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?
Microsoft spyware mostly. I feel stressed using a surveiled and monetized system for personal stuff. Also cause I have always loved Linux utilities and it’s teminal.
I had also mostly finished switching over my software stack to FOSS. So most things just felt easy to move over.
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.
I was using ubuntu during my internship and I like and never looked back
About 10 years ago a friend discovered Linux during his studies and suggested I try it out.
I haven’t looked back ever since.
about 1 or 2 times a year, consistently, Windows for whatever reason would kill my wifi on my system. uninstalling and reinstalling drivers wouldn’t work, hard resetting wouldn’t work, nothing. Just randomly disabled my wifi and looking online the ONLY solution was a complete reinstall of the OS. I don’t know why it did this, but it was an annual thing for me to have to reinstall the OS just to get wifi working again.
I had enough. decided to try a live usb of Linux Mint and I liked it so I installed it on my system. after 2 weeks I switched to CachyOS and now i’m on NixOS.
I started using Linux in addition to Windows years ago, but I switched full-time because I found that Linux actually runs faster on the same machine hardware, and if you have a stable distro it actually breaks things less often.
I’ve had windows go to do it’s update, and sit on the update screen for ages, never seeming to finish. No process bar, nothing, just that stupid screen saying “we’re doing updating, thanks for waiting” or whatever (cycling through several messages without saying what it’s doing, is it stuck?) I would have to hard reset my windows machine when it did that.
And windows has so much stuff running in the background, either pre installed things running or who knows what services. I didn’t use edge or IE but they would still be running there in the background in task manager.
Not to mention the other issues like having to go find software I wanted to download, hunting for a real, valid, non-virus link to download, then run an installer, and click click click through the installer. Oh it needs some version of Microsoft visual C++ runtime that it didn’t include automatically? Good luck finding the right vcredist to install to make it work, you’re on your own.
Linux has none of that nonsense.
You want to update? You either click the button or type the command, put in your password, it gives you a list of exactly what it’s going to update. You confirm yes and it goes and giving you a progress bar and tells you what it’s doing each step of the way. No guessing if it’s stuck or broken. If it does break, it gives you an error message you can actually Google for a result for.
You want to install new software? For most of what I’ve wanted, I can just go to the distro’s software repository and download things directly from a trusted source. The builds are signed and verified so I can trust they’re real and not a virus rather than having to go searching online. All dependencies are also automatically installed with the correct versions to make everything just work.
And there are no installers, you click the buttons to install and what you want installs with no extra stupid menus or anything, if you want to install 10 things in one go you can.
Also there are standard paths for everything, you can pretty much Google “Linux how to” and you’ll get sane results for most distro’s.
And games run faster on Linux with less overhead from background things competing, there’s no background update crap kicking in to nuke your game performance. I’ve been running steam and the free epic games stuff on Linux full-time and Linux only for probably 5 years and I’ve had minimal issues, VR also works. Sure there may be some setup involved but there are many guides and instructions out there, and it mostly amounts to installing things and maybe a little bit of configuration.
Which, on Windows you still often need to install things to get stuff to work anyways, so really the argument that windows “just works” has worn a little thin with me. I’d believe you if you told me that a Mac just works, I’ve not used one.
I’ve used Windows for decades, I know that “just works” is a lie. It works no better than Linux imo, and depending on distro, some Linux just works better than Windows.
From my decade of Linux I would suggest: Debian or Ubuntu for a rock solid stable distro. Probably go Ubuntu since you’ll find way more help easily Googleable, but snap causes some difficulties.
Garuda is my current Arch based distro, so far no breakage after about 2 years of use, great for gaming. Would not recommend arch based for your first foray, I ran archlinux itself for about 6 years but it would break from time to time (fixable, but still not beginner friendly.)
I didn’t… Not yet. I really want to, but I’m still tied up to some apps, working best in Windows… I plan to get a powerful enough laptop, to emulate windows, and then that will no longer be a real problem. But I really wish I didn’t have to emulate anything.
Gnomes workflow fit me a lot better and I like the idea of flatpak trying to bring mobile-like samdboxed apps to the desktop. Windows just killed its sandboxed UWPs
Have used Linux for work (desktop and server) for 15+ years. At home I’ve got Linux for my servers but desktop had stuck to windows because of gaming and audio production software.
The experience in gaming is amazing now on Linux for me and while audio is still quite iffy it’s workable.
I have never liked Microsoft so binning them off at home completely is something I’ve always wanted to do
I was not “techy” Jumped about 15 years ago. My (then) laptop was old and that Windows thing was very slow and needed many restarts. My much smarter work colleague showed me his Ubuntu. I installed as dual boot and in less than 12-months had stopped using Windows and installed Ubuntu as the sole OS. Since then, have tried many others, including Puppy. Now on Debian. Still not techy,or in any way competent with the terminal, but linux just works, even for me.
poverty; i couldn’t afford a windows license.
I switched because of a strong dislike for Microsoft and their spyware. I didn’t even bother dual booting, I ran baptism by fire right into Fedora and it was way smoother than I expected it to be. I enjoyed Fedora so much that I decided to try Arch. Very different experience, but now I’ve learned so much that I dumped Fedora and I use Arch for almost everything. I do keep a machine with Debian that way I feel like I’m getting the most well-rounded experience in case I ever need to help a friend with a Debian-based distro.
This is really interesting. I started with Mint-Cinnamon since it sounded like it would be ideal for me as I had no desire to switch to Windows 11 and I needed a daily driver OS; I did not like Mint at all and spent too much time trying to make it work with newer hardware. Fedora Workstation has been a great experience for me and it checks all the boxes with minimal troubleshooting. What is about Arch that made you decide to switch? Genuinely curious as I am all-in on Linux now that I know I can do productivity stuff and gaming so easily and I don’t have to give another dime to MS.
I suppose all the “I use Arch” memes made me curious about the hubbub behind it. Fedora is totally competent, works right out of the box and gives no issues in my experience, I truly believe it should be recommended more when folks consider making the switch. Arch has been a learning experience for me, kinda figuring out what the system needs but doesn’t come with. “Oh, I have no firewall, I better install it. No bluetooth? Alright, I’ll add that too.” It’s so hands on and it forces the user to make decisions that the distro usually makes for the user on its own. This is a “for better and for worse” type of thing, but it forces the user to learn more about Linux itself than just handing them a totally functional machine right out of the box. It was intimidating as hell the first couple installs, but now I understand things I didn’t understand before as a result of it.
I understand, this also worked for me. Although I also have to include Debian in this since it’s the my favourite for server related installs
I hated Windows Update. There were other reasons, but this was the main one.
I allways wondered why windows update is so slow.
FOR REAL. When my Fedora setup gets some system level updates that it would like a reboot for (kernel etc), it takes maybe 20 seconds to install them. Windows monthly update on the same hardware would take fucking ages to install before it reboots, then ages again to complete installing post-reboot.
I was trying Linux because I was curious (back then it was Mandrake) and I realised I hadn’t booted Windows for 6 months so I reinstalled Linux giving it all of my hard drive and never looked back.
I haven’t, I run a Windows desktop, Linux desktop, Windows laptop, and Linux laptop (was a Mac OS laptop but Apple EoL’d it, so I am looking at a Mac Mini M4 Ultra or M5 if they release one next year). I am OS agnostic though.
