Linux

Proprietary software just feels gross, low quality, and opaque. I want to feel like I've actually got some kind of control over the computers I own. Windows was feeling more out of touch with software developers. Installing a compiler in Linux is super easy compared to Windows.

Windows XP was the last Windows that I wanted to use. When it became totally obsolete, I upgraded to Linux Mint. I will never go back to Windows. I did not even start off using Windows. MS-DOS was my first operating system.

I had a 3-4 year old gaming laptop, and a mandatory windows update would corrupt the hard drive forcing a fresh install. I say mandatory because it installed no matter what I tried. Disabling updates in settings and registry never would prevent this update from wrecking my computer. I could get a few days to a week of use and then it would crash and require a fresh install.

I installed Ubuntu to see if it was a hardware issue, and it ran great. Years later when I finally got another computer I tried windows again, but quickly realized how many things I hated about windows. I deleted my windows partition and have never looked back since.

I actually like Windows. Not because its a good OS (it isn't) but because my software works with it, and it works with my hardware.

Only problem Windows 11 has decided thaty hardware isn't compatible anymore thanks to no security chip and because it requires a mandatory account to use.

The security chip is me being stubborn, but the mandatory account is an issue because I know people who live off the grid, and not entirely by choice.

So I wanted to find an alternative and Valve is showing that Linux is good enough that they can ship thei Steam Deck to mass market, without Windows.

I've jumped 4 distros since starting this. POP_OS, Manjaro, EndeavorOS and Fedora. What I've learned is 3 things

1. Linux has become stable, no matter what OS I used the experience was the same software was the same. And most if not all of it just worked. Its not Windows with exe installs (unless you're using Wine/lutris) but its similar to android/iOS that I was able to get into it easily enough

2. which distro you want depends on the software you need and how up-to-date the packages need to be. Ubuntu (and any is based on it) has packages that are too out of date for me.

3. find a desktop environment that you like, since it really narrows down which distro you use. I like KDE plasma and if the distro doesn't game with it pre-installed or an installable option I won't use it.

The end result was some productivity software shuffling fusion to freecad, Vegas to resolve etc. But almost everything I needed was installed out of the box, or installable without extra packages. With flatpak and community repos filling in the blanks.

Currently on Fedora, and it's the closest distro to user friendly Linux I've used. Manjaro is a close second, but how the manage aur and their own packages caused me to destroy my install with no hope in recovery. Thankfully I was able to save my files.

I was trying to get some work done, I don't even remember what it was, and literally every tool that did exactly what I wanted was only available on Linux. Every time I looked stuff up, people just said, "oh yeah, type this into you command line and it works!" And I finally decided fuck it, and wiped my work laptop and installed Ubuntu.

I bought a laptop just as Windows Vista came out that could barely run it despite being labeled as "made for Vista". Once I installed Ubuntu on (Gutsy Gibbon) on it everything worked much more smoothly...even World of Warcraft through Wine, which was why I wanted a new laptop in the first place. I haven't played WoW for years, but I never wanted to go back to Windows.

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...)

The easiest way to try linux is to install it from the Microsoft App Store — not joking, windows officially supports running Linux now. Here’s a random tutorial: https://adamtheautomator.com/windows-subsystem-for-linux/

When my last PC‌ died around 2019, I had to use a spare, hand-me-down laptop that could barely run windows 7. I was already exposed to Linux back then, and that I was counting on its reputation to run on a potato. I installed Ubuntu (kind of a bad choice, perhaps) on that ancient laptop and it ran surprisingly well! I didn't look back at that point, even after that laptop died (of old age) and I got a new PC.

Windows XP looked like such a downgrade from Windows 2000. Lacked stability. Wanted something more customizable. I liked the idea of community powered software so Linux was the solution.

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 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.

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).

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.

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’m late to the party but windows Vista forced me off of windows. Not 5 minutes into setting up a new laptop and it told me even after clicking yes for admin privileges that I didn’t have the right to uninstall mcafee… I threw Debian on the laptop and never looked back. Ended up running FreeBSD for years on that thing and have mostly stuck with them since.

For Linux as others have stated lack of crashes and clear ways to customize/fix things was incredible.

FreeBSD doesn’t support all the newer standards yet (looking at you wifi6), but it is beyond rock stable. A month plus of 24/7 uptime between reboots for years and it’s just as snappy as when I first installed it. And even better they push hard to keep things more or less the same. The things I learned setting up FreeBSD 8.0 are still the same for FreeBSD 13. The biggest changes have been upgraded hardware support and quality of life tools that interact with the systems I was already using.

As a note FreeBSD does not come with a graphical interface. They have imo the best manual (handbook) for setting it up and getting going, and have native zfs for software raid arrays.

My risky two cents here is FreeBSD is great for learning all the ins and outs of Unix-like systems but is missing some things linux users take for granted like docker for servers (they use jails you set up yourself) and no cuda libraries for ai. If you have the time and want to learn how these systems operate from the ground up I find it’s better than arch. Easier to install, no compiling everything like gentoo, and an incredibly clean manual that has always made sense and worked exactly as expected. For just getting a desktop and easing into things there’s also nothing wrong with say Linux mint or any of the other recommendations others have said either.

The glory of Unix-like systems is they’re yours, and once you get used to how they run they’ll be rock steady for years and run faster than windows on the same device.

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.

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.

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.

Download a linux distro iso file

Burn iso to usb using rufus

Restart computer with usb plugged in

Get into bios by pressing your system's specified key to get into bios while booting

Go to the boot settings

Select your usb

Linux should pop up after a minute with install menu

If you configure the settings right, you can have a dual boot setup with both windows and linux

After linux is installed you no longer need the usb

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 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.

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

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'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.

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.

A lot of the things i was doing on my pc were either done using wsl or a linux vm at some point, using windows mostly for gaming reasons. When i tried linux on bare metal again i had no issues running the games that i care about using proton or wine so i just stuck with it.

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

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.

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