These days, Windows constantly gets in your way with ads, forced updates, crappy apps that install themselves, useless features like Cortana, forcing you to make a Microsoft account, etc. Linux or the BSDs, however, usually give you a bullshit-free and distraction-free experience. Plus, no spyware, completely free, endlessly customizable, and low resource usage (if you use a lightweight setup, but even “bloated” distros like Ubuntu and Mint are often light compared to Windows).

And what surprised me? I guess the only thing that surprised me is how easy the experience is, especially for things like gaming, which Linux has historically had a bad reputation for. Also, how nice it can be to use the terminal, not that you have to, especially as a novice user.

Linux doesn’t try to sell my elderly mother a subscription to onedrive

Windows 95 was dreadful.

Yes I am old and my knees do hurt, thank you.

Forced Windows updates bad. Gaming on Linux good. Also Windows 11 not installable on perfectly good hardware.

I think the straw that broke the camel’s back for me was when I learned msvc compiles telemetry calls into every binary.

It took a few years after that incident for the linux gaming ecosystem to mature to a point that I could switch over entirely, but I’m there now. EVERY time I use windows now, I groan at something it tries to do without me asking. It’s so nice knowing that my PC will only do what I ask it to now, and that I won’t get pushed into yet another garbage UI overhaul I didn’t ask for.

For me, it just came down to how unintuitive and slow Windows’s desktop environment is. Setting up the most basic customizations requires going through like 15 sub-menus or dealing with the registry. Also, GNOME and KDE are just so much prettier than Windows’s desktop environment.

There were a few reasons I wanted to switch, but nothing pushed me much, until a lot of things culminated at once.

I’d been using Linux on servers for a long time, and a Linux desktop in an old job, and I much prefer the usability of it over Windows (I really like the command line options on Linux over CMD or Powershell, and kept having issues with Git Bash, whereas stuff would just work on Linux), as well as the customisablity, and it is more friendly for developing (at least in my opinion, web development for me specifically) so I’d been contemplating it and occasionally trying out distros in VMs. Then I found out my PC isn’t compatible with Windows 11, and it had me thinking it was dumb that I couldn’t upgrade because my PC meets all the specifications but there’s some specific thing Microsoft didn’t like and didn’t think was “secure enough” or whatever. It got me thinking that it’s dumb that a company can decide what I’m allowed to install on my PC. Even if my PC was vastly underpowered for the OS, it should be up to me to decide what I can and can’t install on my computer that I built with my money.

I looked into installing Windows 11 and bypassing the check, and it seemed like too much hassle, so I was going to stay on Windows 10, but at some point after, a Windows update completely broke my installation - which wasn’t the first time - and after hours of trying to fix it, it pushed me over the edge. I decided to completely scrap Windows at that point, because I was just fed up and preferred Linux anyway, and justified it further because of the fact Windows is essentially spyware on top of that. I nuked my OS drive and installed the distro I liked the most at that point (KDE neon) over it and never looked back.

I also have Valve to thank for that impulse too, because at the time I’d been looking at their work on Proton because I wanted to know how well gaming worked on Linux, and from what I saw, pretty much my entire library would work mostly without issues thanks to the info on ProtonDB. If I hadn’t seen this info, I might have hesitated to switch, but knowing most - if not all - of my games would work (even if I had to do a bit of tweaking) made the decision very easy.

The main thing that surprised me is just how polished it feels. At least with KDE as my desktop environment, it feels like everything has a purpose and they belong together. So many things in Windows felt tacked on and like it was an afterthought, with vastly different designs. The biggest thing I love is being able to fully (and I mean fully) customise the taskbar, window decorations, colours, animations, everything. I love being able to make things my own, and I couldn’t do that on Windows. Windows was more “Microsoft with a bit of my touches” whereas using KDE neon it feels like my computer.

Also, software repositories are fantastic. Instead of having to download an exe for each thing you install and each having their own way of updating, with package managers I can just search in a central place, install it, and the package manager itself will keep it updated for me. It’s just so much more user friendly. Although one thing that threw me off with package managers is seeing a notification that I had updates and it was like “you have 200 updates” and it shocked me, but obviously each piece of software has their own individual update, including system packages, instead of Windows update where you get a single package with a bunch of updates in it that you can’t customise, and possibly a few driver updates.

One obstacle I hit however was graphics drivers. I have an nvidia GPU and nvidia really doesn’t want to play nice with Linux for some reason, but to get a decent gaming performance you need their proprietary drivers. I had quite a few issues trying to get them properly installed, so unless you have an AMD GPU or are fine spending a bit of time possibly troubleshooting, take this as a warning (or if you don’t care about gaming, because the open drivers would probably be fine for just a basic PC)

The last time I installed Windows after it broke itself I said that I had enough and would switch to Linux the next time it broke.

I never switched. I checked out BSD and Linux when it was new and I stuck with Linux.

Ok, I was on AmigaOS before, but it died.

I was learning OpenGL at the time and I was frustrated that I could not play a game using OpenGL (When I use a technologie in programming, I love using software that use it) because none of the games in my library supported it. So I discovered Ubuntu 16.04 and I immediatly loved it. I also reinstalled it seven times because every time I broke it and I didn’t know how to fix it.

What realy chocked me at the time is how easy it is to install C++ dependencies for your project. You just use the package manager and boom, you link it to your project and your done and if for whatever reason the package is not available in your package manager, you can build it manually very easely.

However, there where some downside too. VSCode didn’t exists at the time (or I didn’t ear of it) and the only proper IDE was kdevelop which I never liked. Hopefolly, when VSCode came it was realy cool, but not as cool as when I discovered NeoVim. The gaming too was bad, Proton didn’t exist, Wine was not as advanced as today and DXVK was not a thing yet. You could only play games that where 5+ years old and only at 15/20 fps with a lot of glitches.

Linux nowoday serve all my needs, I only need to start Windows when I deploy and test some program to it or when I play a game that is not well supported on Linux and I only do it in a VM with single GPU Passthrough.

I kept having troubles with Windows 11 and I was also fed up with all the Microsoft crap and how they push they’re Cortana, Edge or other bullshit.

Switching has been amazing. Yes, also confusng at first, but you’ll learn a lot and rn I’m happier than ever with my machine.

I’m running Fedora Workstation.

For me it was a couple reasons:

1. my brother installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my desktop for me when I was in high school, and I was enamored with the different desktop layout. It got me started on the journey.

2. maintaining it is much easier than windows. Running one command/script to update a system is much faster than heading to the right window or menu and hoping Microsoft delivers you an update. Plus if it breaks it’s easier IMO to troubleshoot and fix.

Because Wikileaks, Anonymous, Julian Asange, and Edward Snowden. Privacy (in digital data) are our own RIGHT to have as human has right to wearing any clothes so our bodies are not visible by public, and our government do not have to dictated what right clothes we should using or HAVE RIGHT to remove it from us.

In other perspective, people don’t realized that their own data can HYPNOTIZED them and create mental health issue that can’t be known only by our own mind. Consciousness is very fragile things. Still people pretend not aware and understand that…

I was writing just writing some code one day. I then realised something, I needed to press " key twice. I thought my keyboard had died, but the behaviour was consistent so that’s unlikely. Then I realised what happened. Windows had installed and set English international as the default layout, and I was unable to switch it out in settings. Even if I manually switch to English us, it would eventually go back. And editing the registry to remove it just made all windows system apps shit themselves.

Now at the same time, I had a laptop. It had an update pending for a few weeks, but the update kept failing and hence I had not allowed it to update this time. But as I open up my laptop to code on there with the right keyboard layout, I see the update screen. THE LAPTOP WAS NEVER TURNED OFF, and it was plugged in. I waited and waited till it finally failed yet again.

Also shortly after one more of these attempts was made my windows which wiped my encryption keys and made my system unbootable or recoverable.

I had used Linux on a Chromebook before with custom firmware, all my dev work happend in wsl, and I had did a lot of projects on the raspberry pi, so for me the logical step was to completely wipe my SSD and install Linux mint. That happened about 4 years ago and I have not ever thought of leaving Linux. I did switch to arch though, so I use arch btw.

For me it was the philosophy behind Free (as in freedom) software. Call me a Richard Stallman fan, but I would love to live in a world were everyone is free to:

• Run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
• Study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• Redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
• Distribute copies of your modified versions to others.

Learn more at fsf.org