I woke up one day, and copilot had been installed on my PC overnight. I didn’t like that lack of control. This was, coincidentally, a weekend that my wife, kid, and dog were all gone. Since I knew Win10 only had a year left, and I had the time, I figured it was as good a time as any.

I downloaded Fedora and Kubuntu. Spent a bit of time with each, and went with Kubuntu. For a few days. It had issues waking from sleep, and I had to do some kind of tweaking with every one of my games to get them to work.

I don’t mind tinkering with stuff, but i just don’t have the time to make my computer my hobby. So, I switched to Mint. Everything just works. So, I put it on everything else. I guess the one time I really had to dig into terminal stuff was getting a wifi driver for my living room PC off git. Other than that, super easy.

Now, I’m coming up on a year of Mint. Couldn’t be happier.

1. I’m a lifelong contrarian.
2. I refuse to overpay into the locked-down Apple ecosystem.
3. Windows has become worse with every release.
4. I use Arch btw.

I was not about to put up with windows co-pilot or recall and had already put up with enough ads and bugs.

I had been running Debian on my laptop for a year without a problem and then finally Windows 11 started doing this when I was trying to update:

Click check for updates? Same result. Wait a week and try again? Same result.

I could no longer trust that the OS was secure from even 3rd parties, so I pulled the trigger and installed Debian 12 - later upgrading to Debian 13 when it released.

There just is never any going back now - Linux is just waaaaaaay too good.

Now I just need something similar to happen with phones.

I really, truly, seriously hate modern implementations of AI and am willing to make concessions in my life to avoid using it. Windows 11 forcing Copilot was my last straw for using Microsoft.

Same as most people. OSs have just evolved to become systems made to serve their creators rather than their “customers”.

Windows wants to steal all your data and then use it to shove ads in your face.

Apple also constantly tries to push their own products and services through the OS, not to mention continually pushing the boundaries of irrepairability and locking you in an ecosystem. And just being extremely expensive.

I heard two talks around 2001 or so. one by Wolfram, after which I swore never to use mathematica again. and one by stallman after which I switched completely to Linux and never went back to windows.

still on Linux 25y later. went from days when getting sound working was a challenge , to today when even obscure tablets work out of the box.

started with red hat. used Gentoo for about 5y. then debian for 10, and now arch.

went from the old “crux” and metacity, to openbox to fvwm to gnome to kde plasma

i remember the old days I was envious of Mac users for transparency and the present windows features, and I ran this utility called Skippy that would screenshot windows and present them… all these features are now built in to the wm now, so no tweaking needed

I wanted to code in C. I saw some tutorials for windows and found it very complex, but I saw one in linux where the person just gcc hello.c. And since then I’ve fallen in love

I got sick of my devices spying on me

Homework.

College used linux because I did computer science.
Topic: concurrency. College then gave us a programming assignment that required adding a code library, which I had never done before or even heard of, and thus did not understand.
Since this was a library that was platform-specific, they had made one library for linux and one for windows.
Way too late I got the gist of it but still couldn’t install the library.
Since the question contained the linux directory structure I was convinced that the windows library was broken and every other college student finished this task in Linux.
Thus I installed Linux.
Ten years later I understood and finished the assignment.

Because windows has become spyware and enough shit works to be worth the hassle. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a constant struggle. I have many hobbies, and for some of them it’s really annoying to be on Linux. Programming is awesome on Linux, gaming is for the most part fine, music production gets a lot more iffy and some of the photography stuff isn’t really cooperating. But I’ll just have to endure it, I’m almost one year in and for the most part everything works in some way or another. I only start Windows once in a few months now.

I bought my son a cheap little computer, basically a windows version of a Chromebook. When windows needed an update there wasn’t enough memory to perform it, and the computer would no longer connect to WiFi. I thought this was very dumb so I figured out how to remove windows and install Mint. Was impressed by how well it worked.

When I needed a new computer I bought a $150 thinkpad and installed Fedora. Been a fedora main ever since

cuz windows sucks major balls and i was sick of it breaking itself (and the spyware)

This feels like a fireplace for all Linux users to meet :D

1. fun, I like trying out new software
2. I love the philosophy of free software.
3. fuck Microsoft and windows.
4. It’s actually just better

(I switched last year)