I woke up one day, and copilot had been installed on my PC overnight. I didn’t like that lack of control. This was, coincidentally, a weekend that my wife, kid, and dog were all gone. Since I knew Win10 only had a year left, and I had the time, I figured it was as good a time as any.

I downloaded Fedora and Kubuntu. Spent a bit of time with each, and went with Kubuntu. For a few days. It had issues waking from sleep, and I had to do some kind of tweaking with every one of my games to get them to work.

I don’t mind tinkering with stuff, but i just don’t have the time to make my computer my hobby. So, I switched to Mint. Everything just works. So, I put it on everything else. I guess the one time I really had to dig into terminal stuff was getting a wifi driver for my living room PC off git. Other than that, super easy.

Now, I’m coming up on a year of Mint. Couldn’t be happier.

Sometimes I want to read the sources of the programs I use and learn how they work.

because, with Linux I truly own my computer and have the freedom to do whatever I want with it

Fix your title

I had to use a library that only works in a UNIX like OS. So I switched to linux and never looked back.

My first experience with Linux was as a kid, when the family PC that was handed down to us breathed its last. Quite a bit of malware was on that machine, and it got left to sit in the garage.

I found Ubuntu and revived the Compaq, although the experience was limited, and me as a 10 year old didn’t really know what all could be done with a PC anyway.

Since then, it’s been a slow burn. 2022 had me dual booting Linux and Windows, and learning how to migrate everything over.

2025 and Windows 11 recall, AI everywhere, intrusive Big Tech had me pull the trigger and nuke the Windows boot from my machine.

Now I’m here. Enjoying a peaceful time on my hardware just like it used to be when I was a kid. The internet and the computer have the capacity to be wonderful again.

Privacy, no bloat (depending on distro), no Big Tech, freedom, no cost.

I switched in the Windows 98/ME era, so quite some time ago. I was tired even then of Windows being an unstable mess. BSODs, headaches with DirectX and different versions, etc. I was/am mostly a console gamer so not being able to play games on my computer was less of an issue for me. So I tried then Red Hat linux which I scored some CD images of and never really looked back.

My shift was primarily ideologically driven. I was sick of privacy encroachment, enshittification, and feeling like my computer wasn’t truly mine. Linux changed all that.

I’ve used it since the 90s, but windows was always my daily driver. Linux always worked, but games could be spotty and there always seemed to be to be the random breakage for no reason.

But that changed a few years ago. Games “just worked”, device support became really good, and if I’m being honest - I became a gnome guy. That interface is very very productive, especially on a laptop with a trackpad.

And then windows just, started sucking. They break machines with every single update, it’s like there’s zero qa anymore. And the little things became more and more annoying - the pop ups “upgrade to 11, try copilot, OneDrive isn’t working omfg let me help you fix that” the “where is that setting moved to now” game, the extra clicks everywhere.

My dual boot setup found a windows drive that was never being used anymore. I didn’t switch, I just stopped using. Eventually I just deleted the partition and use it for extra space and playing around with other OSs.

During this process I distro hopped quite a bit and eventually settled on fedora workstation. It’s been good to me on three PCs.

Because it is the least worst OS

I had a laptop with a borked Windows installation. Unfortunately, it didn’t come with any kind of recovery partition or DVD. So, I took a chance on Linux and I liked it better.

I had been messing with Linux for years and was already dual booting Manjaro for a while when Windows started uninstalling my AMD GPU drivers every 2-3 weeks for a month straight, tried what I could to stop it, but it kept doing it, eventually fed up enough I fully switched over.

Customization and no bloatware. I also love tinkering and finding problems to solve, so Arch was the distro I went with.

I was bored. Nowadays I would like to store sensible data (i.e. any personal data) on my laptop, so I use Linux