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?
These posts are funny, literally everyone has an answer so you get like over a hundred replies.
I moved away from MacOS in the past few years to finally full-time Linux after using it recreationally since the early 2000s. I’ve only really used Windows on work computers (or school back in the day).
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.
Windows 8 was an abomination, I was still using a flip phone and so I was extra grossed out.
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 used Linux in a VM and WSL for several years, and I occasionally used it on an old laptop. It was in 2022 on the week I installed Cygwin that I thought, “I do more Linux stuff than Windows stuff. Why don’t I just straight up use Linux?”
I created a test install on a secondary drive, which has now been my main install for years and has been moved to a bigger drive twice.
I got very used to Linux, and Windows gave me no reason to come 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.
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.
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.
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!
Microsoft wants to have its cake and eat it too… they want to become Amazon while having a full head of hair and a stable marriage… its not going to happen…
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 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.
Ubuntu is great, I’ve heard good things about Arch. Arch people are similar to vegans: they’re really annoying, they announce themselves, they preach to people… they tend to have good opsec and own some sort of mask and bolt cutters… they like taking pictures of their pets…
I moved from Ubuntu for the same reasons I moved from Windows, to be honest. I felt like I was losing control of what my system was doing. All this bullshit being forced on me that I didn’t like. I wanted to be able to pick my own DE without uninstalling something else first. Major upgrades would fail sometimes, etc.
Installing Arch was a challenge I was willing to take on. Learned a lot.
I don’t share the trope about Arch Linux users being annoying per se, but the joke about “Arch btw” is just fun to participate in lol. But I don’t think Arch users preach that much. I see way more preaching about Fedora and NixOS, e.g. And like, Mint. 😆 Meanwhile Arch users are just silently enjoying themselves. 🤷♂️
So you’re saying you don’t own a Guy Fawkes mask?
Not what I was saying, no, but it is true, that I don’t own one. 😄
Basically, im getting old and weird and less willing to abide corporate fuckery.
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.
Windows is such a horrible experience and MS is such a horrific company.
