Windows 10. When your OS no longer respects your choices and you have to fight it every minute, there is something wrong. The creeping invasions on privacy have only cemented my use of Linux
Truthfully, I’m not sure if I would have ever switched over if Microsoft kept the Windows 7 paradigm. But I started my search for alternatives when Windows 8 - already too adventurous for me - came with the computer I bought.
Towards the end of my time using Windows 10 as my primary OS, the realization that the UI is not an inherent component of the OS sealed the deal. As a Windows 2000 fan, I fell in love with the way Chicago95 Debian replicated the look and stability that I had sorely missed.
Bought an eeePC on WinXP that ran like trash and barely could handle simple tasks. Dropped numerous flavors of GNU/Linux on it in a few months. I remember thinking “wtf is this” because the settings and interface felt so bare without the WinXP clutter but things ran much better. Fell in love with the repository model of updating everything with a single command, found the UI was actually simple looking on the surface with a ton of depth available to me when my tinkering became more comfortable and experienced. Stayed because I don’t think everything in our lives needs to be stuffed full of micro transactions and ads.
When I left the church, I started directing what was my tithes to nonprofits of my choice including FOSS projects instead.
Here I am a decade and a half later and if I didn’t have Linux, I probably wouldn’t use computers except in the rarest of circumstances. Its just a high quality experience that commercial software can’t measure up to because they have different goals.
I was trying to run a forum in the early 2000s and was pirating Windows Server with IIS to do it, and I discovered this entire other free, legit OS to do what I wanted to do with ease. Back in those days you could install a "LAMP" stack during install which gave you Apache, MySQL, and PHP automatically configured, whereas in IIS I was having to install a seperate PHP interpreter and figure out how to send php scripts to it and back, the whole thing seemed janky.
After that Linux became my go-to for any IT related project, and even more so when I started my electronics hobby due to how you can just make it do any damn thing you want.
In 2020 it became my desktop permanently after Microsoft decided they didn't want their OS running on my perfectly fine computer anymore.
It was PHP and Laravel.
I started doing fancier things with websockets, redis, cronjobs etc.
Anything “designed for” laravel hosting wasn’t cheap. So, I learned how to get a VM going and set it up for webhosting.
Windows is still my daily driver due to Office, Visual Studio and gaming.
But I have a bunch of VMs and servers, and they are all Debian.
I enjoy Linux, but I haven’t gone whole-hog into a desktop environment or whatever. Everything has been CLI based
My interest started in my physics classes. They teach you the basics of Linux since it gets used for simulations and solving other math problems as well. I’m not 100% sure why, but i remember not even finding windows versions of some software that we used. I think it’s connected to supercomputers almost exclusively running Linux, and I had a couple of professors that use them.
I built a computer and didn’t have high speed Internet about 18 years ago. Couldn’t get Windows activated so a friend gave me a (Debian?) CD so I could get something going. Been keeping old machines alive with it ever since.
Embedded Linux is such a huge part of embedded software in every industry. I’ve done a bit with build root but mostly Yocto. There is just no replacement for the Linux kernel. If I need to know how the kernel actually handles a platform driver, I can just look up the relevant source. This is just impossible with Windows (IoT or otherwise)
I’ve been using Linux for a long time on various other systems but what caused me to finally ditch Windows completely on my daily driver was:
A nonconsensual Windows Update which caused my bitlocker encryption to become corrupted and I lost everything on that disk.
This unscheduled reformat combined with all the other shady practices on Windows lately cemented my choice.
It’s been several months now and I couldn’t be happier!
The quality of gaming on Linux has advanced an incredible amount in the last year or so since I’ve tried it. Most of my games will either run natively or require a few extra clicks to use proton in steam. A few outliers that aren’t on steam required Lutris.
On average I find the performance in games is better on Linux, even for non-native games using proton/wine.
Definitely would recommend giving it a shot if you are on the fence. Particularly if you’ve tried gaming in the past and were disappointed.
If you wanted to host your own site and services, a Linux vps was (and still is) the only choice. Back then it was Debian, nowadays I use Arch on everything. Same with Raspberry Pis when the first one became available in 2012. With university I started using Arch on my laptop and later when Proton and Wayland became good, I moved to it on the Desktop as well.
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