Linux

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.

Valve releasing Proton.

The need for latex, in 1999.

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.

Tim Cook and Jony Ive.

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.

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.

Windows sucks, I love open source, built my own computer didn't want to pay a 100$

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

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.

I had used Linux almost exclusively between 1999 and around 2005 and then went back to Windows for games. Stayed there until recently and switched back to Linux because of the enshittification of Windows. I even had a pro license and hadn’t gotten everything pushed into my face but it was still too annoying what Microsoft did.

While not everything is working smoothly yet (especially Wayland and sound), it feels a lot smoother and is so much more fun. I was especially surprised how great the games work. If I had know that I would probably have switched back to Linux sooner.

A multitude of factors aligning together.

I was aware windows was kinda shit for quite a long time, but as a gamer linux was just not good for me back in the day. (This assumption that I couldn't game stayed until after the switch)

Fast-forward to university, I was given by my parents an old laptop with an old unsupported Linux Mint version on it, didn't quite like it I thought it looked ugly and old and I was still assuming it worked like Windows, which kead to a bad experience, but it didn't bother me too much since I mostly only used firefox and libreoffice, then that laptop broke and got a new one with windows. For this laptop I had assumed that playing videogames wasn't an option, laptop wasn't powerful enough but still managed to run a few games.

A year~ish later one of the courses teaches a very little basic python, I started to like programming things and started using the WSL because it was so much easier to work in there, but I found it to be annoying to have to copy and paste every time I edited something, so I watched a few YouTube videos and did some research, waited to finish my STALKER Anomaly game and then ended up switching to Linux, no dual boot. I already used mostly FOSS software like LibreOffice and Firefox so it was not too hard. Linux also got me more interested in learning computers in general (I was already somewhat tech savvy but way more now) so after 1 and a half years I am definitely not looking back.

Also swotched my desktop, and found out that gaming works perfectly fine too now and all of my games run, so I literally have no reason to use windows any more.

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.

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

• Open source community
• The diversity in Linux distributions
• Trying something different from Windows
• Ubuntu interested me when I read about it a long time ago in the computer school textbook, although I didn't try it in practice back then
• Experiencing Windows 11 on my father's computer .... It was a little disgusting, especially when it's not activated

-Nearly 2 years when the warranty period ends , then I can go full-time to 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.

My story I guess.

For a long time (until end of 2023) I used ahoy Win7 on cheap 2012 laptop (2-core 1500 MHz 6GB RAM), and influenced by mentions of Linux efficiency tried dualboot installing Arch, Manjaro, Ubuntu, maybe even Mint. Also much earlier (maybe 2009?) couple of times tried Puppy Linux on CD my dad gave me a long time ago. Ubuntu stuck, and sometimes I primarily used it, returning to Win to games (my major use case for PC). So when I finally built an actual PC I was already familiar enough to try and actually commit and install Ubuntu as sole OS. And it kinda just worked. Probably important thing is CPU and GPU used are both AMD.

Yes there are some quirks, some bugs (i.e. sometimes frozen apps in Wayland lock whole system, or still don't know how to get screen recording to work properly), also that snap drama I don't understand, also trying to use some things from Windows through Wine is pain in the ass and a huge timesink (and no guarantee it'll eventually work), specifically modding software for Win-only games. But generally, thanks to Wine and Proton, and probably also more attention of gamedevs to Linux userbase, my gaming needs are covered.

Also I joined Lemmy during big Spez drama, so I've had general influence of "another example of Win enshittification".

Also my sister has Win10 laptop, and I really don't like some things like integrated in start menu internet search, or clusterfuck the Control Panel (where are all settings should be) has become.

A lot of 'Also' here, sorry.

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.

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.

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.

Curiosity and desire to learn.

I switched for good in 2019, when I realized that I was wasting more time getting windows into a usable state than the average arch user.

Privacy and usability were the biggest reasons for me.

windows "8" ..final straw. blech

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.

Windows Vista and curiosity.

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 me... Iykyk

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.

It was always obvious to me that as long as I was using closed source software that any day could come when the vendor would screw me over. In fact, it could have been running it with bundles and bundles of spyware already and I had no way of knowing it. So I pledged to start using open source software only, to make sure that wouldn't happen. First, I migrated all my desktop applications to open source alternatives. Then I finally made the switch.

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

Bought a Raspberry Pi back in 2019 or 2020 with the intention of making a little handheld emulation game console. I tried Ubuntu on it and thought it was neat enough to install on a secondary drive on my main computer to tinker with. At that point, I didn't care so much about the FOSS/Unix philosophy, I was just fascinated by the technical aspect; my computer can run an entire other OS besides Windows, which was the only thing I knew for almost two decades.

Now I exclusively use Linux and would only use Windows if it was an absolute necessity.

I was just bored during the pandemic

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

Back in the early days of Win10, an updated messed up my system and I ended up with duplicated icons. Wasn't happy, but didn't feel that it was that big of a deal to warrant a full reinstall.

2 years ago I built myself a new desktop and decided to try installing Linux straight away. Haven't looked back since.

Software dev was nicer & easier + digital art tools being more than servicable (where Adobe had just moved to a subscription service in 2013) while the philosophy matches my own for privacy & freed. I don’t like compromising on that philosophy unless absolutely necessary or being cost-prohibitve (where convenience is a low priority). In 2016 after seeing the Nvidia 10 series GPU numbers (still primary GPU ha), I built a new PC & vowed that this wouldn’t be a dual-boot machine, & the rest was history.

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

Many reinstalls of windows 10

Something in windows was causing it to be impossible to run docker containers with ease without needing to mess with some virtualization setting in some deep hidden windows settings paanel

Wal-Mart had redhat 5 on sale and the xplane screenshot on the back handled the rest.

I've been on Mac for around 10 years and the price of the hardware was a huge motivator. The 13" Framework came out and I jumped on that modular bandwagon. I do still use my Mac as a video ripping station but otherwise I earn all my money as a dev on Fedora 40 and have a secondary tablet with NixOS on it, because the draw of an easily reproducible system is strong.

Now Apple just continues to do stupid shit and I just want to own my computer without them looking over my shoulder and charging me a huge price to do it.

I do need to upgrade the Framework (started with the cheap i5 chip) to the fastest AMD variant available so that streaming works better without the fan spinning up, or just build a desktop for streaming and video work.