I’m asking what big motivational factors contributed to you into going Linux full-time. I don’t count minor inconveniences like ‘oh, stutter lag in a game on windows’ because that really could be anything in any system. I’m talking, something Windows or Microsoft has done that was so big, that made you go “fuck this, I will go Linux” and so you did.
For me, I have a mountain of reasons by this point to go to Linux. It’s just piling. Recently, Windows freaked out because I changed audio devices from my USB headset from the on-board sound. It freaked out so bad, it forced me to restart because I wasn’t getting sound in my headset. I did the switch because I was streaming a movie with a friend over Discord through Screen Share and I had to switch to on-board audio for that to work.
I switched back and Windows threw a fit over it. It also throws a fit when I try right-clicking in the Windows Explorer panel on the left where all the devices and folders are listed for reasons I don’t even know to this day but it’s been a thing for a while now.
Anytime Windows throws a toddler-tantrum fit over the tiniest things, it just makes me think of going to Linux sometimes. But it’s not enough.
Windows is just thankful that currently, the only thing truly holding me back from converting is compatibility. I’m not talking with games, I’m not talking with some programs that are already supported between Windows and Linux. I’m just concerned about running everything I run on Windows and for it to run fully on a Linux distro, preferably Ubuntu.
Also I’d like to ask - what WILL it take for you to go to Linux full-time?
Something in windows was causing it to be impossible to run docker containers with ease without needing to mess with some virtualization setting in some deep hidden windows settings paanel
Back in the early days of Win10, an updated messed up my system and I ended up with duplicated icons. Wasn’t happy, but didn’t feel that it was that big of a deal to warrant a full reinstall.
2 years ago I built myself a new desktop and decided to try installing Linux straight away. Haven’t looked back since.
i was a starving college student with $20 to my name and a dead windows me desktop computer that had an entire semester’s worth of school work trapped inside of it.
i had read about linux before and saw that i could buy a couple of mandrake cd’s from a magazine at circuit city for $5 or borrow $169 from someone to buy a windows xp installation disk.
i bought the magazine; installed linux; and taught myself (with google’s help) how to copy all of my school work onto a usb drive. i finished those papers using the school’s computer laboratories; and then kept on using the linux installation from then on in 2002 until now.
The “AI” garbage on the horizon finally did it for me. I’ve been using Windows for 30-some-odd years (and DOS before that) and it always had a quirk or two but it mostly just worked, and that was enough for me. Hell, I even jumped on Win 11 when it was still in Insider Preview, just because I wanted the latest. And despite everyone always complaining about 11, for the most part, it did for me as Windows has always done - it just worked, so if it ain’t broke, why fix it?
Not that I hated Linux, I just always seemed to have an excuse. “Oh, the last time I tried to install it I was stuck at a CLI” sure, almost 20 years ago. “Well, I’m a huge gamer and Linux just doesn’t have the support”, “Man, KDE Plasma on the Steam Deck runs great and looks a lot like a fresh Windows install… ahhh, it’d be such a pain to migrate though.”
Anyway, I set up Arch on a “dual boot” partition a couple weeks ago I say “dual boot” because I haven’t booted into Windows in a week. Feels good, man. I should have done it sooner.
I will say though, if any other potential Windows refugees are reading… Migrate your Steam library to an ext4/btrfs/other Linux partition. You can successfully mount your Windows NTFS partitions. You might even be able to get them to mount as read/write. You might even be able to get Steam to read the directories! But it’s not worth the headache, and in my experience it’s a lot easier to get Windows to mount a btrfs partition. My Windows install is the last NTFS partition on my system, and I’ll keep it around for a while in case I run into something that just won’t play nice with Linux, but that’s it.
Microshit flipping back privacy settings on win11 among other bullshit.
Tried monitoring network connections, there is no way tell what windows is doing. Blocking them will break the OS… I was done.
I really liked having a login screen, so I switched to Mandrake from Windows 95
Steam play. I spent nine years with linux as my main work os. Then I’d come home and game on windows. Once Steam play was mature I setup a dual boot to give it shot. I think I booted into windows twice after that.
- Open source community
- The diversity in Linux distributions
- Trying something different from Windows
- Ubuntu interested me when I read about it a long time ago in the computer school textbook, although I didn’t try it in practice back then
- Experiencing Windows 11 on my father’s computer … It was a little disgusting, especially when it’s not activated
-Nearly 2 years when the warranty period ends , then I can go full-time to Linux
For me personally, it was mostly due to programming on Windows was a painful experience. I was using MinGW compilers, which were quite good but I wanted the latest and greatest GCC. The other options were using MSVC or clang, but I believe clang is just a frontend to MSVC (I’m not sure… please correct me if I’m wrong).
WSL was an option, but I was doing graphics programming at the time. And I needed to upgrade to WSL2 to run GUI applications or something, which required Windows 11. So at some point I got fed up and just thought to myself, why not run the real thing. This is probably one of the few instances where the technical merits of Linux is what actually got me to switch in the first place. I didn’t hear anything about software freedom, privacy, or even care about any of those reasons at all when I did the switch.
As a Windows user for a very long time, using it from my childhood, I wouldn’t have switched no matter how unethical it was to use Windows if Linux was too difficult to use. So I’m glad that ended up not being the case. :)
It wasn’t clear that windows 95 would beat OS/2, and OS/2 was clearly the better so I installed that over windows 3.1. Then in college I got introduced to BSD. I still prefer BSD, but sometimes linux has things that BSD doesn’t so I use linux in places.
Tim Cook and Jony Ive.
I wanted to learn programming and I heard Linux was nice. I remember setting up Java on Linux was pain (2012) and I decided to try Linux and see what happens.
I decided to go for a learning experience and installed Arch, I got through the installation and was shown KDE and I was amazed until something weird broke. The utter bliss of customising the UI to my liking was so good.
I then tried Ubuntu, it worked but I was disappointed it wasn’t KDE but I liked the part where all the guides online were basically geared towards Ubuntu/Debian setups.
So I checked out KDEs website and I saw KDE Neon and thought “That’s the one for me. Based on Ubuntu with latest KDE.” not wrong, but not right either. I entered KDE Neon when it was still a dev distro without knowing. Stuff broke every now and then but nothing major. KDE Neon since v6 has been amazing. I’ve had a couple of Wayland crashes but the bloody thing restores everything in the exact same place, same activity, virtual desktop, size and all and it has only happened once since v6.
KDE just keeps getting better.
I also jumped from Gnome to KDE over the years. I’m not a fan of how Gnome went with the convergence, large-padding, touch trend. I love how KDE has tighter spacing and follows a traditional desktop metaphor while still being customizable. Gnome 2 did okay at this, but when gnome 3 hit, I ran to Mint/Cinnamon for a bit before trying a bunch of KDE distros.
KDE is so humble. Their k-apps are much more numerous than I realized and the DE is great on Kubuntu, Neon, Arch, MX, etc.
Having said that, I hold a lot of love for the gnome team too, I just don’t jive with the design philosophy anymore.
…Windows me… Iykyk
The pursuit of Freedom led me to Linux.
When I was a CS student in the early-mid 90s, my college had Unix only and we had to fight to get a free terminal to complete our assignments.I had a good 486DX with Windows 3.11 and I had heard of Minix, so I could do my assignments in the comfort (?) of my dorm room.
I went to my local technical library to see if they had a box (that sort of places used to carry boxed OSes and specialized software back then). They didn’t, but they had this CD with Slackware written on it and the store owner said it was better. So I bought it on a whim.
After many hours and a lot of recompiling the kernel and libraries right and left, the thing finally booted and ran surprisingly stable. My roommate saw it and immediately installed it on his machine. The next days we went buy a couple of 10base2 NICs, some coax and a pair of terminator, and before you know it, we had NFS going.
It was our own Unix network and it was way better than college’s :) I never looked back.
I did work with DRDOS as a kernel dev a few years later, which involved reverse-engineering bits of MSDOS 7 (yes, that’s the version of MSDOS Windows 95 ran on top of). That’s as close to working professionally with MS stuff as I ever got. Other than than, I’m a pure product of the Linux generation baby!
