this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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Linux

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Why did you move from Windows to Linux? (leminal.space)
submitted 2 months ago by umbrellacloud@leminal.space to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Personally, I’m not brand loyal to any particular OS. There are good things about a lot of different operating systems, and I even have good things to say about ChromeOS. It just depends on what a user needs from an operating system.

Most Windows-only users I am acquainted with seem to want a device that mostly “just works” out of the box, whereas Linux requires a nonzero amount of tinkering for most distributions. I’ve never encountered a machine for sale with Linux pre-installed outside of niche small businesses selling pre-built PCs.

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. These two groups of people seem as if they’re very fundamentally different in what they want from a machine, so a user who solely uses Windows moving over to Linux never made much sense to me.

Why did you switch, and what was your process like? What made you choose Linux for your primary computing device, rather than macOS for example?

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[–] altphoto@lemmy.today 5 points 2 months ago

Windows 98 ate my college photos and music when a virus made my HDD take a click of death dump.

Fuck you to whoever wrote that virus. Since then I gave various linuses a go and I did so for a while each just learning how to be as lazy as possible while using linux. Later I had to run windows for some cad software. But after it corrupted my Linux several times I gave it the boot into its own drive which is only startable using grub. Grub sits on the Linux drive. My home drive is a big ass Linux formatted drive that mounts into Home/username. That way even if my Linux takes a shit I can reinstall it and boom back to where I left off....solo much further than anything windows could ever imagine. I could even have several linuses all going to the same home folder without any problem.