Why did you switch to Linux? I’d like to hear your story.
Btw I switched (from win11 to arch) because I got bored and wanted a challenge. Thx :3
In high school in like 2007/8ish my friend told me you could get a free disc with an operating system called Ubuntu on it sent to you in the mail, so I requested one out of curiosity and put it on the iMac in my room, and fell in love with it. I still have the disc, even though I’m more of a Fedora person now.
My computer was getting older and slower and I couldn’t afford a new one and wanted to squeeze as much performance out of it as I could. That and, I heard it was all the rage with hackers and I fancied myself a bit of a hacker.
Because of the continual enshittification of Windows 11 with each major update.
I had a meeting at work with a product team lead at Microsoft. Went home and installed Linux that evening.
I literally just wanted a login with a password experience with no ads or sketchy telemetry from my OS. Like how Windows 7 worked or at least how I thought it worked.
Dark patterns, kajouling, telemetry, settings that reset on upgrades, and the overall feeling that my computer is not truly mine.
Because Windows XP was a hot pile of garbage.
One day, my network driver broke. None of the discs worked. None of those incoherent “wizards” Windows loves to use worked. Reinstalling Windows broke more things. I couldn’t get online for about 2 months.
One day I was at the bookstore and saw a Fedora Core book with an OS disc. I thought it was cool so I convinced mom to get it. Went home, blundered my way through the install and everything just worked.
I cannot for the life of me understand how XP is routinely loved by everyone. It looked like a muddy fisher-price toybox.
If you had spent any time with Windows ME at all, XP is as big a jump as the move from XP to Fedora (with the caveat that the bar was much lower, of course)
I had used 95, 98, and 2000 at that point. All of which I mostly enjoyed. Me I used in my grandmothers computer and yeah…it was rubbish.
However I’d say it was less of a “Big leap” and more of a “Quick give us something that’s almost as good as 9x!”
Tired of the constant pop ups in windows 10. The constant upselling of their product.
An OS shouldn’t get in the way of what you are doing and Windows was always popping up some bullshit.
I learned to use linux decently in school. Used it for servers, etc at home.
Windows had its auto updatee, and eventually drove me mad enough to dual boot. When the updates started crash boot loops and I literally couldn’t use it anymore… I finally swore off Windows.
Its not all sunshine and rainbows, but i have had a much better time woth Lonux, and feel much better about it.
Looking at all the sheisty things theyve talked about and/or attempted, such as screen recording everything for AI, contemplating ads in file explorer, forced one drive integration slowing basic operations down… I have no desire whatsoever to return.
SSD died that had windows 10 on it. During the re-installation process I got fed up with onedrive and skype popping up every reboot despite being told not to start with windows multiple times. Attempt to disable, the next round of windows update brings them back. I didn’t even have the absolute basics up and running before I lost all patience for it. Downloaded several distros, setup like 10 different USB sticks to boot them all. Cycled through them for a bit poking around and testing out. Landed on Garuda Linux kinda by chance, but it has been great. It was so refreshing to have a computer feel like it’s mine again.
Simple. Windows caused a lot of Problems I simply could Not solve.
Besides that Microsoft became Something I do Not want to Support much longer or willing to giveaway my privacy.
And yeah. Linux Runs better.
I wanted to code in C. I saw some tutorials for windows and found it very complex, but I saw one in linux where the person just
gcc hello.c. And since then I’ve fallen in loveI have older hardware that would not be compatible with windows 11. I’ve recently started becoming a privacy nerd and thought this would be the perfect time to switch to Linux. I’ve been running Linux mint for a year and I will never go back, there is no reason to 😁 I wish I had done it sooner
Homework.
College used linux because I did computer science.
Topic: concurrency. College then gave us a programming assignment that required adding a code library, which I had never done before or even heard of, and thus did not understand.
Since this was a library that was platform-specific, they had made one library for linux and one for windows.
Way too late I got the gist of it but still couldn’t install the library.
Since the question contained the linux directory structure I was convinced that the windows library was broken and every other college student finished this task in Linux.
Thus I installed Linux.
Ten years later I understood and finished the assignment.
