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.
Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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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.
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
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.
Valve releasing Proton.
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. :)
The need for latex, in 1999.
Windows.
Funny that windows fucking your audio outputs is a big deal but ridiculous stutter in games in a highend machine is a minor inconvenience.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
My internship supervisor. I did an internship back in 2006, I had this supervisor that was very very pro open source. He asked anyone on the team to use a Linux distro for work. I used Ubuntu for work for a long time. Slowly I started liking my personal laptop with windows less and less. So at some point (I think 2010 or 2011) I just went to Linux for my laptop as well. At first a dual boot, but I booted in Windows less and less. So on my next laptop some years later I skipped windows entirely.
I don't miss windows at all, but I do really hate I have to work with teams. It's the only app on my laptop I really hate on Linux.
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.
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.
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.
...Windows me... Iykyk
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Many reinstalls of windows 10
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.
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.
Honestly Red Hat only has a big grip on the mid to small size business side.
- 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 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.
Bitlocker.
I'll decrypt it one day...
Curiosity and desire to learn.
There was some kind of an upgrade and it had privacy issues in the eula. I was dual booting for a while already.
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
Curiosity and an Ultrabay Caddy (Thiccpadders will know) with some random old SSD I had lying around
Windows 8.1. I switched to Linux because of Windows 8.1.
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" ..final straw. blech