Linux

I'm over twenty years deep. I had a friend who was always my go-to for technical problems with my windows laptop. He ended up becoming a technical support guy for windows shops. anyways, he mentioned Linux one day as I was babbling about file sharing during the Napster days. I went down the rabbit hole from there. I've been called a systems administrator, server administrator, systems engineer, DevOps engineer, etc as job titles. it clicked in my head how or why it worked and it felt liberating. I'm the grumpy guy scowling trying to figure out how your windows or Mac operating systems work like how normal people are trying to figure out how mine works.

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.

While just running better for most of the tasks I do (and being more customizable) are a huge plus. I am also personally sick of the way Microsoft (and most other large corporations) do business. So Linux is my way to do what I can to not support them and move towards a better future.

Windows was trash, BeOS didn't take off, and all the good network diagnostic tools were exclusively on *nixes in the early 2000s. Later, the *nixes are better for application development and deployment. They're just built to serve data.

Windows has kind of caught up in the tooling department largely thanks to a VM, but it's still trash. LOL

Idealogically, I can own my tools and modify them if needed. I don't modify them, but hypothetically I could.

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

I was too poor to buy a windows license for the pc I assembled from dumpster parts. I was also to much a rule follower to pirate windows so that led me to slackware linux and the rest is history.

When I became a professional developer, I felt the friction of windows and package management. I knew of Linux desktop, and had used Ubuntu briefly in around 2008 or 09, and then at the time in 2021 I made the switch to Fedora for ease of dev. And never looked back.

My old laptop works well on Windows 10. Mint does about 99% of that and other stuff I don't do in Windows. The only thing that I miss is a multi monitor setup (and I've been told that CachyOS or KDE Neon would do it).

Idealogical reasons.

It started because I was poor and resented the idea of paying for software. Then I became a professional developer and the advantages of the OS became more obvious. This was ~15 years ago.

Since then the enshittification of MS has made me more and more confident in my decision.

I like being able to debug stuff.

Windows nowadays does not provide any meaningful logs, so everyone in their forums and such is just guessing around why things won't work.

DirectSound libraries are missing? Install them via a sub menu of a sub menu of a really small text in the settings, wait 20 minutes for a „loading bar” telling you nothing, and guess what problem it had when it just told you no.

Aside from all the bugs like the menu bar just not opening and preview updates being shown with the same size as regular updates (great because older people will just install those updates too)

One reason. Anti -Windows 11.

Because I feel at home 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.

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.

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.

Better software availability/support than BSDs. Refuse to use proprietary software. Plus, there's a lot of software I use that isn't available on Windows or macOS. I've tried to dual boot Windows for gaming before and I just couldn't install most of my usual software on Windows.

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. 😊

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.

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.

Well simpel Windows all shenanigans and telemetry is enough to skip it if you can.

The main reason is that the big Tek company want you to own nothing and rent everything! That wouldn't fly with me!

Microsoft with Windows want you rent windows and pay unfairly high price inc no privacy! No thanks Microsoft I pass!

Linux

After distro hoping I finally landet with my love with Linux is OpenSuse and Arch.

The god, and bad Opensuse is stable as rock an rolling that goes on.

Bad is "for me" if you don't update in 2-3 months and then update I get royally fuckt! I try on 2 different computer and the same thing! Why no idea! If anyone know a solution please let me know!

Arch easy and light and you get only what you really want and need nothing else! If you need something just ad it, or don't need just uninstall, easy peasy! (I know all Linux can do it but not as easy as Arch) Go Canada go 🇨🇦

The bad thing 🤮🤯🤬

Is not so much Arch it's me I can't hold my hands of it and tinker with it untill I brake it 🤬🤬🤬 Dam you Arch and 🇨🇦!! In some rare cases update can brake your Linux and definitely if you use AUR, it's not question if it's will brake, it's all about when it breaks!

i wanted to try something new

I choose linux because:

1. Installing a programming language doesn't require setting up a path, the package manager does it automatically.
2. It's 100x easier to be private on linux than on Windows or macOS.
3. There's no AI in the notepad app.
4. It just works.

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