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?
I problem solved and tinkered all day everyday on windows, linux just worked and used less ram, I immediately noticed I had many more tabs open and no lag
I web browse and use blender , all I lost eas the pirated software I barely touched and I guess I wasted 6monthd learning houdini, but it transferrs to blender (its paid and hard to pirate on linux)
I didn’t appreciate MS’s anti-consumer practices (subscription fee for an OS, invasive telemetry and tracking, fucking ads in the goddamn Start menu), etc.). I installed Mint a couple years back and have almost zero regrets.
I have never owned a windows machine.
And I doubt most people can honestly claim their primary computing device is something other than their smart phone.
Instability in my WIndows NT 4 development machine. I’d been using Linux as a hobbyist for several years, but switched to it at work so I had a machine that didn’t crash every few hours.
I don’t remember anymore (it was around 20 years ago), probably out of curiosity, like most things I do.
Originally I switched just because I didn’t have a Windows install available and Linux was convenient enough to just download and stick on there. But then once I got used to using it I massively preferred it. I’m the opposite of what you’re describing, I don’t want “problem solving and tinkering”, I like Linux because it basically just does what I want it to do. Windows does what Microsoft wants it to do lol.
I have a laptop and a handful of desktops between my office and home. Some run Windows and some run Linux. I simply choose which one matches my task best.
Systems where I’m writing server-side code are going to be Linux. Systems that run jobs in the back end such as my self hosting stuff are all Linux. Systems where I’m doing email, documents, and general web browsing are going to be Windows.
Of course, my Windows systems have WSL, and my Linux systems can run Windows apps in virt. These days the line is super blurred and it would no doubt be possible to use only one if I were willing to give up some native app running.
Started 20 years ago. It made sense from the first time I had to buy a pc and deal with windows. Previously had been Mac person, and just hated Windows. Linux felt different and had potential for flexibility and options.
Did Linux week every year since then. Shame it took 18 years for linux to get to where I could game on it and not feel like I was having a 3rd rate experience compared to windows, performance wise.
Been running EndeavourOS (aka Arch btw) with KDE plasma for 2 years. Still have windows on a smaller disk but Linux is my primary OS.
Happy to share my build guide (just a text file and some backed up configs).
I just had a Plex server die on me because I dared to use ReFS and storage spaces 10 years ago.
The performance uplift I got moving to Proxmox and ZFS filesystem was STUPID. And way more stable.
Lots more command line stuff, but in the age of AI assistants and things I don’t feel that hampered by my lack of syntax knowledge.
Obviously this is about a server though, not my gaming rig with is still on W11. But that’s said Steam has moved things along to a point where I feel like gaming on Linux is within reach.
I had an overwhelming feeling of corporations telling me what they are selling and that I just have to deal with it. Apple, microsoft, adobe, all subscriptions that lock you in and hold you hostage.
Maybe I am just being over the top, but I miss feeling like I OWNED something. With linux? I own my laptop again.
The last Windows OS I used was XP, around 2004-ish. Even back then, it was obvious to me that, because it was closed source, that they could one day start acting against my interests, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I saw open source as an insurance policy - it prevents vendors from acting maliciously against their users. In that very quaint, old time, nobody believed that MS would ever do something like that, but it didn’t matter - the fact was that they could, so inevitably, they would.
I’m quite proud of how prescient I was when I look at what they’re doing today. No evil is too great to stop a greedy businessman.
Anyway, I decided to just be brave and create a partition on my main drive and install Ubuntu on it. All I needed to get my work done was OpenOffice, LaTeX, a browser, a compiler, Python… Everything worked better in Linux than Windows so even though I was dual-booting, I practically never used Windows again after a couple weeks. Later on, I switched to Debian, and the next laptop that I bought, I just wiped the hard disk and used Linux for the whole thing. I kept the recovery partition because I was paranoid but obviously never needed it.
Today, there’s no doubt in my mind that Linux is the best OS. Sure, Macs have better batteries, but if I’m doing productive work, then I don’t really need more than an hour away from my charger. I could maybe agree that the BSDs are better, but I’ve never tried them.
got sick of trying to make Windows “more private” until I realized I didn’t have to
I grew up with Windows and I switched, because my installation got broken (updates didn’t work), it later got hacked, (I use there is nothing to lose mindset for piracy), and I was too annoyed with Windows. I wanted more privacy and performance from my device, so Linux experience was a nice surprise as it turned out to be so much better.
The thing that finally made me snap was gaming, of all things. Windows 11 would just NOT just leave my GPU drivers alone! If Windows isn’t even better for gaming, what’s the point? As you say, Linux takes a non-trivial amount of work to set up and get used to, but at least once I got it set up I don’t have to constantly fight it like with Windows.
Windows ME happened. At the same time Debian was getting decent and then Ubuntu was released and that seemed to take over the world.
