For me it was the philosophy behind Free (as in freedom) software. Call me a Richard Stallman fan, but I would love to live in a world were everyone is free to:
Run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
Study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
Distribute copies of your modified versions to others.
I’m actually interested too; are you looking for a desktop or laptop? My biggest hurdle is laptop availability and finding decent places to start shopping. How have you approached it? I know it’s not ideal but I prefer laptops for work.
I’m late to the party but windows Vista forced me off of windows. Not 5 minutes into setting up a new laptop and it told me even after clicking yes for admin privileges that I didn’t have the right to uninstall mcafee… I threw Debian on the laptop and never looked back. Ended up running FreeBSD for years on that thing and have mostly stuck with them since.
For Linux as others have stated lack of crashes and clear ways to customize/fix things was incredible.
FreeBSD doesn’t support all the newer standards yet (looking at you wifi6), but it is beyond rock stable. A month plus of 24/7 uptime between reboots for years and it’s just as snappy as when I first installed it. And even better they push hard to keep things more or less the same. The things I learned setting up FreeBSD 8.0 are still the same for FreeBSD 13. The biggest changes have been upgraded hardware support and quality of life tools that interact with the systems I was already using.
As a note FreeBSD does not come with a graphical interface. They have imo the best manual (handbook) for setting it up and getting going, and have native zfs for software raid arrays.
My risky two cents here is FreeBSD is great for learning all the ins and outs of Unix-like systems but is missing some things linux users take for granted like docker for servers (they use jails you set up yourself) and no cuda libraries for ai. If you have the time and want to learn how these systems operate from the ground up I find it’s better than arch. Easier to install, no compiling everything like gentoo, and an incredibly clean manual that has always made sense and worked exactly as expected. For just getting a desktop and easing into things there’s also nothing wrong with say Linux mint or any of the other recommendations others have said either.
The glory of Unix-like systems is they’re yours, and once you get used to how they run they’ll be rock steady for years and run faster than windows on the same device.
Ubuntu 22.04 has ray tracing support for AMD RX 6000 graphics cards, but the performance is terrible. You can install Mesa 23.1 from a PPA and it will work much better. Be sure to take a backup in case something breaks and you need to revert to the stock version. I had some trouble getting the 32 bit Mesa libraries to install, which are required for Steam.
I can run Quake II RTX at 50-60 fps in 1080p on my RX 6700 XT using Mesa 23.1.3 and Linux kernel 5.15.
I switched for two reasons. First, I don't like how Microsoft is trying to attach everything to an online microsoft account. I prefer local control of my OS. I know there is a workaround for this, but it isn't worth the effort.
Second, I am Cheap. My latest hardware is a decade out of date, and linux makes better use of the limited resources that I have.
I decided to switch when windows xp went end-of-life, because my pc was a mid-2000’s era relic that would surely catch fire if it was forced to handle the windows 7/10 bloat. Naturally, I installed Mint on bare metal without doing any research beforehand. Not the best idea, but sometimes it’s fun to jump headfirst into a completely foreign landscape. That said, Cinnamon (the desktop environment of Mint) shares much of its design language with windows, so it’s not really that foreign, as far as the graphical interface is concerned.
What surprised me was just how different the underlying system was, how much more transparent and accessible it was, and how incredibly efficient and versatile the command line could be. Then there’s the broader OSS community, which I think is a fantastic thing to participate in even if you don’t use Linux, but using Linux is certainly a gateway.
I’m not saying Linux is perfect, and it’s probably not for everyone, but it is nice to not be held captive by some monopolistic corporation, who continuously engages in ethically questionable anti-consumer behaviour, in the name of increasingly monetizing their user base. Linux gives power back to the end users, and that’s what makes it worthwhile and important.
Long time ago my dad bought a few netbooks and they came with Xandros pre-installed. It wasn’t much of a choice to be honest (all my friends, school, every other PC was running Windows). And I never give it a chance because there was a desktop with Windows so I used that instead.
Times goes buy and the Xandros version was not going to keep up with my needs and I’ve switched to Ubuntu Remix (very cool at the time) and then I’ve got to experience Ubuntu 09.10 with Gnome. And that was a game changer for me (I learned a lot on how Linux works under the.hood) but I kept Windows machine just for gaming (until last year).
My AMD graphics card had atrocious driver support in Windows, and every time windows forced the half-yearly big update on me, my PC would go into a BSOD loop and I would not be able to run windows. It was becoming a massive annoyance and a humongous time waster.
So I switched to Linux Mint. No hardware problems at all. With the graphics card working, I played a video game that literally worked better in Linux than Windows.
Then I bought a new laptop and dual booted different distributions. But every time I log into Windows after doing something in Linux (Fedora KDE spin), my windows clock would get messed up. There are professional softwares I have to use that only work on Windows, so completely switching to linux was not an option, and windows boots up Much faster than linux.
So when I needed some space for an online multiplayer game, I got rid of the dual boot. Now I run everything using WSL2.
Windows remains the default platform for small developer teams, and large video games. So it takes a large incovenience to abandon it. And just a little bit of friction is enough to make me switch back to windows. Sorry if I disappointed you guys.
The misconception of Debian as an “outdated” distro is… alarming. IDK but I am running Debian 12 (coming from latest Fedora) and I don’t feel any sign of early deprecation or that an already “old distro”. It’s smooth, stable and usable, like things should be if you use your computer to do other stuff and you rely on your installed software to be there for you when you need it.
People tends to freak out if the latest packages aren’t installed. Stop it, please, security patches are more important than having the latest Gnome/KDE version. Perhaps if we stop selling that idea in Youtube videos, newcomers to this space will not be rushing to install the latest things without knowing if they are worth and really good distros like Debian, which is NOT a corporate backed Linux Distribution, will get more traction.
(PS: in Fedora, you are a guinea pig for future RHEL updates and ultimately, more profits for IBM)
Not to mention RH is ultimatly in charge of Fedora, so it isn’t a community distro. Look at the codec issue that came up this year the lawyers at RH told them to remove it so they did. If it was a community distro why would the lawyers care?
I’ve used debian stable for a decade now. The things I care about are not dependent on new features, so I’m not in a hurry to upgrade to newer versions. I’m happy with security updates and a system that is reliable above all.
Package managers are a godsend and there’s nothing like them on Windows. Chocolatey is okay, but it’s got nothing on Linux pms. This discontinuity between installing and upgrading some applications, other applications, Windows apps, drivers, and system software makes me want to cry.
Customization. Man is Windows lame here. Colors on Windows is about all you can do, and it’s so limited. I bought the machine I should be able to set it up how I like. There are some deeper ways to theme and adjust things more directly, but they’re hard to use and risk breaking your system. On Linux, customization is easy, even on a more pro-default-option DE like GNOME. I just want things to work, and Windows fights me to get it to a usable state.
Bloat, telemetry, ads, proprietary garbage, etc, etc, etc. I like FOSS and using FOSS software, and I can use it on Windows, but I have to have so much other stuff too. Debloat scripts exist, but they can only do so much. There’s always gonna be something Microsoft owns on the system
Complexity and control. Linux is simple. Binaries go in bin, and the settings for them are usually in ~/.config or somewhere in /etc. Want to adjust some obscure setting to fix some issue in a program you installed? Oh go tweak this clear config and explicit setting to fit your hardware or whatever. Easy to fix. On Windows, all the system stuff is not only hidden, it’s restricted, and also so many times on Windows when you run into issues the solution is you have to edit shudder the registry, or worse you have to do a PC reset. Overtime your system slows and blue screens become more frequent too, and there’s nothing you can do. On Linux, you can learn 7 or so folders and understand how your entire system works, keep it maintained, and run it for years. Had a prof in college who was on like a 20yo Gentoo install.
Tiling. There are ways to do tiling on Windows, but they’re all bad and glitchy. Nothing on Windows comes close to i3, and I can’t go back to a non-tiling workflow. Windows wants you to do things the Windows way, and anything outside of that is always lack luster. People talk about Linux balkanization as a problem. It’s not. Those people are just ignorant and stupid. No system can ever really fit all use cases, so it’s important to support choice. Windows doesn’t just promote one way to do things a la GNOME, it actively works against doing things other ways.
Programming. Compilers and dev tools on Linux are so much easier to install and set up than on Windows. If you want to program, you’ve gotta be on Unix/Unix-like
Windows weirdness. There’s so many things on Windows that are just weird decisions. I’ll be using Windows and be like “why the heck did they do it this way?” I’m constantly left scratching my head. Windows has made me lose all respect for Microsoft engineers. They’re clearly stupid. On the other hand, everything on Linux makes sense and has good reasoning behind it. You need to learn very little comparatively to understand your entire system.
Stability. Not talking about applications/upgrades here, but rather Linux will never crash on you, but I can’t go a week without Windows blue screening.
Freedom. I like owning my computer. With Windows, Microsoft owns your PC. Does this directly effect everything constantly? Is it the end all reason for me to switch? No, but it’s icing on the cake. On Windows I feel stuck and miserable. On Linux I feel free and happy.
So I still technically use Windows, but only because I need it because of some software for school, but I still use Linux most of the time. It’s mainly the small yet super annoying things in Windows that caused me to switch. Like how everything has to automatically try and back up to OneDrive until you dig into the settings and disable it, or how it constantly badgers you to use insert Microsoft product here instead of what you want to use. Plus as a computer science student, and someone who spends a lot of time in the terminal, Powershell and the Windows command line feel so old and incapable compared to the Linux terminal (WSL has helped with some of that, but not all of it.) It’s just small issues that cause big issues when you run into them, because it just makes simple things harder to do than they need to be, usually for the sake of pushing their products.
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