Enshittification. I never had any technical reasons for leaving Windows. It has its share of annoyances but so does every other OS. What really got to me was the constant pushing of their own products over others. And I don't even want to think about switching to 11. Without the enshittification I would still be using Windows, just because of inertia.

It's not like I hate other operating systems, I just really like the idea of FOSS and try to use it whenever possible.

Windows kept shoving their stupid Edge browser down my throat. Tried every way to remove it and it kept popping back up like malware. Kept annoying me with "upgrade to Windows 11 popups." I've used windows 11 on other people's laptops and was flabbergasted that there were ads on paid software. In addition to that I heard 10 will stop getting security updates next year so I bit the bullet and switched to mint full time. It's worked well for me so far.

I didn't want to have spyware for an os.

Windows 98 really sucked and running Unix at home became an option.

i was a starving college student with $20 to my name and a dead windows me desktop computer that had an entire semester's worth of school work trapped inside of it.

i had read about linux before and saw that i could buy a couple of mandrake cd's from a magazine at circuit city for $5 or borrow $169 from someone to buy a windows xp installation disk.

i bought the magazine; installed linux; and taught myself (with google's help) how to copy all of my school work onto a usb drive. i finished those papers using the school's computer laboratories; and then kept on using the linux installation from then on in 2002 until now.

Been 100% Linux on all my personal devices for about 4 years.

I just got tired of being treated like I was either an idiot or a criminal by Microsoft. Plus the way they kept forcing their bloatware and trash ads on the OS that I already paid for!

I decided I didn't care what I had to give up, it was worth it to be rid of Microsoft's clutches forever. Switched to Linux and I've never looked back.

Turns out, I actually didn't have to sacrifice much at all, and the few things I don't have anymore are nothing compared to the benefits of using Linux and FOSS software.

Everything works better for me too, more stable, updates are rarer and wayyyyy faster when I push them. No more fighting with AMD driver hell in Windows, no more weird lockups or crashes, a million times more customization options, and zero bloat or spyware installed by default on my system.

Solid gaming support

The final straw for me was Microsoft reinstalling software I had removed with updates, as well as installing crapware like Candy Crush, all in the background and without permission or notifying me. I left Windows back in August 2021 for Arch.

Until recently I had kept a Windows VM with a GPU passthrough set up until I decided I was done with Destiny 2. Now the only remnant of Windows in my life is a simple desktop in my living room that has a game I can only play on Windows, which is currently being ported to PS5. Once that port is released, it'll be converted to a server running some atomic distro and become a fully dedicated server, and Windows will be fully removed from my life, ignoring PCs outside of my control like embedded systems.

At first I was tipping my toes in Ubuntu but kept coming back to Windows as I kept running into stability issues. Googling my issues very frequently kept sending me to the Arch wiki, and I thought "well if they have so much covered, why not use this distro instead". That and 196 subreddit (rule) made me try Arch, and my experience was noticeably better. Barely any crashes and improving Proton compatibility made me use it more and more. I kept a windows install for VR and anti-cheat enabled games until late 2023.

During my transition period (both in Linux and gender lol) between 2021 and now, I kept getting comments "why are you making your life harder with Linux, just use Windows where everything works". Well, nowadays tables have turned and now I get to say "weird it works for me on Linux". Except VR, it's still a mixed experience.

Two things coming together finalized my choice to leave Windows:

• the ability to play almost every game on Linux thanks to Valve
• the fact that you couldn't create a local account during a Windows install (back when I discovered this you still technically could with some workarounds; I don't know if you still can but you shouldn't have to put in any effort IMHO)

Two things:

1. I have an old refurbished Thinkpad that I originally bought as a backup navigation computer for a month-long sailboat voyage. It had Windows originally and was "fine", by which I mean slow but acceptable for navigation purposes. When I was forced to update to Windows 10, the performance was no longer tolerable, so I hardly used it for about four years. I also had a Windows gaming PC, so no big deal.
2. About a year ago, I got a shiny new Windows gaming PC. I was trying to decide what to do with my old gaming PC, which had the same problem as my laptop: it could barely crawl under the weight of years of Windows OS "upgrades". I got it into my head that I should build a media PC with it since Netflix kind of sucks now. That lead me down the self-hosting and Linux rabbit hole.

Before I knew it, I had my old gaming PC running Proxmox and attached to my main television, I bought an old Dell Poweredge server (also running Proxmox), an old Compellant storage shelf with 20 SAS drives, a Tripp-Lite UPS, and a 24-port network switch. I also discovered Docker. So, now I fucking love Linux and I'm a fiend for self-hosting and media streaming. And how do I centrally control all of this infrastructure? That's right, my old Thinkpad got a new lease on life running Arch and I can run all of my server infrastructure using the terminal, emacs, and web interfaces. Fuck yeah.

And what happened to my beautiful, expensive new Alienware Windows gaming PC? After playing a couple hundred hours of Cyberpunk, it just sits there. Now I'm addicted to Dwarf Fortress on my old Arch Thinkpad and I don't think about high-spec AAA games much.

I had no idea this would happen when I started this Linux journey. Life is strange.

I got a new PC. I installed Windows on it. I felt dirty, so I said fuck it, and installed Linux instead.

It wasn't any one specific thing, but a lifetime of windows frustrations adding up, on top of a growing frustration with enshittified tools and services in general

That was 4 months ago.

Wobbly windows, rotating cube workspace switcher, and a flaming bonanza animation when a windows was closed.

The year was ~2003

The turning point was when Windows was no longer set and forget. Windows 7 was the last time that was the case before I had to put any real work into it.

I put up with Windows 10 for a bit and wrote a script to neutralise bloat and configure the OS to some saner settings, then I could keep things consistent between installations. That was fine for a while.

But over time Microsoft became more unhinged and my script evolved into several larger scripts in order to deal with the BS. It became an endless cat and mouse game and I found that I was wasting too much of my time maintaining it just to have a OS that was clean of crap.

The last straw was when a botched update gutted the performance of my PC, and Microsoft took several months to fix the issue. I installed Debian which just worked, and it was good timing because Windows 11 was announced shortly afterwards. I've experienced it at work and it's hands down the worst OS I've ever used, and I've used pretty much every version of Windows since 3.1. I think I'd even take Me over it. At least that OS sucked because it was poorly designed. Windows 11 is intentionally hostile to its users.

It wasn't my first rodeo with Linux since I've been on and off with it since 2007. Still, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it works out of the box these days.

A few months later and I had built my new machine. I didn't even bother to install Windows on it. Now I use Arch btw and haven't looked back.

What pushed me over the edge: the threat of Windows screenshotting everything I did.

Absolutely fucking not. Took it all to Ubuntu the day after I heard. Couple days later everything I need was set up & a few months later I haven’t looked back

When Microsoft started enforcing online accounts to use my computer. It was then that I fully jumped ship. I was using Linux way before that for my media server, HTPC, etc., but it was that and the Steam Deck that made me finally fully jump.

I switched in 1997.

The internet was taking off, and it was built on Linux and un*ces. It was just a lot more fun.

Also, C-programming. M$ had just gotten protected memory in NT4.0, but a lot of applications just didn't run on NT. It'd take another three years before protected memory hit mainstream with win2k. No novice programmer wants their computer to bluescreen every time they do a tiny little out of bounds error.

The pandemic and programming.

I was watching some tutorials and saw how easily people used the terminal, and how clunky cmd felt.

Next day I had ubuntu running.

Shit just not working with no way to fix it. I had aux speakers. They didn’t work on windows. Worked on Linux out of the box. Had a micro sd card. Was detected by Windows but couldn’t mount. Try to format. Windows said your card seams to be broken. Worked on Linux out of the box. The main problem wasn’t stuff breaking, it happens on Linux too, but stuff just breaking for no apparent reason and there being no way to fix it made me use Linux full time

The pursuit of Freedom led me to Linux.

Lots of little things, but the straw that broke the camel's back was the constant pop-ups asking me to try out Copilot in Win10, harassing me daily on both on my personal PC and my work laptop.

Windows has been on thin ice since the trash fire that was Win8, and I'd only stuck with it for Nvidia driver support for gaming. I've been watching Proton development for years now, and putting it through its paces on my older PCs every few months, so I knew I was ready to make the switch for about a year before I finally pulled the trigger. I justified putting it off with the thought that "I can build my next PC around an AMD graphics card amd make the switch then."

Then Win11 and all its garbage was announced, AI took off, and Microsoft started pushing their slop on my machine harder than ever. It was too much. I switched to Mint DE on my current machine and haven't looked back.

I wanted to learn programming and I heard Linux was nice. I remember setting up Java on Linux was pain (2012) and I decided to try Linux and see what happens.

I decided to go for a learning experience and installed Arch, I got through the installation and was shown KDE and I was amazed until something weird broke. The utter bliss of customising the UI to my liking was so good.

I then tried Ubuntu, it worked but I was disappointed it wasn't KDE but I liked the part where all the guides online were basically geared towards Ubuntu/Debian setups.

So I checked out KDEs website and I saw KDE Neon and thought "That's the one for me. Based on Ubuntu with latest KDE." not wrong, but not right either. I entered KDE Neon when it was still a dev distro without knowing. Stuff broke every now and then but nothing major. KDE Neon since v6 has been amazing. I've had a couple of Wayland crashes but the bloody thing restores everything in the exact same place, same activity, virtual desktop, size and all and it has only happened once since v6.

KDE just keeps getting better.

Windows 11 serving me ads in the OS was a step too far. Windows 10 already had them as apps in every update that annoyed me, but 11 took them to a new level that was too far for me.

Windows ME

Honestly I got started due to curiosity and well, it turned out Linux was a rabbit hole and so down I went.

For me it's the ability to use my hardware as long as I want after a tech company's EOL. When I was on Windows 7 and it reached EOL my machine was unusable. Couldn't go back because I waited to long. Then I updated my machine and Windows 10's EOL was set and again, machine will be not be safe to use. I switched to Linux before that release date but the way Microsoft does with these EOL dates, for me isn't sustainable. I dont need to buy a new machine every few years. I want my machines to be a usable and secure for as long as I want it to with minimal impact to my finances and stop simply just throwing old machines away. And if I run into a distro that my machine isn't beefy enough for, I have distro-hopped around enough to be able to go to something else but still be in the Linux-verse.

The stuff like, better for privacy, open source etc., those benefits came after.

It used to be just because I was interested. Then life got in between and I ditched it a bit, until Microsoft announced that "find anything you ever did"-feature. I installed Ubuntu again after quite a few years and stayed because I finally did not have to spend 3 days to get my video card working "kinda" and I found out my games actually work. No need to use Windows anymore.

I really liked having a login screen, so I switched to Mandrake from Windows 95

My reasons were more hardware related. When I was a bit younger my parents gave me a netbook which had 32 GB of storage, and Windows used almost all of it. I wanted to do creative projects in my free time, but I couldn't install programs or save any of my work. I would often restart to clear log files and gain a bit more working storage, which was extremely annoying because it took like 5 mins for the computer to finally settle down and be usable.

I eventually got a 32GB flash drive which helped a lot, but it was not enough. With 4GB ram I could only have about 3 browser tabs open, and not all the programs I wanted could be run off the flash drive. It was still resource management hell.

Somehow, some way, I learned about Linux. I got a 128GB microSD, put Mint on it. It truly set me free. I could install the software I wanted, I could make the things I wanted to make, I could open more programs at once, and I could do it all without unbearable lag. I never looked back since.

For me it was partially Windows 10 placing suggested apps and ads in the UI. The other part was just curiosity. After some distro hopping I landed on Mint, then Fedora and finally Arch where I've been for about two or three years.

2 very good reasons: privacy and Big Tech.

Windows 7 being discontinued.

I migrated my HTPC to Linux several years ago, and since then just transitioned more and more of my machines over.

My desktop is the only machine left running Windows at this point due to there being no Freetrack implementation on Linux for sim games

VMs are what really did it for me. I was working at a health care job doing IT. Whenever someone wanted a new server I'd have to buy the hardware install the hardware load Windows server on it load the middleware on it, connect it to the SAN, add it to the complicated backup schedule. Literally anything anyone wanted took me a month.

I threw an ESXi box in connected it to the SAN once, worked out a mirroring backup solution. Now I could slice up one decent size box into dozens of smaller boxes. My real limitation was Windows licensing. Server and CALs and middleware gets pricey quickly. But I can install as much community-based open source as I want.

I started running Linux of the desktop to keep up with technology. Before long the vast majority of my servers were Linux.

I love tinkering through and through. Started learning about Linux on raspberry pis a long time ago, jailbroke a chormebook to make it usable, and went "hey wait, tinkering with this and having more control is so much cooler." Don't need rainmeter when the desktop has customization built in

Programming in C and C++ just seemed way easier on Linux at the time.

The assistants at university would frequently distribute virtualbox images with Ubuntu within which we were supposed to do the homework. At some point I decided that just putting Ubuntu on my laptop directly would be easier because GCC is just right there in the repos, plus I was a little interested anyway.

Then it just kept being easy, for Java, Haskell, Scala, Python, everything was just supported nicely. The network simulators we used were Linux native, the course where we were reverse engineering binaries used GDB, Android development was simple with the tools and simulator being in the repos.

That said for gaming I still use Windows. And my workplace forces me to use macOS.

My final straw was getting a new MacBook Air (I was at that point fine with how UNIX-y macOS was) and realizing I couldn’t dock the laptop to more than one external monitor without some weird hacky third-party software fix. Why, you ask? Well not at all because the laptop technically couldn’t do it, but because Apple said it can’t, because they want to overcharge you on a Pro.

I promptly returned the MacBook, bought a Framework on eBay, and learned NixOS.

10/10, I haven’t looked back since.

Becoming a Communist.

That, and increased gaming support, and a Thinkpad that struggled over time given renewed life with Arch.

Why I switched to Linux (on one laptop, so far) from Windows:

1. Enshitification: Such as login interstitials trying to get me to switch to Edge over and over, and more naggy features added to the task bar and stuff

2. End of support: I was on Win10 (Win11 has even more enshitification), so if I was going to be forced off of Win10, I may as well migrate away from Windows (and sooner rather than later).

3. WSL2 sucks (yet more enshitification): it's more isolated from Windows than WSL1 (and other options, such as Cygwin).

Now, I've only switched to Linux on my laptop (full time; no dual boot!), but I see that as a first step towards migrating other computers in the house to Windows. I'm expecting difficulties when I switch the others (like webcam drivers, or lack of ability to use device configuration or firmware update software like for my Logitech Brio webcam). I also use Blue Iris NVR, which is Windows only, and Linux options don't look as good. So 0% Windows is not looking likely for a while.

What pushed me over the edge was how much worse the user experience became with 8 & 10.

I really disliked the lack of control over updates, settings and defaults being reverted after minor updates, and the constant pushing of Microsoft accounts and services. The data collection and privacy issues certainly didn't help either. I switched from 7 to 10 for a period of time, but eventually started using Linux for everything except for games. I started realizing just how good Linux gaming was getting, and I eventually had one too many issues with my Windows partition and just quit using it entirely.

I don't remember having a lot of the frustrations I hear some talk about when switching, but I think that was because early on I realized I just needed to start figuring out the Linux way of doing things rather than bringing my Windows experience over.

It might sound ridiculous but I switched to Linux to take ownership of the things I own.

The lesson for me was Windows Genuine Advantage in Windows Vista throwing a fit whenever I wanted to make a change to MY computer. In this moment I realized that so long as Microsoft was in my life, I will never truly own the hardware I purchased, the system I built with my own two hands. I was late-teens at the time working a dirty minimum wage job, so this was big to me.

This is a lesson I’ve carried with me the rest of my life and colours all purchasing decisions I make. I’m not giving up my hard earned money if I don’t actually own the product I’m purchasing.

To be fair my Windows experience was far simpler than Linux, if less fulfilling. What got me was a combination of constant attacks on privacy, W11 and the enshittification of the UI as well as general Microsoft corporate tomfoolery (have dealt with them for work, not a fan of their monopolistic EEE tactics).

I just wanted the wobbly windows back in 2007.

I'm glad to see other people go into Linux for positive reasons instead of just hating Windows. What really got me was Compiz. Initially, it was all the crazy effects like wobbly windows, but soon I realized how much I liked the "Workspace" paradigm and then being able to customize things as much as I wanted. Then, the whole free software thing, distro-hopping, the great communities, etc.

Nothing, actually. I just decided one day I was going to install Arch Linux for no reason in particular, and now I'm on OpenBSD. I wish I had that kind of determination these days.

When I was a CS student in the early-mid 90s, my college had Unix only and we had to fight to get a free terminal to complete our assignments.I had a good 486DX with Windows 3.11 and I had heard of Minix, so I could do my assignments in the comfort (?) of my dorm room.

I went to my local technical library to see if they had a box (that sort of places used to carry boxed OSes and specialized software back then). They didn't, but they had this CD with Slackware written on it and the store owner said it was better. So I bought it on a whim.

After many hours and a lot of recompiling the kernel and libraries right and left, the thing finally booted and ran surprisingly stable. My roommate saw it and immediately installed it on his machine. The next days we went buy a couple of 10base2 NICs, some coax and a pair of terminator, and before you know it, we had NFS going.

It was our own Unix network and it was way better than college's :) I never looked back.

I did work with DRDOS as a kernel dev a few years later, which involved reverse-engineering bits of MSDOS 7 (yes, that's the version of MSDOS Windows 95 ran on top of). That's as close to working professionally with MS stuff as I ever got. Other than than, I'm a pure product of the Linux generation baby!

Finding a good MusicBee alternative on linux. I just dual boot into windows whenever I need to convert FLACs and organize it. Otherwise I'm on Linux 99% of the time now.

When I switched it didn't even have anything to do with the enshittification of Windows. I just thought it would be cool to try another OS. Pop_OS was really nice to use and this just so happened to be right around the time Proton was getting really good. I think the only game I was playing that didn't work was Siege, and I ended up preferring using Linux to playing it.

I was a curious 14yo. Tried out OpenSUSE 10.2 (10.3? Can't fully remember) with KDE 3.5 and had a blast.

Videos of the Steamdeck showed me how good gaming on Linux had gotten and that's when I started looking into switching.

I already hated using Windows 10 so didn't take me much convincing to look at alternatives.

I'm not a programmer or work in the I.T. field in anyway. But I have been messing around with computers since I could remember so I'm no stranger to tweaking, breaking and trying to repair things.

Windows Registry

I had recurring issues with registering Bluetooth devices, where they would pair initially but refuse to connect again after a reboot. I couldn't remove the device from saved connections, and registry edits wouldn't save or persist. I'd have to completely uninstall the driver, change the registry, and reinstall the drivers, with restarts between each step, to get it to work for 1-2 days.

Now, having to troubleshoot isn't what turned me away from Windows to Linux. I knew I would run into that plenty on Linux as well, but I came to hate the registry. If I was going to have to go through all this trouble to get things to work, I might as well do it on a system I had more control over. I had worked with different distros on VMs and dual booting before, so when I built a new system, I just skipped Windows entirely.

Honestly? I played around with Linux for a long time inside of VM, but then I moved to a new house and got into "a new life" mood. And then I just couldn't look back on Windows with anything but disgust.

The "AI" garbage on the horizon finally did it for me. I've been using Windows for 30-some-odd years (and DOS before that) and it always had a quirk or two but it mostly just worked, and that was enough for me. Hell, I even jumped on Win 11 when it was still in Insider Preview, just because I wanted the latest. And despite everyone always complaining about 11, for the most part, it did for me as Windows has always done - it just worked, so if it ain't broke, why fix it?

Not that I hated Linux, I just always seemed to have an excuse. "Oh, the last time I tried to install it I was stuck at a CLI" sure, almost 20 years ago. "Well, I'm a huge gamer and Linux just doesn't have the support", "Man, KDE Plasma on the Steam Deck runs great and looks a lot like a fresh Windows install... ahhh, it'd be such a pain to migrate though."

Anyway, I set up Arch on a "dual boot" partition a couple weeks ago I say "dual boot" because I haven't booted into Windows in a week. Feels good, man. I should have done it sooner.

I will say though, if any other potential Windows refugees are reading... Migrate your Steam library to an ext4/btrfs/other Linux partition. You can successfully mount your Windows NTFS partitions. You might even be able to get them to mount as read/write. You might even be able to get Steam to read the directories! But it's not worth the headache, and in my experience it's a lot easier to get Windows to mount a btrfs partition. My Windows install is the last NTFS partition on my system, and I'll keep it around for a while in case I run into something that just won't play nice with Linux, but that's it.

I was tired of Microsofts monopolistic shenanigans. So when Ubuntu 5.10 came out in 2005, and was extremely well done, it was time to switch to Linux. Because Linux was finally polished and functional enough to actually be at least as good as Windows.
Admittedly there were a period of dual booting for games. But that isn't necessary today, as we now have thousands of games that work on Steam.

You can say that what it took for me, was for Linux to become good enough to use as a daily driver. I'd say today it's a no-brainer.

When Gnome 2 was discontinued, it was a major pain in the ass though, KDE was buggy and Gnome shell was hell (IMO). So I can't say I never looked back, because I did install Windows 7 in frustration. But that was a very short adventure, because Windows is simply so horrible when you get used to Linux. The idiocy of Windows is momentous, and the jumping through hoops fighting Microsoft stupid security features, that won't even allow you a simple thing as changing your default text editor, becomes insanely tiresome and frustrating very quickly.

So it was back to Linux faster than you can say oops (almost).
Now the desktop has become less relevant to me, because I do almost everything through hotkeys. So I rarely navigate the desktop, so as long as I have a decent file manager, I'm 90% OK just having that.

I had a few false starts before, but MS force-updating me to the objectively worse and user-hostile Windows 8 triggered my latest (and successful) switch.

I'm aware that at some point sourceforge went down the toilet, but in the early 2000s it seemed to be a pretty reliable website for open source software. I had gone a few years coming across more and more evidence that any software I was downloading from sourceforge was much less likely to be a load of shit than software downloaded anywhere else. At some point I made the connection that maybe open source software is better in general. That made me curious about the experience of using an entire operating system that was open source. Either 2012 or late 2011 I installed Fedora to dual boot with windows (like 70% sure it was win7, might have been vista). Over the next year or two I sampled a bunch of other distros, and also PCBSD (not sure if that still exists) at one point. In retrospect I was really sampling DEs, but I didn't know the distinction.

Discovering the philosophy behind GNU was what led me to abandoning windows entirely. I think I had already had some of the core ideas of free software, albeit in extremely rudimentary forms (gee, these EULAs sure do seem like they're deliberately obfuscated), floating around my head for a while. The concept of free software resonated with me, so that's when I finally removed my windows partition. I stopped distro-hopping and settled on Trisquel for two or three years.

Afterwards, I decided to move to Parabola because I thought it would force me to learn things, but the main thing I learned was how to read documentation just well enough to get everything working by trial-and-error tinkering.

I've kind of moved on from free software at this point. I do still agree with the ideals, but I think the goals are somewhat inconsistent with a capitalist economy to begin with so I'd rather be concerned about that.

Today I use arch and still have no idea what the hell I'm doing, but I've had a stable system for years and I'm too comfortable with it to switch to a friendlier distribution.

Constant BSODs in Windows XP (probably caused by NVidia drivers), and then by now that's half a lifetime ago and Linux is just my default with Windows being "the alternative that can mostly do the same thing but in less intuitive ways"

I read the story somewhere about a student from Finland who wrote his own kernel and discussed it with Andrew S. Tanenbaum.

Since I was reading a book of Mr. Tanenbaum at that time, this got me somewhat interested, and when I got the chance, I tried it out.

I was interested in technology and programming and my mom recommended me to check out a raspberry pi. Her friend's son has one. So my first comouter was a raspberry pi with RaspbianOS when I got my first PC it seemd normal to install something that I was using for the last year and its free. So I installed Pop!_Os, a year later Fedora and a half year later Arch. I've been using Arch for more than 2 years now.

BeOS went under.

Ed: I was a huge apple fan, bought an apple clone from Power Computing. Then Apple revoked the licensing that allowed all the apple clone companies to exist. That's when I went to BeOS which would run on my clone, and got a multicore intel machine too. When BeOS went under I tried Suse. Had kind of a sucky UI in my opinion, but I hung in there with linux as an alternative to windows and went Ubuntu/Debian/Arch/Nixos and I'm still on nixos now. Its pretty much my exclusive OS since I quit my job that required windows 5 or 6 years ago.

I really started to dislike Windows and projects like Bazzite made it incredibly easy to make the jump. The wife is now gaming in Linux for the same reasons.

20 years ago somebody told me that installing Gentoo would make my computer performant enough to run video games. I no longer play video games, but I have been using GNU/Linux variants ever since.

Nothing special. It was a natural progression to move from UNIX, Solaris, SunOS, and VMS to Linux.

Ads. Specifically, a popup served by the OS about chrome and switching to bing or edge or something like that. I didn't even use chrome, just having it installed was enough for them. Any ads baked into the OS is unacceptable, but that's just so far over the line that I find it insane anyone still uses Windows at all.

I contacted support to complain and their "solution" was to reinstall the OS, so I installed a better one instead.

Windows 10.

The way they rolled it out, and everything they shoved down the throats of anyone that "upgraded"

Windows.

Tried installing Windows 11. After a few hours screwing around trying to find the right drivers for everything, I tried a live USB of Mint. Everything worked great out of the box.

Also, the ads, and Microsoft's insistence on forcing user accounts.

No longer being able to run Windows 7, the pinnacle of Windows.

Commodore going bankrupt.

was bored in w*ndows and kde looked cool

I never “switched” in the sense that yesterday I was windows and today I am linux.

It just happened. I’ve always had some distro or other running on another drive or partition. This includes things like os2 warp that weren’t linux.

But about 4 or so years ago, my games were playable easily on steam, I was able to find Linux packages for work stuff (like teams), and things just generally behaved with no hassle (up until then things worked but they came with hassles).

Meanwhile, windows became a hassle. Microsoft borked my windows install because it forced their crappy store onto a game (literally trashed my installation by clicking “install” - PSO2), every time I turned the pc on I was faced with an update and restart, some of those updates failed (one of them still doesn’t work) - how does an OS update become so poor quality - it’s an OS update, and general enshitification such as ads, nags, and crappy OS design with the clicks…

I just found myself not wanting to use windows, and wanting to use Linux. It happened over time. The last time I logged into windows was three or four months ago just to update the install and keep it fresh. It was a painful 1/2 hour and I’m dreading going back.

EndeavorOS Gnome, light use of the AUR, heavy flatpak use.

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.

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

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.

For me personally, it was mostly due to programming on Windows was a painful experience. I was using MinGW compilers, which were quite good but I wanted the latest and greatest GCC. The other options were using MSVC or clang, but I believe clang is just a frontend to MSVC (I'm not sure.. please correct me if I'm wrong).

WSL was an option, but I was doing graphics programming at the time. And I needed to upgrade to WSL2 to run GUI applications or something, which required Windows 11. So at some point I got fed up and just thought to myself, why not run the real thing. This is probably one of the few instances where the technical merits of Linux is what actually got me to switch in the first place. I didn't hear anything about software freedom, privacy, or even care about any of those reasons at all when I did the switch.

As a Windows user for a very long time, using it from my childhood, I wouldn't have switched no matter how unethical it was to use Windows if Linux was too difficult to use. So I'm glad that ended up not being the case. :)

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.

Ironically enough, it was gaming performance.

What makes this ironic was that this was months before the Steam Deck came out and I was not familiar with Wine and/or Proton in the slightest. I just thought, "If there are people running it as a daily driver, then it must be good enough at those things".

I'd say my transition over to Linux took years. I first learned of it when I had a laptop with 4GB RAM and 64GB Storage. When you're working with something that weak, you want to minimise wherever you can and it got to the point where the only way to reduce storage use to make this machine useful for some lighter games (also to reduce RAM usage to make the machine snappier than it was with Windows 10), waa to install Linux Mint, as it seemed like the best option. Later, when I got a new laptop of my own, I really got into digital privacy and running a Custom ROM on my phone (a practice that has continued to this day), which led me to the old familiar (well, not so familiar at the time because I was a noob who knew nothing), Linux. I played with Ubuntu, Mint and PopOS in Virtualbox and about 2 months after that (if I'm not mistaken), I bit the bullet and installed Mint. Now why didn't I do it earlier? I was busy with college. Why didn't I do it on the old machine, or over Christmas instead of 3 months later in March (2022)? Because I was scared I was going to mess up the partitioning, as I wanted to dual boot. So in March 2022, I switch, and proceed to use my Windows partition.... 2 times, until I completely wiped it because it was making my life more complicated than it needed to be and I wanted all 512 GB instead of the 128GB I managed to free from Windows' grasp. Now I had to set up temporary Windows partitions twice, where one time was about Excel (my machine wasn't powerful enough to do it in a VM, and I needed to use advanced features for college, that weren't available on Libreoffice or OnlyOffice. I don't remember the reasons for the second time anymore. I almost had to do that another 3rd time because under the same teacher in college, we had to use VS. Not Code, but Visual Studio. It is not available for Linux, and I didn't have my Windows partition at the time, so I ended up doing it in class on the college computers out of spite for Windows. These 2 scenarios really made me almost hate that teacher (her attitude and some people's dislike of her were not doing her any favours in my eye) but once I got to know her properly, she didn't match the perception of her that I was left with. Anyways, that's the story of how I switched to Linux.

I'm on Fedora now (With Hyprland). Though distros (mostly) don't matter. Peace,

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Tim Cook and Jony Ive.

Late 1990s my uni had unix workstations HPUX.

So all projects etc were expected to be done on those. Linux at the time was the easy way to do it from home.

By the time I left uni in 98. I was so used to it windows was a pain in the butt.

For most of the time since I have been almost 100% linux. With just a dual boot to sort some hardware/firmware crap.

Ham radio to this day. Many products can only do updates with windows.

I started my career on PDP-11/44 and moved to Xenix/Unix/Solaris as I progressed my way through several employers. Windows 3.1 had me as it was a step up from GEMOS and the affair lasted until Windows 95 when I got fed up with having to refresh every computer in my household annually and having to clear out the bloatware. All this time I was missing the low cognitive overhead of running Unix.

An SUSE CD made its way to me and I switched immediately. I was home! And I stayed that way until macOS came out with its BSD core which gave me both a tight GUI and *nix frameworks.

Windows is popular only because of its heavy-handed approach to OEMs and businesses, not because of its technical prowess.

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 had a two laptop: one main for gaming and a shitty computer for school. I had to code on python. It was easier to setup on linux. I liked KDE. I installed kubuntu on the laptop for school.

As soon as I stopped playing videogames on my main computer I went for linux definitely

Edit: it was 10 years ago

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 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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 :)

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.

Many reinstalls of windows 10

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.

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.

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.

I bought a steam deck

The need for latex, in 1999.

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.

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

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.

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.

Bitlocker.

I'll decrypt it one day...

I'm a non IT user interested in usability. I left Windows 7, on my home PC, over 10 years ago, as Linux has a good selection of Desktop Environments to choose from. So I get to try different ways of working. Windows has loads of tweaks. But no serious alternative desktops. Work PC is Windows only sadly.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

windows "8" ..final straw. blech

...Windows me... Iykyk

I was just bored during the pandemic

Curiosity and desire to learn.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

• 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Windows Vista and curiosity.

For me I got super annoyed by the taskbar not hiding and unhiding correctly. Other one was the search not working correctly on start menu and many times just stalling and nothing happening.

Those were the ones that broke the camel's back.

When IBM killed OS/2

Windows XP deciding not to boot one day and not being able to find the OEM recovery disk

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

My laptop had 32gb of emmc from factory; it came preinstalled with windows 10; windows 10 pretended at least 64gb and constantly kept the emmc at 0bytes free; i was sick of it. + windows 10 on that poor celereon was miserable.

For what would make me completely move, I just want my games to work, I know a ton of effort has been made on that front, but Nvidia drivers kinda stink so performance is a bit worse or completely unusable in certain programs on wayland at least.

Stuff like Wabbajack Skyrim/FO mod organizer modlist support for Linux too, along with modding other games in general usually requires windows because of dll hooking being very common.

Valve releasing Proton.

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.

Last year my wife said "most games can be run on Linux now because of steam deck, I think I'll switch to Linux" and I said "well I guess I'm switching too" so I un-installed windows, and I've been full time since, even starting to self host jellyfin and nextcloud. She and I have both done linux in the past, but gaming was what was holding us back. There wasn't anything WRONG with windows per se , except maybe the looming threat of windows 11, I just really love linux, open source, and being able to easily lift up the hood to peek inside

I use arch BTW. And Debian, my first love.

When I payed a decent amount for logic express and 2-3 years later I couldn't use it with the latest Apple OS.

As a professional software dev, I worked with pretty much every OS daily. My personal computer was a Windows, my work laptop was a Mac, and I ran my code on Linux so I was familiar with the things I liked and disliked about each. I also ran my own set of server with my websites, mail servers, and various research projects to learn and grow.

Then I decided it was time to order a new laptop and I didn't want to go to Windows 11 because I felt Microsoft was going too much into features I didn't want like Ads, more tracking, pushing AI. Don't get me wrong, I like AI, but it was too much about forcing me to use it to justify their stock valuations.

I also was working on reducing my usage of big tech, setting up self hosted services like pi-hole, Home Assistant, starting to work my own Mint alternative. It just felt natural to get a Framework laptop and try running Linux on it.

I still have a Windows desktop for games and other things, I still use Mac at work. I still like the Mac for it's power efficiency and it doesn't get as hot. Linux has some annoyances here and there, like dbus locking up, or weird GNOME issues, or for a while my screen would artifact until set some kernel params, or the fact that my wifi card would crash and I had to replace it with an Intel card, but I'll stick with it.

Recall

Did not want to switch from windows 98 SE to XP, so went with linux instead.

Started learning web development.

I'm still on Windows 10, mainly for gaming. I probably won't switch (to PopOS or Mint) until Win10 EOL happens, primarily for gaming-related reasons.

I have an Nvidia card and can't afford to get an AMD, and most of my games are not on Steam (I really like GOG), so I'm hoping by that point Nvidia compatibility will have improved enough compared to last time I tried switching.

I mean FFS I went to PopOS like a year ago and couldn't even get Dragon Age: Origins to run, even through Lutris. It made me sad. :(

I'd used Linux a bit out of curiosity in the Windows XP era

Windows Vista came out and was completely unusable on the computers I or anyone around me owned. It was also harder to configure than Linux and the new UI looked worse than the Linux UIs at the time

So I switched and haven't been back to Windows since

I was always interested in computer programming, and was doing so much in WSL and several VMs that I installed Cygwin. I was then like, “What the heck! If I want a Unix terminal, I might as well use Linux.”

I've been playing with Linux distros for over 25 years now. I can't recall what made me go exclusively to Linux,but it had to do with me wanting more control over my devices. I remember that I ended up killing Windows entirely after dual booting 7 (I did not want to move to Windows 10 and EOL for 7 was rapidly approaching) with Linux Mint in 2019 on an Alienware laptop. I started running as much software as I could on Mint, getting to learn LibreOffice pretty well, but I still had to keep a VM for work, as the in-house platform was Windows only.

About 3 years ago my company accepted to provide me with a Windows 365 cloud computer, and I've been solidly using Linux exclusively since then (except for work, but that's going away too as the new platform is fully Web based).

Truth is that I never liked Windows because it's and incredibly intrusive OS, so I have not missed it one bit.

Been meaning to make the switch for years now. Was going to do it before Windows 11 either way. Second full screen popup telling me I should switch to Windows 11 I downloaded an ISO, put it on a USB and haven't looked back. NVMe made it that much faster.

gamescope

I started with Ubuntu in the 2005-7 timeframe on very slow old hardware. Shortly after, I bought an eeepc as I was a poor college student at the time and couldn't afford much else. I dual booted for years until windows 8 irritated me into giving up Windows for non-gaming completely, I've been using various forms of Linux as my primary OS since then.

Tl;Dr tried Linux because my hardware was very modest, stayed because Windows was getting worse in various ways.

I was tired of lugging my HP 710 home every night. Bought a home pc and installed VA Linux on it. Been running Fedora since Fedrora Core 1.

I was able to play ubisoft games online with my friends. That was my last use case for windows.

When Windows 10 came out, half of the Windows 7 system got borked. Mine was one of them.
The next day I flashed Ubuntu on a USB stick

I've played with it for a long time, but I still had a laptop that dual booted Windows. I upgraded the thing to Windows 10, and it became unusable. I went with disabling the anti-virus and firewall. Then I tried to update and the update service didn't work because it tries to go through the firewall service, which is disabled.

I forgot what I did to do that, so my system is essentially broken. I only used Linux on that laptop from then on and only installed Linux on my other machines

Never really have gone full Linux.

I run MacOS, Windows, Ubuntu, Fedora and BSD depending on the need of the box.

The one thing that lead me onto Linux, however, was the full hardware access in Docker.

Windows was actually quite good when I made the swap. It was during the height of windows xp.

I did it because I am a curious guy, and wanted to know what it was all about. I've been full-time and had fun with it since then. :)

When I was a kid, windows XP was having stability issues and I wanted to play minecraft. Switched to Linux and had no issues.

Windows update would always start doing stuff whenever I turned on my PC and would slow it down to a laggy crawl until it finished. This increased the pressing the power button to doing what I need to do time to 15 minutes.

I knew that Linux updates worked differently so I tried it out. And I was right. Oh so right

Nothing really, I started dual-booting and jumped from one to the other depending on what I wanted to do. One day I realized I hadn't booted in Windows for months and had never needed it, so I just got rid of it.

Was curious about the increased customisation so I went dual boot around the time of windows 7.

Went full time Linux when windows 8 came out. Windows has only continued its enshitification since then, so it really paid off.

Every machine I'm currently running would run like dog shit with windows, but runs like brand new with Linux Mint.

Wanted to hack WiFi when i was teenager, right now already close to decade of daily driving linux

I think it was around the time of the windows 10 beta, I was trying that out and also dual booting with Linux mint.

I remember being a little frustrated with getting games to work great on Linux, but even more frustrated just using Windows. So I thought "Linux makes me less mad, I'm just going to use that"

I was dual booting Linux and Windows 10 like 4 years ago, and then Windows somehow got rid of GRUB entirely, pissed me off enough to remove Windows, haven't used it on a personal computer since then.

It's just that i wanna learn more about computers. At the time with Windows I didn't think i could really understand what is going on behind the scene. It hides too much stuff from the users and there was a weird idea in my head that the advanced use of computers is supposed to be in the command line, Windows just doesn't seem to be the right choice. I don't play much games or even heavily use computers in general, so my laptop basically became a big toy for me to tinker with.

It happened really slowly for me, over a period of years. We have multiple PCs (several media PCs, a home server, and our personal PCs) that we've built over the years. Aside from our personal PCs, the OS chosen was always just whatever was free to us at the time. Over time this became overwhelmingly Linux. But the real turning point for me at least was the end of 2021.

Our oldest media PC still had Win 7 on it and it was showing it's age. We'd had a lot going on in our lives when Win 7 support ended, and upgrading it was just not a priority until then. Long story short, I put Ubuntu on it.

While I definitely had my gripes about Ubuntu (which caused me to move to Mint a few months later), it was nothing compared to the problems I'd had with Win 10 on my personal machine a couple years prior. Compared to Windows, everything was just so... Easy. I didn't have to fight for my right to just change shit I didn't like. Installing applications was a fucking dream. Most games I cared about playing worked as well or better than they did on Windows.

So I put Mint on my personal machine and never looked back. Moved over to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed a few months after that, but I'm thinking about going back to Mint now that 22 is out.

TL;DR I was real tired of paying for software that would try to tell me what I could and couldn't do. Thought Linux was "too hard," found out it's not (at least for me).

Went travelling back in 2015 and my laptop was already a 2011 model and starting to slow with Windows. I wasn't buying a new one just to travel with, money I'd rather spend on the trip.

I only needed it for movies and social media etc, maybe downloading photos from my camera.

Installed Ubuntu, so much nicer to be on and fun learning experience and then just never looked back.

Been 9 years and I havent moved home and I'm still on Linux (nixos now).

Basically when Windows became pay-per-install. PCs stopped coming with an install CD so if you needed to reset from scratch you couldn't. I first tried Linux out of necessity because that was all I had to put on the machine in the house, and ended up never looking back.

It wasn't anything big that caused me to switch. It was just a general feeling of "oh, maybe I'll switch" and annoyance at Windows, and then I got a new SSD.

First thing that ever made me switch was MacBook Bootcamp drivers weren't available for a time, and things just worked great on Linux, even the broadcom wifi drivers right out of the box. What made me stay was the infinite amount of customization I can do, and that all of it is stored in one of two places and can be so easily backed up wherever needed.