Linux

I first dual-booted Linux back in 2008 because I'm a musician and at the time I was a broke highschooler trying to use Ubuntu Studio to record and mix songs without dropping $500 on a Pro Tools license. After that I'd generally always have a dual boot system because I like using Linux for its flexibility.

Back in December I switched to 100% Linux Mint on my main gaming PC because my Windows 10 install was starting to die in all kinds of ways and I was gonna have to reinstall, so I just formatted the partition and went all Linux.

I also self-host a bunch of little servers for various stuff on like 5 different little single-board-computers (Pi 4, M1 Mac Mini, etc), and they all run various flavors of Linux, mostly Debian and Ubuntu but also Asahi on the Mac.

In general I find it waaaay easier to maintain, update, repair, and modify. Package managers should be available for every OS by default, not as an ugly hack like on Windows or MacOS.

I just like to hang out with you guys : )

So it was 1995, and a new version of Windows came out. Sadly it didnt run on our 486 so we upgraded to a new computer with a Pentium processor (a week before the Pentium Pro was released). My parents got their new machine and i was left with with Windows 3.11.

A friend of mine from school, a few years older, had just come back from a computer show down in Green Bay with a box fully of floppy disks (like 70). That weekend i brought my computer over to his house along with a few other friends and we all installed Slackware. At that point we were all using the Universe of Wisconsin's dialup service and were able to get online, do some Gopher, IRC and MUDing.

The only other time i ran a non *nix OS would be when work gave me a Windows machine or when I was gaming (Quake, Ultima Online). Otherwise it has been Linux and BSDs since 95

Long time ago my dad bought a few netbooks and they came with Xandros pre-installed. It wasn't much of a choice to be honest (all my friends, school, every other PC was running Windows). And I never give it a chance because there was a desktop with Windows so I used that instead.

Times goes buy and the Xandros version was not going to keep up with my needs and I've switched to Ubuntu Remix (very cool at the time) and then I've got to experience Ubuntu 09.10 with Gnome. And that was a game changer for me (I learned a lot on how Linux works under the.hood) but I kept Windows machine just for gaming (until last year).

When I first tried Linux more than 10 years ago, it was SUPER exciting to just get YouTube working. With fiddling with graphics drivers and installing flash player and all that. That feeling was great.
Also I just hate big corpos spying on me. To me using Linux or rather just open source software in general still feels like a tiny act of rebellion. I think that feeling will never leave me.

My intro to Linux was Google. Their chromebooks allow you to install Linux and I've played around w/ Debian. I never took it serious in terms of a viable alternative to Windows, but it was a great way to supplement the barebones ChromeOS over the last 4-5 years.

My desktop was from yesteryear (i7-2600) but could still get most jobs done outside of heavy gaming/local LLM, but I was not going to be able to upgrade to 11 which sucked since the desktop seemed perfectly functional. My plan was to ride out the Windows long-term support until 2028 and then buy a dirt cheap refurb desktop then.

On a separate track, about 3 months ago, I started my foray into front-end alternatives. I canceled YouTube Premium and started using Piped via redirector (redirects webpages to websites of your choosing) and then I found out about libredirect, which does a lot of the heavy lifting for you, and across multiple popular services including twitter, reddit, imgur, etc.

Initially I occasionally used the reddit/twitter alternatives, but as they became clearer bad actors, it became my defacto options. This nudged me to kbin and privacy-focused subreddits where Linux was not the red-headed stepchild.

The hype/reviews around Debian 12 made me curious to try the full desktop environment, so I decided to dual boot my desktop. I bricked it, bought a new W11-capable desktop and dual boot that with Debian 12.

Now, Linux my daily driver, and only use Windows 11 for workflows that are not optimized for Linux yet. The most surprising thing is the level of customization on things that I never thought about before. It can be overwhelming initially, but I'm finding the sweet spot over time.

Dota (1, in warcraft 3) would have a hitch every once in a while, and i'd die if it was in a fight. Cause was swap writing to disk, that you can't turn off in winxp. I was already looking at linux, so i said f it. Bdw warcraft 3 runs well on linux if you add -opengl.

I decided to switch when windows xp went end-of-life, because my pc was a mid-2000's era relic that would surely catch fire if it was forced to handle the windows 7/10 bloat. Naturally, I installed Mint on bare metal without doing any research beforehand. Not the best idea, but sometimes it's fun to jump headfirst into a completely foreign landscape. That said, Cinnamon (the desktop environment of Mint) shares much of its design language with windows, so it's not really that foreign, as far as the graphical interface is concerned.

What surprised me was just how different the underlying system was, how much more transparent and accessible it was, and how incredibly efficient and versatile the command line could be. Then there's the broader OSS community, which I think is a fantastic thing to participate in even if you don't use Linux, but using Linux is certainly a gateway.

I'm not saying Linux is perfect, and it's probably not for everyone, but it is nice to not be held captive by some monopolistic corporation, who continuously engages in ethically questionable anti-consumer behaviour, in the name of increasingly monetizing their user base. Linux gives power back to the end users, and that's what makes it worthwhile and important.

I don't have the most overpowered PC. I just have a small little desktop (Minisforum UM700) and Linux runs a whole lot better on it. My work also was giving out some old laptops that they were retiring (still better devices than my laptop which was a Lenovo T420) but they came without an operating system. I've always enjoyed using Linux but never made the full change because I would need MS Office and switching from Excel to LibreOffice Calc was just annoying. Since I didn't need to do work on my personal PCs anymore, I made the switch and I love it. Games run better for me.

I currently use Linux Mint but I might switch to just plain Debian (or Linux Mint Debian Edition once they release LMDE6 which will be based off Debian Bookwork).

Hate windows, simple as

I switch to Kubuntu in 2020 because Microsoft discontinued Windows 7. Then I switch to Debian to learn more about how Linux work, and after that I moved to Siduction to get the up-to-date packages. I still rice KDE to look like Windows 7 to this day :P

I left Windows because of telemetry, lack of customization, and tedious updates. I just wish I had bought a machine with AMD rather than NVIDIA because I'm still on X.org for optimus-manager.

Embarrassingly enough, wanted to install Ubuntu on an external drive. It was early, still in bed, accidentally erased the notebook's main drive. Thought I might as well give it a shot. That night, tried to go back to windows. Turns out that creating a bootable Windows bootable USB is nearly impossible from MacOS and Linux nowadays.. gave up after a few hours.

So, giving Linux a forced try. I'll probably make a Windows installation USB as soon as I can get someone to lend me their Windows computer. If it takes long enough, I may not though 😞

I'm in the same boat myself. Windows is and has been my daily driver since the days of Windows 3.1. Over the past few months, I began a path learning web development and I've been using WSL on Windows 11 to learn. I picked up an old laptop and I'm currently installing Debian with KDE Desktop hoping I to find a life raft out of the Windows world for reasons unknown.

The things I was using my computer to do were becoming increasingly technical - I work in science, and I'm also a massive nerd outside of that. Many of the programs I was using were on both Windows and Linux, but often I was unable to find troubleshooting help for the Windows versions. I knew enough of Linux that I could jiggle things around and make the Linux advice fit into my Windows situation, but it was awkward and added another layer of uncertainty to the stressful troubleshooting.

At a certain point, it felt like a case of "you can't find Windows specific advice because who in their right mind would actually be using Windows to do this stuff?"

Who indeed

(That last part is hyperbolic, but it sort of does feel like I was trying to hammer in a nail with a screwdriver sometimes. Combine that with Windows being annoying and stressful in the personal use context too and I wasn't having a good time. Things got very messy.

I switched because Windows 2000 was total garbage, and because Linux gave me actual programming tools. I was like a kid in a candy store. Suddenly I had all these amazing professional software packages, and scripting languages that weren't fucking garbage. I'm still WAY too good at DOS scripts. The number of years I wasted learning DOS. Fuck microsoft. I'm still a little mad.

I'd been tinkering with Linux for years and never using it properly when I saw how Windows Vista performed on my new fairly high end PC and formatted and installed Ubuntu and never looked back. Of course it wasn't an entirely smooth experience, setting up X properly was fun in those days but the performance was so much better.

I was on windows and just got tired of the larger amount of spyware in my os. The last windows I used was 8, but I did hold out on that for a long time.

I have shity low end laptop. It was fine for w10 at first but each update made it worse. I tryed cleaning, reinstall... But then I installed Mint. It was amazing from unusable to snappy. I still use it and it is enough computing for me (browsing, office, watching movies...)

I switched in June 2021. I was a fan of libre software before the switch (I still am! Love me Krita, Kdenlive, LibreOffice, VS Code if you can count that...), and I saw that many people in that community, plus programming communities, use Linux. I heard that there were lightweight distros (my computer was fairly low-end), and a lot of customization options. I also wanted to try something new, so I ended up dual-booting W10 and Linux Mint, after trying LM in a virtual machine!

Now I have a new computer. It's dual-booting W11 and LM 21.1 Cinnamon. I rarely boot into the Windows partition.

Only real option if you want to tinker

Wanted a new adventure to go on and a chance of pace from Windows 10 at the time. Benefits were a less bloated system and more customizability and a way to strengthen my command line skills. I was surprised by how light weight and overall polished the experience was.

Windows has just become worse and worse over the years. I was building a new PC and realized I wasn't going to give MS my money for a terrible OS when Linux was free.

I only used Windows because I wanted to play video games. My family computer has always been an Ubuntu machine. Since starting university I played less games and I heard that compatibility has gotten much better since the last time I tried to play video games. I decided to Dualboot for a while and decided to fully switch after using the mess that windows 11 was when it was newly released

Windows 10 sounded like shit, and Windows 7 stopped being supported.

I had some experience with Linux, most things seemed to work and for the rest I decided that it wasn't worth the hassle of dealing with Microsoft.

My reasoning is nothing big and fancy or philosophical. Hell what had happened was: I upgraded from windows 8.1 to windows 10 and I couldn't pair my phone to my laptop via bluetooth in a way that allowed me to use my laptops speakers and the music on my phone. I started looking for a fix and ended up finding some article or forum about how to do that in linux. Installed ubuntu 17.04 or something like that because I didn't know the release cycle of ubuntu. I never looked back. After that tried Fedora then KDE Neon then back to Fedora then openSUSE Tumbleweed, and now EndeavourOS.

everything on linux is so straight forward, it's just so calm.

Back in 2003 my sister needed a computer of her own to do schoolwork on. We couldn’t afford a new computer and the only other system we had in the house other then the laptop I had just bought was still running Windows 98 on a failing hard drive and the Windows install disk we had was borked.

I replaced the hard drive, started looking for options and found Ubuntu. And it made sense to me. Once I wrapped my head around the idea of the console, everything made sense in a way that Windows and DOS before that didn’t. And I had the freedom to modify anything I didn’t like, a freedom you don’t really have in Windows or Mac OS.

And it was fast! This ancient computer (AMD Athlon, 256 MB Ram, Ubuntu) was running circles around my new laptop (Pentium 4, 1 GB Ram, Windows XP).

I wound up switching my laptop from XP to Ubuntu and ran smack into why some people complain about linux being hard to use. Some of my brand new hardware just didn’t work in linux. WiFi, no go ever (proprietary firmware), audio, ditto. I liked Ubuntu well enough that I decided to work around the nonfunctional hardware with usb WiFi and a audio expansion card until the next update to Ubuntu when the built in audio just started working.

Every time I boot into Windows, it tries to force me to sign into a Microsoft account. I have to unplug my Ethernet cable to get past it. I just got over it and installed Mint instead. I almost never boot into Windows unless it's for something specific.

Foss software for everything that's a one click install got me. I'm surprised msft doesn't make Winget more visible

I've been dual booting Windows and Linux since the 00s. At some point around 2015-2016 I just stopped installing and maintaining Windows altogether and now I have a virtual machine image I just transfer around my network if I ever have to use Windows for something.

I think the real turning point for me was when they introduced UAC and ever-increasing restrictions on unsigned drivers starting with Vista. Wine was already a thing and I could run most games I cared about even back then although I still had to boot into Windows for gaming sometimes. Once steam Proton starting getting really good which was around 2015, there just wasn't a reason to be using Windows anymore. As the enshittification of Windows continued getting worse it became more tedious and time consuming to get anything done in Windows to the point you might as well use Gentoo. I do programming and game modding for fun and there's no way I could use modern Windows for this it's so bad and slows everything down with it's utter bullshit.

I've been dual booting on and off since 2004, but the big switch came in 2016 with DXVK making my games not run like ass.

I had enough of Windows. I had an older motherboard and the windows drivers were terrible for the sound card causing me to have to reinstall them manually all the time. Sometimes I'd leave a video transcoding and windows would reboot to update. After each update I'd spend the time to get rid of the bloat ware like King games, Xbox garbage etc. Once after an update I woke up to the windows 10 "Welcome to your computer" screen, and it decided during the night that it was going to erase my user profiles.

The most frustrating thing though, is that for all these issues I'm locked out from correcting them, or preventing them, or even checking what happened. Windows obfuscates so much in the name of "user experience" that any effort to diagnose a problem or fix a problem usually results in reinstalling being the best solution.

Also, Settings/Control Panel is a mess and really shows the lack of coherence in the OS. Linux isn't completely coherent by design, Windows is by ineptitude.

Windows didnt Work with my Mainboard, Linux did. Eventually fixed the issue, stayed with Linux because it didnt let me down when I needed it the most.

I was studying software engineering so I knew about linux for a while but never went ahead to try it as a workstation OS. I started to really dive into it when Windows 10 came out. Win10 is now regarded as one of the "good" editions but that kind of wasn't the case at release time, switching from Win7 it was bloated with a whole lot of unnecessary new "features" and weird changes. Win7 got it's end-of life announced and having Vista and more recently Win8 in memory I just about had it with Microsoft's shenanigans so I started looking for an alternative. I never really ran a doal-boot setup, I had an old little thinkpad to experiment on and in the first year I ran it through basically all major and minor distros I could find. The hopping was real 😄

I was hooked, loved everything about the freedom and it was refreshing building my own OS from scratch so I settled with arch for a while. At first with arch based distros on my main rig as training wheels (Manjaro and Endeavour) and then plain arch with Qtile and then KDE.

Nowadays especially because of my work I rather much prefer more stable experiences, I switched to Fedora after a pacman -Syu borked GIMP in a particularly annoying time (still love you Arch, no hard feelings ❤️) and just now after about 2 years I installed debian with all the RHEL stuff going on. Kinda making a whole circle in this journey.

I was just thinking about this because I have to use windows sometimes at work that linux really brought back the fun for me in computing. Despite all the flaws and issues that we are dealing with like the whole packaging question and things like that, it is just so refreshing to deal with these issues knowing that I can deal with them, rather than waiting how Microsoft will make those choices for me. For me having Windows or a Mac is like having half of a computer where I just have no choice but accept certain things as a paying customer no less.