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?
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I moved away from MacOS in the past few years to finally full-time Linux after using it recreationally since the early 2000s. I’ve only really used Windows on work computers (or school back in the day).
I didn’t move away from Windows, Windows moved away from me.
I would have been happy to stay on it if it hadn’t continued to get shittier and shittier.
I was a Windows user since 95, but I was increasingly feeling that my Windows PC was not my PC. That my personal information was being sent to some MS server. Then they started pushing recall and shoe horning in copilot. The sledgehammer that broke the camel’s back was when my perfectly good PC was deemed not good enough for an upgrade to Windows 11. I went Linux and am never going back.
Freedom. No company tells me what I can and cannot do with MY machine.
Windows 98 ate my college photos and music when a virus made my HDD take a click of death dump.
Fuck you to whoever wrote that virus. Since then I gave various linuses a go and I did so for a while each just learning how to be as lazy as possible while using linux. Later I had to run windows for some cad software. But after it corrupted my Linux several times I gave it the boot into its own drive which is only startable using grub. Grub sits on the Linux drive. My home drive is a big ass Linux formatted drive that mounts into Home/username. That way even if my Linux takes a shit I can reinstall it and boom back to where I left off…solo much further than anything windows could ever imagine. I could even have several linuses all going to the same home folder without any problem.
Not all the way there yet but working on it because the problems I’m having with Windows are reaching a tipping point where they outweigh the problems I’d have with Linux. I would never buy an Apple product. Their bullshit walled garden ecosystem disgusts me and they are leading the charge that’s showing all the other tech companies just how much the average consumer will let them get away with.
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.
Privacy and freedom. Some developer tools are already installed or if not are easy to install. Also I don’t like bloatware, the price is nice and the performance is great.
I tried to break from Windows back in college after Windows 8 was such a disaster. Set up an Arch dual boot over a weekend and tried to use it whenever I could. Unfortunately found myself using the Windows partition far more often mostly because of gaming compatibility. Shelved it and suffered through MS’s bullshit ever since.
10 years later on the dot, I went on a huge degoogling/de-MS push this past winter/spring. Set up GrapheneOS on my phone, moved away from as many big tech services and tools as I could, changed my email, and eventually said fuck it and installed CachyOS on my brand new desktop to give it a go. It’s been my daily driver ever since. The whole degoogling push also got me to set up a home server and go down the entire selfhosting rabbit hole but that’s a discussion for another day.
The Steam Deck is what really reintroduced me to it and showed me how insane Proton is for compatibility, and with all the garbage big tech and fascists want to throw at us, this year was definitely time to make the switch.
Which reminds me, I should probably wipe that Windows partition that still gathers dust.
Windows from 3.1, MS DOS before that
Come W 8 I was getting grumpy, started dual booting Ubuntu.
Not able to overcome my own apathy, dual boot as in 95% of the time Windows
Come the W 11 announcement some time ago I grabbed another NVME, installed Linux Mint and said fisk it and never went back. Only distro hopped to LMDE haha
Fuck Terminal :)
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.
cucks and simps
Lmao!!! So true. But most people don’t know why they are actually these things.
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.
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
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.
Can people please just stop with these terrible generalizations? Lots of windows users consider themselves “computer people” and tinker with their computer and solve problems. Plenty of Linux users aren’t doing shit but using it as it comes. It feels like a terrible rip off of the old apple ads “I’m a Mac”, “and I’m a PC”. It’s crap.
I’m sorry for whatever I did to personally offend you so much. This must be so hard for you. I hope you’re doing ok.
Enshitification of Windows was my reason, I was quite patient, I let it slide when they backported telemetry to Windows 7, Windows 10 was still quite usable but the amount of bloat was getting on my nerves already. When I saw what shitshow 11 is becoming I jumped ship. I’m glad I did it early and didn’t wait for Windows EOL.
Same.
I had been dualbooting between win10 and linux for quite some time, but at some point near the win10 EOL, I realized I had not booted to windows in ~8 months or so. Decided it was time to nuke the windows partitions.
Pretty much exactly same for me. While I am of the tinkering kind I prefer my gaming machine to game when I wan’t to game. Once linux became stable enough for my choice of games I had no need for windows and used the second ssd for game storage.
Back in the early 2010s, I bought a new PC with Windows 8 on it. Hated the way it looked and the way it worked. I wanted my Start menu and Aero and Classic themes back. Led me to learning about Linux. But uxTheme and Classic Shell kept me happy for a couple more years.
Then I got a laptop with Windows 10. Felt my heart rate spike as I went through the settings and found out how much more hostile to user choice and privacy Microsoft had become. When the semi-annual updates kept undoing all my hard work debloating Windows, I decided it was time to begin using Linux in earnest.
At first, I had a dual-boot setup and jumped around between Ubuntu, Deepin, Arch, etc. Found myself booting into the Windows partition less than once a month, at which point I moved it out onto its own drive. Distro-hopping went on for about a year, after which I decided that Debian met all of my needs. Continued DE-hopping for about another year until settling on XFCE with Chicago95. Brought me enough joy to make a standardized setup in a VM, which I have since cloned to all of my computers except for the Windows laptop I keep around for work.
