Linux

Privacy, Windows 11, and the fact that my system is more stable running Linux. I could count on a BSOD happening once or twice a week due to a driver issue with Windows 10. I still get strange crashes on Linux, but much less often.

I heard about it off and on, but this was the days in dial-up and downloading an ISO to install Linux was too expensive in time and bandwidth . I had discovered at my local Office Depot, a Mandrake Linux box set so I splurged on that and got my first taste of Linux then. I also was able to surf the web and learn how to install it manually, but it didn't make any sense at all and was too complex. For Mandrake, I didn't care for it. It wasn't until later on when I started working with hosting sites, that I got used to Centos and Ubuntu for servers. I even had Mac OSX for a while, which taught my about the directory structure, but I went back to Windows until around 2015ish when I jumped ship and went to Linux fulltime. I worked technical support and the servers were Linux based so I had learned a lot more doing that and got very comfortable with it. I then jumped through different distros to where I am now (Arch). I firmly hold belief though that Arch isn't the best and no distro is truly the superior one. Instead, whatever Linux distro you use, if it does what you need it to do, then so be it!

To answer the question though, what pushed me toward Linux was really the whole push toward Windows 10 being more loaded down with the pushed tracking and advertisements that comes with the Windows Territory. Plus - I grew to love the command line and it's sort of my second home now.

A friend in high school gave me an Ubuntu live CD and told me I should try it.

I think it was world of warcraft. As a kid I had a very bad computer, so windows (Vista I think ?) Gave me something like 15 fps while Linux+Wine gave me 20. It already felt like wizardry that I had better performance while needing a compatibility layer.

I have also some memories of discovering a new land of freedom. When i plugged a CD from the library, Ubuntu's default music player had a popup "wanna install anti-DRM plugins & make a copy of those tracks?"

I started using foss software for everything, and one day, I realized that all the software I used was available on Linux, so I figured out I could run a foss os as well, and migrating was just straightforward.

I watched a video from the linux experiment and thought it looked cool, so I kept watching his videos, and now here I am.

Curiosity, back around 2010 before I was a teenager. No clue how I heard about it, but the concept of replacing the entire operating system was fascinating. I figured it must be really good if it was such a well kept secret.

A few years later, when I started to learn programming, Linux was the obvious winner. The online course taught C in a Linux environment, and I was amazed that the default Ubuntu build at the time had everything built in, whereas a Windows equivalent required visual studio and licensing adventures.

It really stuck as a daily driver after Windows 7, where a clear trend emerged: Windows got in my way, Linux got out of my way. Simple as.

Well, my experience was always on and off: In the past, I always had my phases of trying it out, be it dual-booting, or outright replacing my OS, but always went back to Windows after a couple of months at most due to some software being Windows-only and both VMs and WINE not being sufficient.

But this year, with Windows continuing to get worse (built-in ads, the fact that it eats 60+ GB on a base install, etc.) and me needing Linux for uni anyway: I made the jump and thanks to the work being done with stuff like Proton for games and FOSS software now being good enough for general productivity, I'm happier than ever.

Obsessed? I like customizability and being able to tinker around, but in the end, it's a tool like any other.

Cut throat environments!

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 computer was trash. I migrated out of necessity. It took 40 minutes to boot into Windows XP. Old-timey Lubuntu kept that computer alive for another 5 years.

When I got a real computer, I found that using Windows was unpleasant -- So when Proton started to mature, I switched back to Linux (cuz hey, vidya gaems).

... Then I became an adult and the political radicalisation began.

I'm not "obssessed" so much as I am politically motivated, so I guess I'm an evangelist in a way. If there were ten other mature open source operating systems I'd shill all of them. As it is there's Linux and BSD. So those are the ones I shill.

Generally I'll pester anyone willing to listen to get as far from Big Tech's walled gardens as their life necessities allow them.

I'm not a tech person, I think most Linux people are? Instead I'm just someone who studied basic sociology and history, and can see the kind of power that walled-garden tech can (and HAS, in recent times) give to very few people.

work requirement, amphetamine-driven endless curiosity of staring at commands and man pages, interest in programming, initial allure of the concept of copyleft

Had an old laptop which ran horribly slow on windows. Put Ubuntu on it without knowing anything about that stuff. Years later, I got interested in computer science and Cybersecurity, made some experiences with Kali Linux. Eventually switched my desktop to Linux mint iirc. My servers tun Debian

That old laptop? I used it for the first months of Cybersecurity lectures, until I bought a new laptop with my first salary. This weekend I put LMDE 6 on it. Debian is home.

Probably like most people here, I just got more and more fed up with Windows. I tried Ubuntu a few times in the past, but it never really stuck, and at the time Windows wasn’t quite as bad (I quite liked Windows 7 in all honesty). But as time went on with Win10, it kept moving in a direction I didn’t want and I kept trying to customize it to my liking, and an update would just mess a bunch of stuff up and just make the whole experience worst. Recently it started having issues with my multiple monitors, shutdown and sleep/hibernate were basically broken, Bluetooth would randomly stop working, it was just a lot of aggravation.

I’m only a few weeks into my grand Linux adventure, but I’ve got almost all of the functionality that I need from Windows with none of the frustrations, and it’s way faster on top of that. Right now I can’t see myself going back.

Interesting how there's so many answers here, but no mention of the one I came here for (and I thought would be most popular) : ricing.

I got into Linux when I saw screenshots of all the cool desktops people made with KDE, XFCE, and tiling window managers. Even Gnome looked sleek and minimal. After a while I got bored of ricing but I stayed for the ease of use as a developer

Username and password.

I used Linux on my jailbroken Chromebook during school before and I slowly started using more and more of wsl when that came out.

Then one day a windows update which started automatically on my laptop ended up wiping the encryption keys, I lost all my data including a lot of organised financial documents. This happened while I was having trouble with wsl where it would just delete itself on my pc. Then there was the issue of my pc having an English international keyboard which I was unable to remove and windows kept switching me to it every 2 minutes. Which makes programming harder due to how it handles inverted commas. I ended up doing some regedit to remove it, but then all windows system apps stopped working, including settings. And guess what, there was now an update ready which I could not skip because settings won't open. And did I mention my laptop wiped itself again?

I did not have a single issue since I switched about 4 years ago, I never looked back. Not even for gaming, I exclusively use Linux and I am proud of it. And this is saying a lot, because I always mess up my system when doing random experiments for fun, but there is also always a clear way out. (I use arch btw, and rtfm really helps a lot)

I got this incredibly busted hand-me-down that was having issues running windows, so I installed Linux mint on it and then distro hopped until I started daily driving arch on a new machine.

My philanthropic beliefs and love of freedom. I was absolutely amazed when I found out about open source and free software. Then I got to it and loved it even more, the community, the UI and DEs, how much you could customize everything and how much choices you had. But mostly it is the philosophical beliefs that makes me love linux. Even if it is not better than some alternatives in some aspects, I willl still stand by it.

I got into Linux because BSD didn't have enough hardware support.

Windows becoming completely hostile towards power users.

I used to LOVE Windows, I even made fun of friends who were using Linux, which I only used on servers because I thought the desktop experience was sub par (and at the time it was, we're talking 10-15 years ago). Then Windows 8 came and I stayed on 7 because the experience was bad. Then 10 came and data collection started getting out of control, so I had to jump through a bunch of hoops just to make it usable and "private enough". Eventually things got so bad around 2019 that I realized that I was spending more time fixing that pile of crap than the average Arch user and I decided to give Linux a serious try.

I was somewhat annoyed by some UI/UX flaws but eventually I got used to it, and with the coming of Linux gaming I started using Windows less and less (it's an AMD system so the Linux experience is excellent), eventually last year I realized that I hadn't booted it in months so I just wiped that drive and started using it for games. I've also gotten a lot more paranoid about privacy and sandboxing proprietary software.

Now with Windows 11 things have gotten so bad that even my students are making fun of it so I don't think I'll be coming back.

I've told this story on here before, but here it is again: I used to write for a very Windows-centric computer magazine, and after a couple of years I noticed that most of the content I was writing was about how to make Windows behave less like Windows. So I thought I'd give Linux a go, and I haven't looked back since. I've had phases when I tried convincing all my friends to make the switch, but I've realized that it's just not for everyone. I don't think I'm obsessed, I don't customize my desktop much, I just want my system to work smoothly.

Originally, it was the price and speed. Then I saw one of Stallman's talks, and my perspective completely changed.

I stay on GNU+Linux now for freedom. People don't usually ask me about it, but if they did I'd probably just explain the basics of software freedom and nudge them to install vanilla Debian or maybe Trisquel if the hardware allows it.

I wanted to switch to Linux for several years because I was very sick of how Windows did things.

With Valve doing Proton and Windows 11 being a much shittier Windows 10... With rumours of it eventually becoming a FORCED update!... I decided to actually switch to Linux last November.

Haven't regretted it. Haven't used any other OS since.

I was on a Microsoft systems admin/engineer path for a while and an opportunity opened for a KVM/XEN engineer and I was the one only person in my office to accept the offer. That was back in the RHEL/CentOS 4 days.

After playing around a bit I got hooked and haven't gone back down the MS path since then.

My Mac died, at which time I was already a commandline enthusiast, & unable to afford a new Mac.

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)

First real terminal contact (except for limited use in macOS) I had working at a company which now uses embedded Linux in their product. After that I got in a situation where I had no computing device with admin rights running anymore. iPhone, iPad, corporate locked windows. Once there was the day I needed admin again, so I went searching and found an old iMac lying around, macOS was barley useable (low spec) and I just managed to create a bootable stick with it. Fast forward 2 years, I now have the old iMac of my dad with better specs running tumbleweed with Gnome, and I love it, with the right extensions, this frontend is very fun to use.

PiHole and then Minecraft actually all through CLI.

Imagine my shock once I found out about screen and SSH. I didn't need to walk back and forth between my computer and the server.

I didn't touch a GUI for about 4 years.

It's really great for my work as a software developer. I used it for more than 10 years for work.

My entertainment PC is not Win11 compatible, so I'm trying to switch to Linux with that one too, but it's giving me a lot of grief.

Curiosity. I was a curious tweenager, and I was already a bit of a geek at the time. I read about Linux in computer magazines at the time, and decided to give one of the free CDs a try - with RedHat 5.2 on it. To be honest, wasn't really impressed with it. I especially disliked having to recompile the kernel, which took ages on those Pentium 3s. But it got me exploring other operating systems, and I found QNX, BeOS and NetBSD. I was really impressed with with QNX and BeOS in particular - Linux felt quite clunky and amateurish in comparison. I especially liked the multimedia performance of BeOS, and the lightweightedness, polish and desktop responsiveness of QNX, which featured a real-time microkernel. QNX felt lightyears ahead of it's competition at the time. My first run into it was a free 1.44MB demo floppy that the company mailed me directly, complete with a full developer manual (which was completely wasted on me as a tween, but I still appreciated it and tried to comprehend bits and pieces). I was already into making custom bootable floppy disks at the time, so I was extremely impressed that they managed to fit in a full fledged GUI desktop, complete with a browser that supported Javascript (along with network drivers and a modem dialer) - all on a 1.44MB floppy disk! Till date I've no idea how they managed that. Even the tiniest of Linux WMs are massive in comparison and look fugly (twm), but QNX's Photon microGUI somehow managed to make it good looking and functional. Maybe it was all coded in Assembly, I don't know, but it was, and still remains, very impressive nonetheless.

I digress, but all this started getting me into exploring POSIX systems and distro/OS hopping. It was only when I experienced SuSE that I fell in love with Linux. Finally, I had a polished Linux desktop, with a full-featured settings/control panel (YaST) that made it easy to use even for a tween like me. And that's when I switched to Linux as my main-ish OS, with Windows relegated to gaming duties. However, I didn't fully get rid of Windows until Windows 7. I was actually impressed with the Windows 7 beta releases and was prepared to buy it at release, but... I wasn't expecting that price tag. I was hoping I'd get a student discount, but it wasn't applicable where I lived (or there was some catch, I don't remember exactly). In any case, I couldn't afford it, and I was really disappointed and angry at Microsoft that they were charging so much for it here, compared to the US pricing. And so, on the release day of Windows 7, I formatted my drive and switched to Linux full time, and never looked back.

I was lucky to meet some real operating systems (VMS, Unix) before I got contaminated with Microsoft products. So when I first heard about Linux (some guy in Finland wrote a new kernel and showed it to Prof. Tanenbaum, and when he grows up, he wants it to become a full fledged unix :-)) I knew already what it is.

My Mainboard had somesort of error, where Windows wouldnt Work, Linux did tho

Windows 8

Curiousity, wouldn't say I'm obsessed but I'd hate to switch Windows now since I'm way more familiar on Linux. And I've satisfied (killed) any curiosity in Windows server and desktop in professional life

I actually don't know how that happened. It was either a youtube video: when linux met r/unixporn or my privacy & freedom concerns that suddenly appeared in like the span of a week

Always dabbled, but working with Docker has really made me commit to learning it. Also the ease of spinning up linux on cloud systems is a joy.

i heard about it in a video and immediately went to try it out. i started with linux mint in late 2021!

For me, I was a curious and inquisitive 15 year old that wanted to try out something different to Windows. I didn't really have any gripes with Windows at the time, so I tried Ubuntu and it went from there. I mostly remember after that installing Xubuntu on everything because it was just so lightweight and to this day I still love Xfce.

Worked as a computer repair tech forever ago. We ended up with tons of spare parts and abandoned computers. I took a few home and looked for things I could use them for. Quickly found Linux and gave it a shot. It was perfect, I didn’t need to spend $100+ for a copy, there were tons of options, and I could do anything with it. Spent the next 20 years using it on every computer except my main desktop because of games. At one point I was 100% Linux and all I played was WoW using WINE. Now I’m back to 100% Linux thanks to steam and proton making a healthy chunk of my library playable.

Any time someone comes to me with an old computer my recommendation is to throw Linux on it and get a few more years of usefulness out of it.

I switched to Linux for two reasons:

1. I believe that it's always a good idea to support alternatives.
2. I prefer to use products and services that I actually support.

I do still use Windows occasionally because not everything works or at least has an alternative available but Linux is and will probably always be my primary OS. Even if by some miracle Microsoft, Apple or Google actually start listening to their users and make their OS and business models perfect, I would still use an alternative like Linux as my primary because there would be nothing preventing these companies from reverting their decisions.

I wasn't happy with windows vista's prformance and wanted to try something different. Didn't make the switch permanent for a decade because I needed games in my life but I always ran linux on my laptops when I got them.