Linux

Many reinstalls of windows 10

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

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

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.

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 Vista and curiosity.

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

Windows 11's TPM led me to believe I wouldn't be able to upgrade my machine without windows thinking I need a new license, as it had happened for windows 11. I found a workaround but didn't know if it would work for Windows 11 as well. I want to control my machine so I went with Linux.

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.

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

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

I 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 was just bored during the pandemic

I bought a steam deck

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.

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.

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 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'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’ve been using and working with Linux since 1999 (big box Redhat 5.1). It was a hobby at first, but then it became a tool in almost every job I’ve held.

Now, on my personal PC I’ve bounced between windows and Linux (and some mad attempts at hackintoshing) since 1999.

But Windows Recall changed that.

Microsoft is doing what they’ve always done — try to control everything under the guise of “this is what the user wants” when not one damn person said “oh I want my operating system to take screenshots of everything I’m doing, AI-analyze them, store the data in an insecure database, and trust that Microsoft will never phone home about any of this”

So now I run Linux full time at home and all the games I play and want to play work perfectly fine.

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.

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.

Started learning web development.

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

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

Recall

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.

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. :)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

When IBM killed OS/2

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

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

I was toying around with the idea of doing my classes and early dev work on linux, hearing it's got a lot less roadblocks and annoyances, and that checked out.

I've been running it on all of my systems as main OS since not too long after that, and don't intend to go back

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'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

gamescope

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.