Hey everyone,
I am exploring switching over to Linux but I would like to know why people switch. I have Windows 11 rn.
I dont do much code but will be doing some for school. I work remote and go to school remote. My career is not TOO technical.
What benefits caused you to switch over and what surprised you when you made the switch?
Thank you all in advanced.
I don’t have the most overpowered PC. I just have a small little desktop (Minisforum UM700) and Linux runs a whole lot better on it. My work also was giving out some old laptops that they were retiring (still better devices than my laptop which was a Lenovo T420) but they came without an operating system. I’ve always enjoyed using Linux but never made the full change because I would need MS Office and switching from Excel to LibreOffice Calc was just annoying. Since I didn’t need to do work on my personal PCs anymore, I made the switch and I love it. Games run better for me.
I currently use Linux Mint but I might switch to just plain Debian (or Linux Mint Debian Edition once they release LMDE6 which will be based off Debian Bookwork).
I don’t have ads within my OS or start menus, I can do whatever I want with it, I can customize it with different desktop environments, if I mess anything up and need to clean install I don’t need to worry about license keys.
Also chicks dig penguins.
Also chicks dig penguins.
And foxes
Call me a filthy casual or whatever, but I use Windows, Linux and macOS equally. My preference is Linux but I don’t limit myself by just pretending the other two options don’t exist :)
Nah, I’m with you too.
Sorry but you aren’t special, everyone here already used windows or Mac and the fact that I’m not using other systems righr nowmaybe is more related to I not liking/needing it than pretending they do not exist.
I’m in the same boat myself. Windows is and has been my daily driver since the days of Windows 3.1. Over the past few months, I began a path learning web development and I’ve been using WSL on Windows 11 to learn. I picked up an old laptop and I’m currently installing Debian with KDE Desktop hoping I to find a life raft out of the Windows world for reasons unknown.
If you’re super used to Windows, Mint is also worth a try if Debian with KDE isn’t to your liking
I was running Mint on an old Macbook Pro a few months ago. I couldn’t get over the battery drain so I put MacOS back on it. Hopefully the battery drain isn’t a as bad on a newer Asus laptop.
Mostly battery drain has less to do with your distro so much as your CPU governor settings and other power management settings, at least IMO
Was bored one day and wanted something to do
Every time I boot into Windows, it tries to force me to sign into a Microsoft account. I have to unplug my Ethernet cable to get past it. I just got over it and installed Mint instead. I almost never boot into Windows unless it’s for something specific.
Because Apple stopped delivering updates to my MacBook that I bought in 2016… The hardware is still working and I want a secure OS on it… =>Debian
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
As of W10 I stopped trusting Windows. Having ads bundled into a >$200 OS shows me that being an OS is no longer the primary goal.
Previous to that I had been using Debian as a media server so the switch was pretty painless. I can play 90% of my Steam library on Linux, edit photos, edit videos, stream, browse, and do literally everything I used to do on Windows.
I made the switch when windows ME was released, right now I’m using win10 for work because of some software that really doesn’t have an alternative in Linux but I do run it on all of my other computers. Benefits:
- customization: If you want a desktop environment there’s KDE, Gnome or XFCE, if you want just windows or a tiling window manager there’s tons of them too
- package managers: update all your software on your own terms while you brew some coffee.
- scripting capabilities: you can automate lots of stuff with bash.
- scalability: do you have a potato computer, no problem, do you have a nice one, even better.
Edit: I forgot to say that I run Debian on most of my machines.
It was nothing to do with the positives of Linux, it was the negatives of Windows. If they hadn’t gone full spyware after Windows 7 I’d still be using Windows today
I haven’t switched. Not fully. Gaming is still far better on Windows. Yeah I have a steam deck amd the games that are supported run amazingly.
Anyway, I switched because as a software dev, Linux is such a better development enviroment. Getting a working C/C++ compiler working on windows without using VS is a huge pain, but most linux distros come with GCC preinstalled. Need to do Java? Just a command away.Rust? Ruby? Python? Same deal.
Hate windows, simple as
