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?
deleted by creator
I’ve used Linux since 1998 (red hat), along BeOS. But I went back to Windows because XP was rather good, Linux was becoming good too slowly, and BeOS was dead. Still kept my Linux partitions though, while my laptop was now running MacOSX. After a few years, with 7, Windows became even better, so I moved to it full time, including in laptops. In the 2010s I tried Linux a couple of times again, but it was having these small bug things that was breaking the overall good experience. It just wasn’t ready for the desktop, sorry. My laptops became once again MacOSX, while I was doing photoshop cleanup for my traditional paintings with Windows 10. Then, in 2022, I retried Linux, and it was finally ready for how I always wanted it to be. The overall experience was good. Linux came to 100% usability for me just this year, with the release of Gimp 3, which allowed adjustment layers.
Basically, I have a baseline standard of how well I expect OSes to work on the desktop. I want the number of bad surprises to a minimum. I’m too old for tinkering, I want things to work. For Linux, this came true only in the last few years. So now I’m switched to it on all my computers. I only kept one macbook air with macos, all the other older mac intel ones are now running linux too. My main OS is Debian-Testing, while on laptops I run Mint. I have no Windows PC anymore at all.
I’ve (mostly) moved over from macOS.
Generally I actually prefer macOS to Linux (I’ve settled on Kububtu mostly), but I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with Apple over the past few years. The cost of their services and products creeping, being able to see business decisions that falsely cripple cheaper devices, and general all round shittiness that I no longer wish to be a part of.
I had had a series of iPhones from a 3GS in 2009 up to a 13 mini, but grew tired of having to jump through hoops to make iOS do what I wanted from it - a feeling exacerbated by using iPadOS on my iPad mini. So last February I grabbed a Pixel 9 and out Graphene on it. hell of a learning curve, but one that showed me that there were better, more equitable ways to achieve what the interconnected Apple ecosystem can do. It might not be as polished, but it’s significantly cheaper, and uses equipment that won’t be rendered obsolete and unable to be upgraded or used in some way.
Then Tim Apple pulled that stunt giving Trump the big gold trophy and I knew that Apple was no longer a company that shared the least of my values. Not that I really believed that before, they’re a multi-trillion dollar company, after all, but of the available options they seemed the least shitty. But not any more.
So now I only use macOS on my M2 Air. When that eventually falls apart I’ll replace it with something I can put Linux on.
Tim Cook sucking up to Trump was a huge letdown for me, too. One would think he’d be against a homophobic fascist as a world leader considering the fact that he’s openly gay, but whatever. Kind of going against his own interests, in many ways, making himself look bad in the eyes of his shareholders and customers…
I still think they make a solid product regardless of anything else, kind of like how the Tesla Powerwall is a really good powerwall but their cars are shit.
Can’t beat a Linux server though, that’s always been true.
0: i tinkered with linux as a kid. didn’t get it. no games?
1: in uni i went back to trying it out. mostly over microsofts policies.
2: i was surprised that the green and orange variety of it-just-works-linux were super comfy to set up.
3: in my dual boot phase a windows update messed up the boot loader.
4: i decided to wipe the win-partition with a wire brush, and never looked back.
My windows XP install kept breaking and I got tired of fixing it, so I tried Linux and never went back.
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.
I’m about to pull the plug on Windows because MS says I need to replace my PC to install Win 11. Nothing wrong with my PC at all, it runs fine. So I’ve flashed a usb stick, checked the Linux distro will run ok, backed up my data and am ready to go. Just have to get a day free of distraction…
I got my first PC in 1983 I think it was. Second-hand, running MS-DOS. I’ve done a lot of computing since then, at work as well as home, almost always Windows. I’ve had Linux on an ancient laptop for a few years, various distros. I like to tinker, so that aspect of Linux doesn’t put me off at all.
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
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.
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.
Yeah, @grue@lemmy.world, it’s really messed up to say, “You’re an idiot!” to an idiot’s face. These people need help, not punishment. Saying the victims are “part of the problem” is insane. The only targets you should be allowed to judge are those who know about everything (both Microsoft’s antics and Linux) and still choose to not move; anyone else is not on the enemy’s side or anything near that dramatic, geez.
cucks and simps
Lmao!!! So true. But most people don’t know why they are actually these things.
Windows XP had been out for quite a while, and I did not want to use it. Staying on 98SE was not going to be possible forever. Ubuntu was quite new, I had recently started uni, and some friends helped me get started. There was one thing that absolutely amazed me: package repository. Just the concept. Windows at the time, to install stuff was finding random pages, sifting through ads, locate download button, hope it is not a virus. Linux had it solved. So far superior it there was no way I’m going back after that.
Windows is terrible.
Let’s just say that ME deserved its “Mistake Edition” moniker
Curiosity at first, but now all the stuff I usually do is easier from linux ssh, sshfs etc. WSL on windows is niftyish.
Windows 10. It just didn’t run on hard drives, when I turned off constantly scanning the drive and the firewall, it refused to update because the update service requires the firewall. Then I forgot how I did it so I never booted into it again.
Windows 7 was the last offline Windows and the last one that was tolerable
I was already somewhat interested in Linux (as a long time Windows user) when I started studying Computer Science, mainly for it’s core philosophy of freedom and openness.
Given that most courses used Linux as the default OS I installed Ubuntu on my laptop to dual boot it with Windows, and began getting familiar with it.
Over the years I started using Linux more and more, making it my main OS, with Windows still installed for the few programs I couldn’t use otherwise. Over time this set of programs became smaller and smaller, until it was just games.
Last year I bought and assembled a new PC to replace my laptop for daily uses, and given the higher specs and better support (AMD GPU instead of Nvidia) I see no reason to have Windows on it at all. Everything I need runs perfectly fine there.
I use Arch, btw.
