Linux

It's free, it doesn't track everything you do, it doesn't restrict your options in terms of how you use it, it runs well on underpowered machines.

Every alternative is worse.

Grew up with programming, Windows, and Visual Studio. That was fine, back then. After Microsoft released Windows 8 I knew this was so stupid and would only get stupider, that I said my next computer will have Linux. Never looked back. It's not as good as Windows 7 unless you have really specific needs. It's miles better than Windows 11.

Because Windows 10 installed candy crush without my input and interrupted me to tell me how edgy it was.

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.

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.

To give Microsoft the finger.

Steam Deck made gaming on Linux possible and that was the only thing holding me to Windows. I had been using Windows since Windows 95.

Microsoft simply stopped making an OS and started making a subscription and content delivery platform. When they did that, they lost me as a customer.

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.

Freedom.

Im a hater and spite is a powerful motivator

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.

The Windows key that I had been using for years stopped working. It was an old Win 8 key that I had updated to 10 then 11. Had to refresh the OS due to a random corruption and my Windows key wouldn’t verify. When I contacted Microsoft support they told me that since I don’t use a Microsoft account my registration wasn’t backed up. They don’t accept upgrades from Windows 8 anymore, so I would have to buy a new key. Instead I found a new OS.

Was building a PC years ago, while in college, and forgot to get a Windows license (eventually got one through my university). After finishing the build I was so hyped to use it I just installed Linux (had played around in it in a VM in the past, so I knew my way around).

Got used to using Linux as my main OS after that, and stuck with it. Paying for a $100 OS is silly when the free alternative is just as good (though, I admit I do still use Windows for work).

Note: I used to game in Windows as well, I don't do that anymore. Thanks, Steam!

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.

Freedom.

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.

I was experimenting with Linux for a long time, but haven't migrated fully. W11 was the breaking point for me. Everything built with unnecessarily heavy Electron making the user experience much slower than W10 pretty much forced my hand.

Better privileges over my own hardware and the software I install on it. Less interruptions, annoyances and adware.

I can continue using the hardware I already own, and it still runs well. And now I have a reason to learn how to make it work even better, so that's fun

One reason. Anti -Windows 11.

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

Microsoft is clearly not making decisions to benefit the customer. The best they can do is accidentally benefiting customers every once in a while. It's simply not good enough, since Linux is literally made by customers with the express purpose to be the best for us. 😊

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.

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’ve never liked Microsoft but grew up using it and naturally when I came into adulthood I stuck with what I was familiar with. Then my longtime girlfriend got me into Mac which for me was definitely a step up because it didn’t have a lot of the annoying bullshit bloat that MS has but as time went on and I started to care more about digital privacy I realized that Linux had been here this whole time and dipped my toes in while also using MacOS and then once I was familiar enough with Linux that I felt confident I could do anything that I would need to do on my Mac on Linux I made the switch completely

so i can scroll unfocused windows with the mouse wheel

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

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.

The internet is poor and I couldn’t setup Windows 11 without it. So I said screw it and installed mint. Haven’t looked back.

I'd love to noodle about with Haiku, MorphOS and such, but being hopelessly hooked on tiling window managers (Niri particularily), I'm just stuck on unixes...

It’s open source and not owned by an evil corporation. It doesn’t have ads. It doesn’t mine my data and sell it to the highest bidder. It doesn’t have AI shoved in every nook and cranny. It’s much lighter to run. I can easily run it on a 10 year old laptop.

• I have the radical idea that when I own something, I should actually own it.
• I’m a software engineer, both professionally and hobby. Developing on a non Unix platform is bullshit
• HaikuOS is 20 years too late
• What is the alternative? Windows is user hostile ad infested crap, MacOS is a prettier flavor of user hostile ad infested crap. The BSDs have their place, but a daily desktop or laptop isn’t really it.
• Copyleft FOSS or GTFO
• I don’t do a massive amount of customization, but the things I do I want to have. I know that will be the case with Linux. Who the fuck knows with closed source software
• When I find a bug, missing feature, or something just isn’t right I can fix it, file a bug, or just talk to the actual human beings who wrote it. Good luck with any of that in non-FOSS unless you are spending $$$ on a corporate account.

A complete and total lack of bullshit.

If something is wrong, there's a concrete reason, no matter how deep the cause and you can always dig far down enough to catch and deal with it.