Linux

My first programming experience, an online class, was in a Linux VM. Linux made programming easy and delightful, Windows always made it a huge pain. As time went on, more of what I did was easier on Linux, and now everything is.

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.

For me, Windows 11 mandatory account, and Internet on setup. Yes there are bypasses, yes I could upgrade from 10. But where I'm from, having the internet isn't always a given.

So imagine dropping $500-$1000 on a new laptop booting it up for the first time, and learning that its now a brick since Windows refuses to let you use it since you have no internet. No Pro license can unbork you from this.

Even MacOS isn't that dumb (for now).

The account thing is a personal beef I have with windows. I.e. my PC my account, why does it need to be online, I have no reason for it.

So my plan was to migrate to FOSS or proper cross platform software for work, see if Linux works, and if it doesn't move to MacOS. So far Linux Mint has been stable.

What did it in were the semi-annual mandatory feature updates, which restored the invasive settings and bloat I worked hard to remove. Already being acquainted with Linux at that point, I began dual-booting and later having Windows on an entirely separate machine for a few stubborn programs I needed for work.

What made me acquainted with Linux was looking for alternatives after the loss of theming options and the start menu in Windows 8. That eventually brought me to my present Debian setup with the Chicago 95 theme, which recreates (and even improved) the workflow and stability I had grown to love in Windows 2000.

The first time I ever booted into a Linux iso, however, was to migrate files off of my machine, which was excruciatingly slow to transfer files under XP.

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.

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

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.

It wasn't clear that windows 95 would beat OS/2, and OS/2 was clearly the better so I installed that over windows 3.1. Then in college I got introduced to BSD. I still prefer BSD, but sometimes linux has things that BSD doesn't so I use linux in places.

Windows.

I wanted to create a development environment, so Linux was the natural choice. Then I realized how great current Linux is after I struggled with it in the past. Nowadays I read daily of Microsofts fuckups and am so glad that it doesn't concern me anymore. I deleted my windows drive after half a year and turned it into another Linux machine for my living room (htpc). Best time to switch was yesterday. Second best time is today.

I wanted to customize Windows 10. Customizing Windows was too hard and unsafe (requiring many "bloated" third party tools).

Then, after seeing some cool themes, I realized Linux is way more customizable. So I tried Linux Mint and now I use NixOS.

windows "8" ..final straw. blech

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

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.

I had this old laptop I bought when I was in high-school. The fun thing was it was a laptop with Ubuntu installed. But at that time I had no idea of what linux was, or even the idea of operating system was not very clear to me. I was pretty afraid of trying something new and asked someone to install windows on it. For 4 or 5 years it worked great. Then, suddenly the keyboard started to have lots of problems. Even after sending it to repair 3 times the problem remained. At that time I came to know about Linux and used it a fair bit in my university and became pretty fond of it, so I just decided, fuck windows, and installed Ubuntu. Although, this was not exactly a full time switch to linux. After the lockdown was lifted, I bought a new laptop with Windows installed (at that time I couldn't a laptop other than Mac that didn'thave windows installed) and I used windows for like 1 year. The laptop being 2in1 was a bit skeptical about how good the linux support will be. But I eventually had to switch to linux for my dissertation and never looked back.

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

I was just bored during the pandemic

My Surface Pro 4 was getting long in the tooth. My best friend, who uses Arch btw, kept nagging me about switching until he gave me his old laptop when he upgraded. Soon after that, my cat knocked over a beer into it and killed it. So I bought a Framework 13" and put PopOS on it, and also got a Steam Deck. I'm all in on Linux now, except for an old desktop that gets rarely used.

And now I keep my beer on the floor.

Windows 8.1. I switched to Linux because of Windows 8.1.

My first couple of computers had AmigaOS and even from the start Windows felt like complete garbage in comparison, but eventually I had to buy a PC to keep up with the times. After that I kept looking for alternative OS:es, tried Linux dual booting but kept going back to Windows since all the programs and hardware I needed to use required it. When I finally decided to go full time Linux, some time between 2005 and 2010, it was because I felt like I was just wasting my life in front of the computer every day. With Windows it was too easy to fire up some game when I had nothing else to do, and at that time there were barely any games for Linux so it removed that temptation. But that has ofc. changed now and pretty much all Windows games work equally well on 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've been keeping an eye on Linux since the late 90s. It took me not having to use any non-Linux software or hardware on the computer in question. Currently I have two laptops running Linux, one has Windows in case I need it (which so far has turned out to be never), and I have a workstation that has Linux as a secondary OS but I'm always in Windows on that one because of software and hardware.

Bitlocker.

I'll decrypt it one day...

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

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.

Tbh my uni gave me a PC with no OS on it. I wasn't going to pay for an OS for work so I installed Ubuntu. I liked it, so I also switched on my private laptop.

TLDR: it being free, then liking it

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.

I'd been using linux for work for a couple years and it was going fine. I had a pretty crappy laptop at home with limited storage and I was constantly wrestling with Windows storing update stuff, installing adware during updates, etc.

I'd heard of proton and about how well it was going with it, so I had an idea linux gaming was possible.

Eventually something happened during a windows update that required I reinstall the OS and I just pulled out the flash drive I used to install linux on my work machine and tried it out. Eventually I did have to dual boot (on a bigger drive) for some games, but nowadays I'm all linux everywhere.

I didnt leave because I was tired of windows, i stayed because it was better for development. I learned about other benefits later once I started using it

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.

...Windows me... Iykyk

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.

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.

Vista, that's what ruined it for me. I had XP Pro, and I loved that it had all the features (IIS, FTP Server, etc.). But when Vista came out, it had so many different versions, each one a gatekeeper for different features. That was just too much. XP was the last one I used for my personal use. I jumped into Linux, head first, and I've never looked back.

Curiosity and desire to learn.

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.

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.

There was some kind of an upgrade and it had privacy issues in the eula. I was dual booting for a while already.

A mix of factors for me. Firstly, privacy concerns, settings reverting themselves after updates, and the looming threat of Windows 11 were I to get a new PC. Stuttery performance on my already 3 year old laptop at the time (I still use the same laptop. It is now 6 years old and still runs great with Linux). General bloat, driver problems, and instability issues.

I did not make the switch all at once, but thankfully my laptop has two NVMe slots, which made dual booting easier while I got more used to using Linux as my daily driver. Within about a year, I was booting into Windows less and less, and eventually hardly ever once I found ways to use Linux for everything I needed.

Steam play. I spent nine years with linux as my main work os. Then I'd come home and game on windows. Once Steam play was mature I setup a dual boot to give it shot. I think I booted into windows twice after that.

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.