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So what did it take for you to go to Linux?

I'm asking what big motivational factors contributed to you into going Linux full-time. I don't count minor inconveniences like 'oh, stutter lag in a game on windows' because that really could be anything in any system. I'm talking, something Windows or Microsoft has done that was so big, that made you go "fuck this, I will go Linux" and so you did.

For me, I have a mountain of reasons by this point to go to Linux. It's just piling. Recently, Windows freaked out because I changed audio devices from my USB headset from the on-board sound. It freaked out so bad, it forced me to restart because I wasn't getting sound in my headset. I did the switch because I was streaming a movie with a friend over Discord through Screen Share and I had to switch to on-board audio for that to work.

I switched back and Windows threw a fit over it. It also throws a fit when I try right-clicking in the Windows Explorer panel on the left where all the devices and folders are listed for reasons I don't even know to this day but it's been a thing for a while now.

Anytime Windows throws a toddler-tantrum fit over the tiniest things, it just makes me think of going to Linux sometimes. But it's not enough.

Windows is just thankful that currently, the only thing truly holding me back from converting is compatibility. I'm not talking with games, I'm not talking with some programs that are already supported between Windows and Linux. I'm just concerned about running everything I run on Windows and for it to run fully on a Linux distro, preferably Ubuntu.

Also I'd like to ask - what WILL it take for you to go to Linux full-time?

theshatterstone54 ,

Ironically enough, it was gaming performance.

What makes this ironic was that this was months before the Steam Deck came out and I was not familiar with Wine and/or Proton in the slightest. I just thought, “If there are people running it as a daily driver, then it must be good enough at those things”.

I’d say my transition over to Linux took years. I first learned of it when I had a laptop with 4GB RAM and 64GB Storage. When you’re working with something that weak, you want to minimise wherever you can and it got to the point where the only way to reduce storage use to make this machine useful for some lighter games (also to reduce RAM usage to make the machine snappier than it was with Windows 10), waa to install Linux Mint, as it seemed like the best option. Later, when I got a new laptop of my own, I really got into digital privacy and running a Custom ROM on my phone (a practice that has continued to this day), which led me to the old familiar (well, not so familiar at the time because I was a noob who knew nothing), Linux. I played with Ubuntu, Mint and PopOS in Virtualbox and about 2 months after that (if I’m not mistaken), I bit the bullet and installed Mint. Now why didn’t I do it earlier? I was busy with college. Why didn’t I do it on the old machine, or over Christmas instead of 3 months later in March (2022)? Because I was scared I was going to mess up the partitioning, as I wanted to dual boot. So in March 2022, I switch, and proceed to use my Windows partition… 2 times, until I completely wiped it because it was making my life more complicated than it needed to be and I wanted all 512 GB instead of the 128GB I managed to free from Windows’ grasp. Now I had to set up temporary Windows partitions twice, where one time was about Excel (my machine wasn’t powerful enough to do it in a VM, and I needed to use advanced features for college, that weren’t available on Libreoffice or OnlyOffice. I don’t remember the reasons for the second time anymore. I almost had to do that another 3rd time because under the same teacher in college, we had to use VS. Not Code, but Visual Studio. It is not available for Linux, and I didn’t have my Windows partition at the time, so I ended up doing it in class on the college computers out of spite for Windows. These 2 scenarios really made me almost hate that teacher (her attitude and some people’s dislike of her were not doing her any favours in my eye) but once I got to know her properly, she didn’t match the perception of her that I was left with. Anyways, that’s the story of how I switched to Linux.

I’m on Fedora now. Distros (mostly) don’t matter. Peace,

Lettuceeatlettuce ,
@Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml avatar

Been 100% Linux on all my personal devices for about 4 years.

I just got tired of being treated like I was either an idiot or a criminal by Microsoft. Plus the way they kept forcing their bloatware and trash ads on the OS that I already paid for!

I decided I didn’t care what I had to give up, it was worth it to be rid of Microsoft’s clutches forever. Switched to Linux and I’ve never looked back.

Turns out, I actually didn’t have to sacrifice much at all, and the few things I don’t have anymore are nothing compared to the benefits of using Linux and FOSS software.

Everything works better for me too, more stable, updates are rarer and wayyyyy faster when I push them. No more fighting with AMD driver hell in Windows, no more weird lockups or crashes, a million times more customization options, and zero bloat or spyware installed by default on my system.

blitzed ,
@blitzed@noauthority.social avatar

@Lettuceeatlettuce @Frozyre

Yes, so many years squandered babysitting Windows PC's sheesh /0\ and dicking around with dopey serial numbers, gauntlet of security patches & multiple reboots LOL

I am exclusively Linux-based for Eighteen Years now wahooOOOoooo \0/

bufordk ,
@bufordk@noauthority.social avatar

@Lettuceeatlettuce
Actually you GAINED on many levels.
@Frozyre @billybon3s

festus ,

I had a few false starts before, but MS force-updating me to the objectively worse and user-hostile Windows 8 triggered my latest (and successful) switch.

HarriPotero ,
@HarriPotero@lemmy.world avatar

I switched in 1997.

The internet was taking off, and it was built on Linux and un*ces. It was just a lot more fun.

Also, C-programming. M$ had just gotten protected memory in NT4.0, but a lot of applications just didn’t run on NT. It’d take another three years before protected memory hit mainstream with win2k. No novice programmer wants their computer to bluescreen every time they do a tiny little out of bounds error.

Mesophar ,

Windows Registry

I had recurring issues with registering Bluetooth devices, where they would pair initially but refuse to connect again after a reboot. I couldn’t remove the device from saved connections, and registry edits wouldn’t save or persist. I’d have to completely uninstall the driver, change the registry, and reinstall the drivers, with restarts between each step, to get it to work for 1-2 days.

Now, having to troubleshoot isn’t what turned me away from Windows to Linux. I knew I would run into that plenty on Linux as well, but I came to hate the registry. If I was going to have to go through all this trouble to get things to work, I might as well do it on a system I had more control over. I had worked with different distros on VMs and dual booting before, so when I built a new system, I just skipped Windows entirely.

dotslashme ,

Honestly I got started due to curiosity and well, it turned out Linux was a rabbit hole and so down I went.

ramenu ,

For me personally, it was mostly due to programming on Windows was a painful experience. I was using MinGW compilers, which were quite good but I wanted the latest and greatest GCC. The other options were using MSVC or clang, but I believe clang is just a frontend to MSVC (I’m not sure… please correct me if I’m wrong).

WSL was an option, but I was doing graphics programming at the time. And I needed to upgrade to WSL2 to run GUI applications or something, which required Windows 11. So at some point I got fed up and just thought to myself, why not run the real thing. This is probably one of the few instances where the technical merits of Linux is what actually got me to switch in the first place. I didn’t hear anything about software freedom, privacy, or even care about any of those reasons at all when I did the switch.

As a Windows user for a very long time, using it from my childhood, I wouldn’t have switched no matter how unethical it was to use Windows if Linux was too difficult to use. So I’m glad that ended up not being the case. :)

chemicalprophet ,

Windows ME

dotslashme ,

Oh sweet lord, I required therapy after installing that garbage once.

Magnolia_ ,

Forced to use it in a VM in uni. Went down the rabbit hole and liked it.

stargazingpenguin ,

What pushed me over the edge was how much worse the user experience became with 8 & 10.

I really disliked the lack of control over updates, settings and defaults being reverted after minor updates, and the constant pushing of Microsoft accounts and services. The data collection and privacy issues certainly didn’t help either. I switched from 7 to 10 for a period of time, but eventually started using Linux for everything except for games. I started realizing just how good Linux gaming was getting, and I eventually had one too many issues with my Windows partition and just quit using it entirely.

I don’t remember having a lot of the frustrations I hear some talk about when switching, but I think that was because early on I realized I just needed to start figuring out the Linux way of doing things rather than bringing my Windows experience over.

umbrella ,
@umbrella@lemmy.ml avatar

it rebooted itself while i left it overnight doing an important render.

thats after i fucked with it for hours to turn automatic updates OFF.

i would probably still be on windows 10 if it werent for microsoft going out of their way to make it shitty.

LedzMx ,

I bought my mother a laptop and it came preinstalled with a bunch of games and software that it threw me off, like wtf I dont want or need this what happened, I had a mac at the time and felt limited to what it can or cant do. So last year I built myself a pc and before installing windows I was already looking at steam decks and noted that it seems games runs quite well, so I went with Mint, and there where some features that lacked but discovered I could modify on my on and it just works! I do have to admin that it was a bit different in my work life, since do graphic design, but its been interesting switching over to inkscape and gimp.

gramgan ,

My final straw was getting a new MacBook Air (I was at that point fine with how UNIX-y macOS was) and realizing I couldn’t dock the laptop to more than one external monitor without some weird hacky third-party software fix. Why, you ask? Well not at all because the laptop technically couldn’t do it, but because Apple said it can’t, because they want to overcharge you on a Pro.

I promptly returned the MacBook, bought a Framework on eBay, and learned NixOS.

10/10, I haven’t looked back since.

HouseWolf ,

Videos of the Steamdeck showed me how good gaming on Linux had gotten and that’s when I started looking into switching.

I already hated using Windows 10 so didn’t take me much convincing to look at alternatives.

I’m not a programmer or work in the I.T. field in anyway. But I have been messing around with computers since I could remember so I’m no stranger to tweaking, breaking and trying to repair things.

BaumGeist ,

I replaced windows on my laptop with Ubuntu and stopped using it after realizing how unimpressed I was with the difference. Years later I took the OSCP course, and they required using Kali.

From there I fell in love. Things that would have taken hours and weird 3rd party installers to do in Windows came with the OS or were in the official repos. The CLI showed me unimaginable power over every bit of the computer, and in windows the Conmand Prompt CLI is pretty mediocre; Powershell is better, but is more about data processing than running software. Linux has SSH and Python installed with one sentence, windows graphical installers are a bloated nightmare. There wasn’t random shitty third party software installed by the OEM who struck a deal with the OS maintainers.

After that, it was a cascade of disillusionment. Those nasty 3rd party apps I didn’t install showing up in my start menu? Actually ads, I was just using cognitive dissonance to avoid admitting that. And the proprietary programs aren’t better, they update more frequently just to introduce ads, harvest more data, and change their layout to make it seem like they did anything to help the end users.

Why does changing any meaningful settings require tampering in the registry? Why is this low level stuff documented so poorly? Why can’t I turn off telemetry completely? Why can’t I check what code is running in the kernel that I purchased and am running ON MY COMPUTER??? IT’S MY COMPUTER, NOT MICROSOFT’S. Why the FUCK should I let them run code that I can’t legally review, much less change, on it?

If someone offered you a meal but refused to tell you about any of the ingredients, you just wouldn’t eat it. Not “you’d be suspicious,” it goes beyond that: you’d be too suspicious to eat it. If someone offered you a home security system that you could have “spy on you minimally” you’d tell them where they could stick it. If it came with your house, you’d remove it immediately. If either of those people tried to charge you for it, you’d laugh in their face.

Yet for some reason, when it’s our computers doing the spying and whatever else we can’t verify, we’ve learned to just put up with it? This is BULLSHIT.

And I have too much pride to be treated like a mark, I won’t take being scammed lying down anymore. I’m not a hapless dipshit who just lets people have their way with her because it’s “too hard to learn new things.” I’ve always said I have some integrity to protect, so I better prove it or forever be a hypocrite.

I already use only Linux at home, I’d have to get my company to switch to let me run it at work.

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