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.

I wanted to code in C. I saw some tutorials for windows and found it very complex, but I saw one in linux where the person just gcc hello.c. And since then I’ve fallen in love

I was not about to put up with windows co-pilot or recall and had already put up with enough ads and bugs.

I had been running Debian on my laptop for a year without a problem and then finally Windows 11 started doing this when I was trying to update:

Click check for updates? Same result. Wait a week and try again? Same result.

I could no longer trust that the OS was secure from even 3rd parties, so I pulled the trigger and installed Debian 12 - later upgrading to Debian 13 when it released.

There just is never any going back now - Linux is just waaaaaaay too good.

Now I just need something similar to happen with phones.

Homework.

College used linux because I did computer science.
Topic: concurrency. College then gave us a programming assignment that required adding a code library, which I had never done before or even heard of, and thus did not understand.
Since this was a library that was platform-specific, they had made one library for linux and one for windows.
Way too late I got the gist of it but still couldn’t install the library.
Since the question contained the linux directory structure I was convinced that the windows library was broken and every other college student finished this task in Linux.
Thus I installed Linux.
Ten years later I understood and finished the assignment.

FreeBSD didn’t have working nvidia drivers for amd64 in 2006, so, Linux it was.

This feels like a fireplace for all Linux users to meet :D

I learned how far gaming on Linux had come, so during COVID I decided to try it out. I wiped my Windows 10 installation, and installed Ubuntu on it (later Pop!_OS, then Garuda, and Arch on other machines), and got to work figuring things out. I didn’t know if it’d stick, because I was still unsure of it as I wasn’t sure I’d get all of my games working. But, I got settled within a week, and over time things just got better. At that time I was so used to Windows’ bloat and other… “features” that I became blind to them. After more than five years using Linux, using Windows even for a few minutes is quite the shock!

My heat was out and I needed a way to warm my apartment so installed Gentoo on my Dell XPS. /s

That was around the time Windows 2000 was coming out and I couldn’t afford a copy. I’d been dabbling for a year or two before. That was my first and last dual boot computer. MythTV really sold me on linux.

Post subject:

Why?

Post content:

Why did you switch to Linux? I’d like to hear your story.

I feel like I’ve been click-baited.

I started a masters program and I was assigned an an office computer with MintOS that contained all the software and data for my research project. Unfortunately, my advisor couldn’t remember the password so my first task was breaking into the computer. You’d think being able to externally reset the root password would turn me away from Linux, but the ease and functionality of the terminal shell really made sense to me. Plus now I know how to better secure my Linux systems.

It was a challenge I wanted to conquer too but also I increasingly felt like I didn’t own my computer. The software was increasingly cutting me out of the ability to modify and use it the way I wanted.

I spent a lot of time in Gentoo early on where patching software was an overlay and recompile away and it was great testing early amd64 bugs and pushing the limits with gaim and reverse engineering chat protocols.

I was doing some dual booting then but as i built a career in web development, it became more and more my solo driver. Running the same platform you’re developing for is incredibly convenient and Linux runs the web.

Now I can’t imagine running windows. Using it and helping people on it is just a miserable experience for me.

My dad was a software developer so growing up, there were Linux textbooks in the bookcases. Sorry if was inspired by my dad to try Linux in and off in my teens. Was fun a kid failing and then succeeding to install Linux and distrohop through the various flavors of Ubuntu and what not.

Then in university my cheap laptop was running poorly on Windows 10 say I started experimenting again with Arch, Mankato since I didn’t really need any fancy proprietary software.

Finally, now in 2025, just pissed off with Windows and decided I’d go all in with Linux on my desktop gaming PC. It worked well enough or my laptop and my home server, and really considered that it was not games that required anti cheat that I really loved, so I just dove in with Bazzite.

I had a not-very-computer-savvy friend with Windows 7 who didn’t want to upgrade to 11 but Steam and some other programs stopped working for him, so I tried out Mint as a dual boot option and told myself that I’d switch back to Windows when I needed to.

I ended up never booting to Windows again; everything I needed to run worked just fine in Linux, either natively, or with Wine, or with alternatives that were actually better than what I was using in Windows.

Tired of the constant pop ups in windows 10. The constant upselling of their product.

An OS shouldn’t get in the way of what you are doing and Windows was always popping up some bullshit.