Personally, I’m not brand loyal to any particular OS. There are good things about a lot of different operating systems, and I even have good things to say about ChromeOS. It just depends on what a user needs from an operating system.
Most Windows-only users I am acquainted with seem to want a device that mostly “just works” out of the box, whereas Linux requires a nonzero amount of tinkering for most distributions. I’ve never encountered a machine for sale with Linux pre-installed outside of niche small businesses selling pre-built PCs.
Windows users seem to want to just buy, have, and use a computer, whereas Linux users seem to enjoy problem solving and tinkering for fun. These two groups of people seem as if they’re very fundamentally different in what they want from a machine, so a user who solely uses Windows moving over to Linux never made much sense to me.
Why did you switch, and what was your process like? What made you choose Linux for your primary computing device, rather than macOS for example?
My dad played (and still plays) heavily modded Cities Skylines. After upgrading his RAM to 32GB, he’d run afoul of Windows 7 Home Edition’s 16GB limit. I offered to check out Linux on my own computer to see how well Cities Skylines played. I never went back.
I moved to Linux from OS/2 in the 90’s.
Privacy, freedom to choose whatever I want, focus on FOSS (I hate/dont trust proprietary software), and security features for hardening Linux (Landlock, SELinux, Bubblewrap, sysctl, hardened_malloc).
Windows users seem to want to just buy, have, and use a computer
That’s just not how I would describe Windows. It’s more like a digital bilboard with spyware that also runs programs. It actively prevents you from just using “your” computer.
Yes, but most people haven’t realised that yet. They’ll buy whatever is sold to them and use it till they experience some malfunction and then buy something new and repeat the cycle
Combination of three things:
Windows XP. What a pile of shit that was. The enshitification began here. This is where microsoft ID’s started. Where music downloads only worked with Internet Explorer. Where microsoft began data harvesting, and they started lying about being able to remove applications you didnt want.
The second reason was indirectly due to Quickbooks shitty software requirements.
Quickbooks, and windows wanted you at a specific computer. I thought this was bullshit. I realized with Linux I could work anywhere, and deliver my applications via x forwarding. No one “seat” rule.
So I added a linux server to work, and quickly started using Linux full time.
Funny about what you said though. I use Linux because I do not want to tinker, I want everything to just work. Windows and the applications for it go against you, change on you, require licensing of you, and generally are a pain in the ass.
Through a MSDN I have free access to all windows software. I have free use of an Azure node and Virtual Desktops. But I won’t use them for anything personal, only if someone will pay me. MS just sucks that much.
I am willing to remote into, push code to, admin any window device for money. But I do it all from a linux machine.
it ran like shit, I never knew what was going on, trying to read the logs was a pain in the ass, I had to edit the registry for basic shit, they crammed ads into everything, I didnt use one drive, it eventually just stopped updating - it would try then fail without any useful info and say try again.
what a dumpster fire of an operating system and company. how they still have market share and are successful blows my mind.
Printer trouble with win 7 ,after that i left windows .
Windows 10 decided to update a machine in a client’s office. The update took 4 hours and the employee could do zero during that time. A few weeks later a Win 10 machine at the same office crashed and would not start. I was left googling error codes from the BSOD. Nothing worked and I had to reinstall. I decided I needed to get my own work stack off of windows. I installed Kubuntu. 2 years later and I like KDE, I like the Debian base, I hate snap, but mostly I’m working and productive.
Honestly, from curiosity and messing around with stuff, playing with Crunchbang on an old Win9x PC. (this was eons ago as Crunchbang wasn’t BunsenLabs yet at the time)
Yes, really, the last time I actively ran Windows for any reasonable length of time was with Win9x, specifically 98se.
I messed around with Win10 LTSB for a bit on a laptop (this was in 2016, so when Win10 was still new and LTSC was still called LTSB), but eventually went back to running Linux.
Self-respect. I’m not going to tolerate my property being sabotaged against me in service of some other entity, and I don’t understand why anybody else would either.
As soon as Windows 10 “telemetry” (read: spyware) started getting backported into Windows 7 almost a decade ago, I was gone.
Windows users in 2025 are nothing but cucks and simps for corporate abuse. They don’t “just buy, have, and use a computer;” they are part of the problem.
To be fair, most people who use Windows are ignorant of any of this stuff so while I guess they are technically part of the problem (debatably), it’s not knowingly. With that in mind it seems unwise to tar them all with the same brush and set them up as the enemy if we hope to convince any of them to abandon it.
Yeah, @grue@lemmy.world, it’s really messed up to say, “You’re an idiot!” to an idiot’s face. These people need help, not punishment. Saying the victims are “part of the problem” is insane. The only targets you should be allowed to judge are those who know about everything (both Microsoft’s antics and Linux) and still choose to not move; anyone else is not on the enemy’s side or anything near that dramatic, geez.
cucks and simps
Lmao!!! So true. But most people don’t know why they are actually these things.
Windows is terrible.
Office 365 in my face 24/7.
I was already somewhat interested in Linux (as a long time Windows user) when I started studying Computer Science, mainly for it’s core philosophy of freedom and openness.
Given that most courses used Linux as the default OS I installed Ubuntu on my laptop to dual boot it with Windows, and began getting familiar with it.
Over the years I started using Linux more and more, making it my main OS, with Windows still installed for the few programs I couldn’t use otherwise. Over time this set of programs became smaller and smaller, until it was just games.
Last year I bought and assembled a new PC to replace my laptop for daily uses, and given the higher specs and better support (AMD GPU instead of Nvidia) I see no reason to have Windows on it at all. Everything I need runs perfectly fine there.
I use Arch, btw.
For me it was Windows 7 end of life. I always liked to tinker, and at the time I didn’t wanted to spend the money to get a macbook, so I tried Linux, eventually moved completely to it and never looked back.
Curiosity at first, but now all the stuff I usually do is easier from linux ssh, sshfs etc. WSL on windows is niftyish.
