Linux

I had known what Linux was but I never really was interested in finding out what it was. That was, until, 2021 came around and I became more privacy conscious. Learning more about Open Source software and it's philosophy, switching completely to FOSS software (besides ROM) on my phone and then slowly looking into Linux. I was fascinated by it, this wholly new world as it seemed to me... ready to explore and learn so much from. Of course, someone who's used windows most of his life will definitely think of it as a challenge to learn to use Linux and adapt to it. I started supporting and using more and more OSS and loved it, so naturally I also had became a bit more interested in Linux. After I became privacy conscious, I also wanted to get away from Big Tech and I already hated using Windows by that point. That was because I've had a low end PC most of my life, I stuck around with Windows 7 until 2019 where it became EOL and I had to switch to Windows 10. It was an awful experience, running windows 10 on older and low end hardware.

Then came 2022, I had a new upgraded system and it was more mid-range than low-end now. I started using Linux in VMs and learnt more and more about it, I tried to switch full time but couldn't because of a few things that I just cannot live without. Truth be told I'm still using Windows, there's just one thing holding me back and all other things I've either adapted to, learnt or have found an alternative for. I know some people will hurl insults at me for saying I dislike Big Tech but also use Windows and call myself privacy conscious but It is what it is. I use Linux part-time in VMs and I really enjoy it. As soon as that use case is covered, I'll be making a full switch to Linux.

Apologies if this went a little off-topic haha, couldn't help myself I'm afraid

I’ve been using Linux off and on again for the past decade.

The original reason I used Linux was because as a kid I got stuck with whatever old laptop was laying around, so my dad would install Ubuntu to make it usable.

When I built my first computer a couple years ago and started using Windows 10, that’s when Windows stopped working for me. Nothing made me want to switch more than when the major Windows 10 updates broke my software every 6 months.

I watched a video from the linux experiment and thought it looked cool, so I kept watching his videos, and now here I am.

I wanted to update my family PC (technically, but I don't think anyone else apart from me used it). Windows XP licence was too expensive for me as a kid and I found a CD ROM in my library with a FOSS OS advertised on it.

Fast forward to now, and I have been using Linux almost exclusively for 15 years now (some Windows usage needed for work or gaming)

Windows is boated and eventually becomes unusable or unsupported.
Linux has no such issue.
That was my initial reason for trying it.
Since then I've revived countless computers with Linux.

I heard about it off and on, but this was the days in dial-up and downloading an ISO to install Linux was too expensive in time and bandwidth . I had discovered at my local Office Depot, a Mandrake Linux box set so I splurged on that and got my first taste of Linux then. I also was able to surf the web and learn how to install it manually, but it didn't make any sense at all and was too complex. For Mandrake, I didn't care for it. It wasn't until later on when I started working with hosting sites, that I got used to Centos and Ubuntu for servers. I even had Mac OSX for a while, which taught my about the directory structure, but I went back to Windows until around 2015ish when I jumped ship and went to Linux fulltime. I worked technical support and the servers were Linux based so I had learned a lot more doing that and got very comfortable with it. I then jumped through different distros to where I am now (Arch). I firmly hold belief though that Arch isn't the best and no distro is truly the superior one. Instead, whatever Linux distro you use, if it does what you need it to do, then so be it!

To answer the question though, what pushed me toward Linux was really the whole push toward Windows 10 being more loaded down with the pushed tracking and advertisements that comes with the Windows Territory. Plus - I grew to love the command line and it's sort of my second home now.

Privacy, Windows 11, and the fact that my system is more stable running Linux. I could count on a BSOD happening once or twice a week due to a driver issue with Windows 10. I still get strange crashes on Linux, but much less often.

A friend in high school gave me an Ubuntu live CD and told me I should try it.

I used Linux on my jailbroken Chromebook during school before and I slowly started using more and more of wsl when that came out.

Then one day a windows update which started automatically on my laptop ended up wiping the encryption keys, I lost all my data including a lot of organised financial documents. This happened while I was having trouble with wsl where it would just delete itself on my pc. Then there was the issue of my pc having an English international keyboard which I was unable to remove and windows kept switching me to it every 2 minutes. Which makes programming harder due to how it handles inverted commas. I ended up doing some regedit to remove it, but then all windows system apps stopped working, including settings. And guess what, there was now an update ready which I could not skip because settings won't open. And did I mention my laptop wiped itself again?

I did not have a single issue since I switched about 4 years ago, I never looked back. Not even for gaming, I exclusively use Linux and I am proud of it. And this is saying a lot, because I always mess up my system when doing random experiments for fun, but there is also always a clear way out. (I use arch btw, and rtfm really helps a lot)

I needed something lighter than windows 7 basic on a cheap network my girlfriend at the time (now wife) bought me when we were in high school. Ended up using Ubuntu 11.10 netbook edition. After spending 5 hours getting my Broadcom wireless card working, I was hooked. Used it until that laptop died and during that time I slowly migrated all of my computers to Linux. Only kept windows on secondary drives or a different partition for the occasional time I need it.

As a young tech trying to get started, Knoppix live CD enabled me to clean viruses and recover data for clients.

After years of using it as a specific tool, I decided to daily drive it when an older machine stopped accepting Windows Updates.

I still run Windows on my big rig, but Debian on everything Else.

My computer was trash. I migrated out of necessity. It took 40 minutes to boot into Windows XP. Old-timey Lubuntu kept that computer alive for another 5 years.

When I got a real computer, I found that using Windows was unpleasant -- So when Proton started to mature, I switched back to Linux (cuz hey, vidya gaems).

... Then I became an adult and the political radicalisation began.

I'm not "obssessed" so much as I am politically motivated, so I guess I'm an evangelist in a way. If there were ten other mature open source operating systems I'd shill all of them. As it is there's Linux and BSD. So those are the ones I shill.

Generally I'll pester anyone willing to listen to get as far from Big Tech's walled gardens as their life necessities allow them.

I'm not a tech person, I think most Linux people are? Instead I'm just someone who studied basic sociology and history, and can see the kind of power that walled-garden tech can (and HAS, in recent times) give to very few people.

Interesting how there's so many answers here, but no mention of the one I came here for (and I thought would be most popular) : ricing.

I got into Linux when I saw screenshots of all the cool desktops people made with KDE, XFCE, and tiling window managers. Even Gnome looked sleek and minimal. After a while I got bored of ricing but I stayed for the ease of use as a developer

My boss at the time (I was a writer for a tech magazine) asked me to review FreeBSD. I couldn't get it to install (at all) so someone suggested Linux (Slackware) which was an insane idea at the time around 1995 or 1996. Slackware sort of worked, no sound and I had to do various really annoying things to get it to see my modem (which never really worked). But something about it was interesting and I stuck with it.

Windows 11

I wasn't happy with windows vista's prformance and wanted to try something different. Didn't make the switch permanent for a decade because I needed games in my life but I always ran linux on my laptops when I got them.

Minecraft. I wanted host a dedicated Minecraft server so I rented a VPS and needed a free, lightweight OS. I've been tinkering with Linux ever since.

I love Linux and Windows, I wouldn't trade one for the other.

For me, I was a curious and inquisitive 15 year old that wanted to try out something different to Windows. I didn't really have any gripes with Windows at the time, so I tried Ubuntu and it went from there. I mostly remember after that installing Xubuntu on everything because it was just so lightweight and to this day I still love Xfce.

Curiosity pushed me to try Linux roughly 15 years ago. Today it's simply the best option for me. But I approach it as a user, I don't posses any deep knowledge about how it works.

I wanted to switch to Linux for several years because I was very sick of how Windows did things.

With Valve doing Proton and Windows 11 being a much shittier Windows 10... With rumours of it eventually becoming a FORCED update!... I decided to actually switch to Linux last November.

Haven't regretted it. Haven't used any other OS since.

Embedded Linux is such a huge part of embedded software in every industry. I've done a bit with build root but mostly Yocto. There is just no replacement for the Linux kernel. If I need to know how the kernel actually handles a platform driver, I can just look up the relevant source. This is just impossible with Windows (IoT or otherwise)

It was two decades ago, when someone gave us the CDs of Fedora. It was so very different than Windows XP. I came back to Linux when my school library had Ubuntu on their computer. I'm gonna ask someone to gift me Steam Deck upon graduating from college.

Im not into it yet.

But the answer is windows.

Windows me

Always dabbled, but working with Docker has really made me commit to learning it. Also the ease of spinning up linux on cloud systems is a joy.

Windows 8

Talk of advertisements in the Windows app menu was the last straw for me. I don't use any programs that require Windows so I don't have dual boot or anything - although I do have a KDE theme that mimics Windows 95/8 because that was what I grew up with and I'm super nostalgic for it.

That said, I've always been attracted to "third options". My favorite phone was a Windows Phone, my motorcycle is from a small manufacturer, etc.

It's really great for my work as a software developer. I used it for more than 10 years for work.

My entertainment PC is not Win11 compatible, so I'm trying to switch to Linux with that one too, but it's giving me a lot of grief.

I was on a Microsoft systems admin/engineer path for a while and an opportunity opened for a KVM/XEN engineer and I was the one only person in my office to accept the offer. That was back in the RHEL/CentOS 4 days.

After playing around a bit I got hooked and haven't gone back down the MS path since then.

Curiosity, mostly. And Ubuntu giving away freebies.

Took me a couple years to get out of the "Why change a winning team?" mentality and my baby duck syndrome.

Sco xenix way back when was required for work. I decided to run it on my desk Then i had to work on sun machine for a few years. So ive really never been a windows person except for games. Once wine then proton atrted letting me game even a little then i got rid of every windows install i had and replaced with linux

Windows update that ruined 3 months of work.

Windows used to break all the time, Microsoft was evil, that Ubuntu thing showed up.

My Mac died, at which time I was already a commandline enthusiast, & unable to afford a new Mac.

Worked as a computer repair tech forever ago. We ended up with tons of spare parts and abandoned computers. I took a few home and looked for things I could use them for. Quickly found Linux and gave it a shot. It was perfect, I didn’t need to spend $100+ for a copy, there were tons of options, and I could do anything with it. Spent the next 20 years using it on every computer except my main desktop because of games. At one point I was 100% Linux and all I played was WoW using WINE. Now I’m back to 100% Linux thanks to steam and proton making a healthy chunk of my library playable.

Any time someone comes to me with an old computer my recommendation is to throw Linux on it and get a few more years of usefulness out of it.

I was being encouraged to learn programming by my brother-in-law, so when I was going through the lessons in the course he bought there was a section on Linux. At first I was thinking on how would I be able to install in a virtual machine but my brother-in-law in all his wisdom said "why don't you dual-boot". After some planning so I don't nuke my hard drive and flashing LMDE as my first distro I installed Linux and did the rest of the course there.

I've distro hopped 3 times since then:

LMDE (3 months) -> Ubuntu LTS (4 months) -> Arch (2 years) -> NixOS (2 weeks)

I was in 6th grade and wanted to know more about computers. I thought being a computer programmer would be a cool job one day. I'd heard Linux was difficult to install and use and thought hey, that'll help me learn. So I had my parents get me a copy of Mandrake 6. It was perfect because I had the free time to play with it and figure stuff out by making mistakes and fixing them without the pressure of having to do really important work.

I do preach the good word of FOSS, but only to those who are in a position to appreciate the suggestion and benefit from it.

Less "get in to" and more "all my shit is so old basic things on the internet were not working any more if I left it running XP or 7".

I was lucky to meet some real operating systems (VMS, Unix) before I got contaminated with Microsoft products. So when I first heard about Linux (some guy in Finland wrote a new kernel and showed it to Prof. Tanenbaum, and when he grows up, he wants it to become a full fledged unix :-)) I knew already what it is.

PiHole and then Minecraft actually all through CLI.

Imagine my shock once I found out about screen and SSH. I didn't need to walk back and forth between my computer and the server.

I didn't touch a GUI for about 4 years.

Curiosity. I was a curious tweenager, and I was already a bit of a geek at the time. I read about Linux in computer magazines at the time, and decided to give one of the free CDs a try - with RedHat 5.2 on it. To be honest, wasn't really impressed with it. I especially disliked having to recompile the kernel, which took ages on those Pentium 3s. But it got me exploring other operating systems, and I found QNX, BeOS and NetBSD. I was really impressed with with QNX and BeOS in particular - Linux felt quite clunky and amateurish in comparison. I especially liked the multimedia performance of BeOS, and the lightweightedness, polish and desktop responsiveness of QNX, which featured a real-time microkernel. QNX felt lightyears ahead of it's competition at the time. My first run into it was a free 1.44MB demo floppy that the company mailed me directly, complete with a full developer manual (which was completely wasted on me as a tween, but I still appreciated it and tried to comprehend bits and pieces). I was already into making custom bootable floppy disks at the time, so I was extremely impressed that they managed to fit in a full fledged GUI desktop, complete with a browser that supported Javascript (along with network drivers and a modem dialer) - all on a 1.44MB floppy disk! Till date I've no idea how they managed that. Even the tiniest of Linux WMs are massive in comparison and look fugly (twm), but QNX's Photon microGUI somehow managed to make it good looking and functional. Maybe it was all coded in Assembly, I don't know, but it was, and still remains, very impressive nonetheless.

I digress, but all this started getting me into exploring POSIX systems and distro/OS hopping. It was only when I experienced SuSE that I fell in love with Linux. Finally, I had a polished Linux desktop, with a full-featured settings/control panel (YaST) that made it easy to use even for a tween like me. And that's when I switched to Linux as my main-ish OS, with Windows relegated to gaming duties. However, I didn't fully get rid of Windows until Windows 7. I was actually impressed with the Windows 7 beta releases and was prepared to buy it at release, but... I wasn't expecting that price tag. I was hoping I'd get a student discount, but it wasn't applicable where I lived (or there was some catch, I don't remember exactly). In any case, I couldn't afford it, and I was really disappointed and angry at Microsoft that they were charging so much for it here, compared to the US pricing. And so, on the release day of Windows 7, I formatted my drive and switched to Linux full time, and never looked back.

Job reason, early on my college, realize on my field I would be working on Linux a lot. I installed one on my laptop to get a head start. It was painful, Not being able to use the usual software, did not help that my university don't even use Linux. I had to keep trying to find workarounds.

Privacy and programming communities. I tried to stay at Windows at first, but when I was bith recommended GNU/Linux for privacy and had to use it for programming, I knew I couldn't keep the resistance up.

Three years later and I have 0 regrets. All games I play work, except for, recently, TF2 because of a weird malloc library issue on Arch-based systems. All apps I need just work, and whenever I need something Windows-only I have a VM setup just for that. Developing and managing your system on a Unix-like system is just so much easier.

work requirement, amphetamine-driven endless curiosity of staring at commands and man pages, interest in programming, initial allure of the concept of copyleft