Me, coder, student, cant afford mid range PCs, interested in learning computers, gamer, not professional. What about you guys?
It was the night of December 24th, 1996. I turned on the family PC, then running Win95, and found my D:\ drive corrupted. Windows had no tools nor docs how to resurrect a corrupted filesystem. I cried, and two days later installed SuSE on a spare disk.
Some 20 years later, I restored about half of the disk lost in 1996, because Linux had the tools, and the docs, and encouraged me to learn.
One reason. Anti -Windows 11.
What’s the option? Windows? Keeps getting shittier all the time. Now with AI Slop and bugs. No thanks. Mac? Their walled garden, making it so you can’t upgrade your existing computer? No thanks. My last mac was a 2015 that let you upgrade things but it was a pain. They’ve since removed that so they lost me as a customer.
With Linux, I have a Framework laptop that let’s me upgrade everything. It’s easy to take apart, there are hardware switches for the mic and webcam… it’s very user friendly. Linux doesn’t have any telemetry. The only AI that gets installed is if I install it myself, it’s not intrusive. I’ve been using Linux for a long, long time but the Desktop experience has been lacking in the past. It’s gotten way better recently and the last thing I would boot into windows for was Fusion 360. I spent some time learning FreeCAD and since 1.0 it is way better and now I don’t need to boot into Windows anymore. Steam has made leaps and bounds with proton and now I can even game on Linux which is pretty huge. Is Linux perfect? No, but it does everything I need it to.
Found an Ubuntu CD on the ground and took it home. It resurrected a dead laptop and since then I’ve only known the kiss of Linus
Because Windows 10 installed candy crush without my input and interrupted me to tell me how edgy it was.
I am old, I have used windows for around 20 years. I am also a geek. I tried Mac OS a long time ago - not geeky enough and the hardware was too expensive for me back then.
Tried Linux several times. It was fun, but I had too many issues, up until now.
In my opinion if you plot user friendliness over time for Linux and windows, the Linux is going up on the friendliness axis, slowly but steadily. Windows on the other hand… Goes somewhere. Every good idea MS devs have is countered by 3 terrible (for users) from the marketing department.
I want to be the owner of my own PC. I want to control everything, windows was good enough a few years ago, but it is not anymore, the cloud integration plus AI bulshit, plus bloatware.
No, thanks.
My original windows 10 PC died so I built a new one from scratch. I didn’t like windows 11 AI features they were pushing so I installed Linux. I mostly play steam games and web browse and that’s all I need
Freedom.
So I have control of my computers. Windows has been getting worse, and worse for a long time, apathy is the only reason to stick with it. Pick the right distro, and linux can be very user friendly these days.
Fed up of all my apps appearing with copilot in them. Fed up of apps like notepad becoming fucking laggy. Its bloody notepad for Christ sake.
I don’t care about AI. I don’t want it. Every time I uninstalled it all, it just appeared again a week later.
Then I found cachyos and realised I could play all the games I play. Never looked back.
I enjoy not feeling spied on. Not feeling my data is being sold on.
I use Nobara, a gaming fork of Fedora on my desktop. I also use plain old Fedora on my laptop.
I game on both, almost everything works without issue.
I started because I heard it’s good for programming which turned out to be true. Initially stayed because it was customizable but had windows for games. Now just Linux because it’s better for everything I do. I think now people switching to Linux mostly do it because Linux is just better except for niche programs.
Decades worth of windoofs hate. Finally did the full switch a few months ago. I have been using windoofs for gaming only anyway and professionally I already had plenty of Linux experience.
Linux isn’t great either though and can be a real pain in the ass. Recently had to fix few lines of code in the kernel, because I had no audio. But the fact that one can do it in principle is already a huge win over windoofs. And although some games stubbornly won’t run (stable), a lot do without having to tinker much, thanks to Wine, Proton, and a couple of startup parameters.
Professionally I mainly use Ubuntu, for gaming I did so at first as well but switched to CachyOS recently.
I’m glad you said this. I think it’s important to be honest about the Linux experience. It is not perfect. My Boomer parents could not use it. It often is plug and play, and often you don’t have to do anything with Terminal. But, there are times when it’s not plug and play and there are many times when you have to use Terminal to make something happen.
For example, Lubuntu updater keeps telling me there’s a new version of Lubuntu, but does nothing when I click upgrade. OK. I think it’s because there is a beta upgrade available that the updater sees but won’t upgrade to.
I’ve been using Linux since about 2003, off and on. It’s much better than it was. For me, it’s better than windows. For my 70-year-old mother, she should stick with the windows environment.
I have no issue with using the terminal myself, but you’re expecting other people to use something that’s foreign and unneeded when it’s not even safe to do so. Copying scripts from the internet is dangerous, and even a minor typo when you know what you’re doing can bring your system down. -Which happens even to senior system admins at times.
Some people don’t want to run Linux for the same reason they don’t want a job where a slightly off measurement in a chemical factory can destroy a town.
Huh? I don’t expect people to do that at all. Are you saying “you” like the royal/editorial you?,
I agree with you. Just like I said above, stupid old people and lazy people can’t be expected to use Linux because sometimes it requires using terminal.
Windows 11 kept putting up “helpful hints” and kept asking me to set up a OneDrive, and would randomly reboot itself when not in use (which is a pain in the ass for a server system), so after about 6 months of enduring, I nuked it and put Lubuntu on it. Now it works almost perfectly.
My gaming pc is still windows 11, and I’m afraid to put Linux on it because I bricked my previous laptop doing that, and my gaming pc was expensive and is nice. Someday I’ll get really fed up with having to specify “no, windows – I don’t want to save this to your cloud. I want to save it to my hard drive” but for now, I’m dealing with it.
It was maybe 2003, and my Windows (XP I guess) was not working properly for like the third time this year, requiring a re-installation. I rad a home linux server (IP masquerading) at that time, and this has gotten me a student job administrating a web and a mail server, so I felt confident enough. This was when I first installed linux on my main machine. But I was dual boot or dual machine until end of 2025, when I finally got rid of my old gaming box and put CachyOS on my new rig.
Okay, a few years earlier a friend gifted me some slackware 1.0 CD, that partitioned my 800MB hdd into a 300 and a 800MB parition. The joy about the extra 300MB linux gifted me did not last too long when everything corrupted, and I went back to windows.
Using windows, which I have to do some times at work, feels so painful now.
