20+ years ago I grew tired of having to constantly buy upgrades or find cracks for Windows and a friend suggested i check out thi s new OS that was coming out called Ubuntu. I believe it was around 2004 when I installed the first distro and I have never looked back. I find it amusing that all my friends and family think im some super hacker because I use linux lol.

I swap PCs regularly and I hate how long it takes to install windows.

Also windows borked a games drive once and I never forgave it.

Then I learned all the privacy stuff.

I didn’t choose Linux. Linux chose me.

But in all seriousness, back in 2015, I got a PC that came with Windows 8. It had the horrible, completely unusable Metro UI. But my main gripe with that OS was how it forced me to use Microsoft’s solutions over everything else. Quite often, the PDF files I opened would launch in the Metro PDF reader instead of the one I had chosen. Usually, this kind of things happened after a Windows Update, which ‘accidentally’ reset my default application choices - including the PDF reader - and, as a final spat in my face, added an Internet Explorer shortcut to my desktop.

I started to feel as if I had no control over my PC anymore; it was Microsoft deciding what software I should use. Then and there I decided it was time to give Linux a chance. I had already noticed how Valve was pushing the gaming industry toward Linux, and I thought, those guys can’t be completely wrong.

When I became a professional developer, I felt the friction of windows and package management. I knew of Linux desktop, and had used Ubuntu briefly in around 2008 or 09, and then at the time in 2021 I made the switch to Fedora for ease of dev. And never looked back.

I’ve used Linux for over 20 years, it just works and gives me the freedom I want, so there’s no reason for me to use anything else.

1. Win31 sucked
2. I needed a modem terminal for my 386.

Because I love proper i3 style keyboard based tiling and I can’t imagine my workflow without it

Ideological and practical reasons. It does everything I want how I want and doesn’t get in the way.

A lifelong Windows user, dabbled in MacOS too, windows 11 was absolute dogshit, did some research and saw loads of videos about bazzite so dual booted into it, liked it so decided to make it my main OS, I also love learning about computers

I’d been using Windows forever and always stuck to the “rule of two”: I skipped Vista and Windows 8, and was holding out to see if a Windows 12 was going to happen. When it didn’t, I jumped ship to Linux. 11 took everything I hated about 10 and made it all worse, and that’s without even considering all the telemetry. I’d already started using open source software, so that only made it easier to switch.

And for the record, my hardware was plenty new enough to install 11. But boy is it zippier with Linux! Just goes to show how much bloat Windows has. I have to use 11 on my work machine and I hate every minute of it.

It just works.

I tried Linux multiple times (out of curiosity / contrarianism I guess) until Windows pissed me off enough, while the Steam Deck proved I could reliably run games with minimal tinkering (frankly not any worse than what I had to do on windows).

So I made the jump, and I have not looked back

It was just an extension of my interest in computers since I was young ^ ^ This new, completely different OS fascinated me when I was growing up, and led to me installing Ubuntu on an old laptop. I never made an actual jump to it until I was a few years older, and had Windows slowing down my laptop that I used for work. I jumped onto the Manjaro train that was happening at the time, and eventually ended up installing Arch on my main PC (´･ᴗ･ ` )

Windows was trash, BeOS didn’t take off, and all the good network diagnostic tools were exclusively on *nixes in the early 2000s. Later, the *nixes are better for application development and deployment. They’re just built to serve data.

Windows has kind of caught up in the tooling department largely thanks to a VM, but it’s still trash. LOL

Idealogically, I can own my tools and modify them if needed. I don’t modify them, but hypothetically I could.

I was too poor to buy a windows license for the pc I assembled from dumpster parts. I was also to much a rule follower to pirate windows so that led me to slackware linux and the rest is history.