no reasonable way to disable it.

I'm an evangelist so far as to recommend people to switch to Linux or BSD. But people always find some reason to stay on Windows - "I will switch when Linux starts doing ". (Not gaming). It often feels like they're searching for a problem to justify not switching. I don't bother fighting with such people.

I'm obsessed with modifying Linux to my liking. Programming was another one of my reasons for switching. These days, I program components of my desktop to suit my needs.

I had a laptop that had physical damage and I wanted to see what could happen by switching to Linux.

It didn't help the laptop but I stuck with the new hotness and here we are a decade later.

It’s on my pi hole and my steam deck. While I’m not crazy into it I am thinking of building a pc with it in the not too distant future

High school computer class. I was like: "Hey! This is pretty cool." And the rest is history.

Compiz

Windows

No joke! A friend told me it was "the year of the Linux desktop", because of all the recent breakthroughs in drivers and usability.

I love how this story doesn't even remotely let you guess what year it was.

I dont know if this is still the case, but Windows used be very bad with downloads through Steam. They would often drop to zero throughput. Also Alt-tabbing in an out games without the system crashing also seemed to work better on linux. So for me gaming was actually better on linux.

I don't think I've turned into an evangel yet. However when I've passed on a computer I'd just put a fresh install of fedora on it.

Windows 8 taking away the skeumorphic, frutiger aero theme for a plain boring flat theme as well as going with a very anti-desktop look with the start menu. I still haven't gone back to Windows and probably never will for my personal computer (work computer is different) since I don't see them ever bringing back the fun Vista and 7 look.

Each Linux VM requires fewer resources and takes less time to maintain compared to Windows so I can run more of the servers I want.

https://www.evl.uic.edu/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman although I had experience with unix from college. bit of a free software evangel but linux wise im just a pragmatist.

Vista… what a horrible piece of crap when it came out.