I didnt leave because I was tired of windows, i stayed because it was better for development. I learned about other benefits later once I started using it
I’ve been using and working with Linux since 1999 (big box Redhat 5.1). It was a hobby at first, but then it became a tool in almost every job I’ve held.
Now, on my personal PC I’ve bounced between windows and Linux (and some mad attempts at hackintoshing) since 1999.
But Windows Recall changed that.
Microsoft is doing what they’ve always done — try to control everything under the guise of “this is what the user wants” when not one damn person said “oh I want my operating system to take screenshots of everything I’m doing, AI-analyze them, store the data in an insecure database, and trust that Microsoft will never phone home about any of this”
So now I run Linux full time at home and all the games I play and want to play work perfectly fine.
And as silly as it sounds, I think the name is a big part of why businesses haven’t ever wanted to touch the project or invest in it.
Imagine telling your average upper management guy or board member that you want your workers to use software called gimp. They’re probably not gonna want to hear you out.
Anecdotally I know of a local NHS practice that refused to use GIMP, and was even sceptical of other subsequent suggestions of other FOSS due to the terrible impression they got from the GIMP name during a pitch to use more FOSS.
I get it’s their identity, their project. Nobody has the right to dictate the name but them. But it’s also fair to point out that they probably shot themselves in the foot by giving their software a juvenile and weirdly fetishy name.
They won’t. It’s an old topic and they are clear about not changing the name. Anyone having a problem can fork and rename the project. But it seems not to be a big issue that nobody wants to do it.
After seeing this thread, and the Linux wallpaper engine repo, I think I’m gonna boot into Windows and record wallpapers I like as videos, then set them as backgrounds in linux. I’m gonna be on x11 until cinnamon updates to waylan
The turning point was when Windows was no longer set and forget. Windows 7 was the last time that was the case before I had to put any real work into it.
I put up with Windows 10 for a bit and wrote a script to neutralise bloat and configure the OS to some saner settings, then I could keep things consistent between installations. That was fine for a while.
But over time Microsoft became more unhinged and my script evolved into several larger scripts in order to deal with the BS. It became an endless cat and mouse game and I found that I was wasting too much of my time maintaining it just to have a OS that was clean of crap.
The last straw was when a botched update gutted the performance of my PC, and Microsoft took several months to fix the issue. I installed Debian which just worked, and it was good timing because Windows 11 was announced shortly afterwards. I've experienced it at work and it's hands down the worst OS I've ever used, and I've used pretty much every version of Windows since 3.1. I think I'd even take Me over it. At least that OS sucked because it was poorly designed. Windows 11 is intentionally hostile to its users.
It wasn't my first rodeo with Linux since I've been on and off with it since 2007. Still, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it works out of the box these days.
A few months later and I had built my new machine. I didn't even bother to install Windows on it. Now I use Arch btw and haven't looked back.
I was always interested in computer programming, and was doing so much in WSL and several VMs that I installed Cygwin. I was then like, “What the heck! If I want a Unix terminal, I might as well use Linux.”
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