First experimented when Windows 8 took away Aero Glass and other customizations. Committed when I had to fight with Windows 10’s twice-yearly feature updates that messed with my settings and wasted space with new programs I didn’t ask for. I now keep a separate laptop just to run Windows when I have to.
Distrohopping was mostly confined to my first year using Linux. Deepin (kept crashing) -> UbuntuDDE (went unmaintained) -> Arch Linux -> Debian. Settled on Debian Stable since it just works, I haven’t been using bleeding-edge hardware, and I don’t like things changing around too often (see my Chicago95 rice).
I tried pop in November last year. I’ve since tried nobara, mint and now arch. I hate it because many arch users are so obnoxious but the AUR is invaluable, I think. It’s a bit more work to setup, but with the new arch install script it’s really not so bad. Watch out for the partitioning bug though! You basically have to manually partition your drive currently, because of an off by one error.
I use Linux for largely the same reasons I use Lemmy. While I’m still far from strictly using FOSS software, I respect the decentralization and freedom that comes with Linux. I have such a deep admiration and respect for everyday people that create/maintain platforms, as opposed to large companies that seeking to profit off their userbase.
While I have distro hopped a number of times over the past few years, I keep coming back to Pop!_OS. Everything just works right out of the box for me, but still gives me the freedom to tweak my environment however I choose. I love their tiling desktop feature and am anxiously awaiting the release of their new COSMIC desktop.
Honestly, because Windows is a steaming pile of garbage and using Mac feels like swimming with pool floaties.
I recently started using NixOS as my distro and it has been phenomenal. Saying the learning curve is a little steep is like calling a hurricane a little bit of rain, but once you start to get it, it’s extremely powerful and delivers on the promise of “all of your configuration in one place.” It gives me a lot of peace of mind to know that every time I tweak or fix something, it’s reliably making it into a version controlled and backed up repository. I could throw my laptop out the window, pick up a new one, and have all my applications installed and configured within half an hour.
First time I switched it was because I had a piece of trash for a computer and making it work with Windows was easier said than done. It was truly amazing how smooth that machine would run Ubuntu while crying to run Windows XP (t’was a long time ago) I knew about Linux before then because my father was an oldschool geek and had messed around with old Linux distros that came on magazine cover discs, so I was somewhat familiar with the idea of Linux. Still had a lot to learn.
Eventually I got myself a “real” computer, and because I’d be using it for gaming and this was before Proton was a thing, I had it run Windows. But good god it was hard to go back. And the first thing that made Windows a pain in the arse to me was something surprisingly simple: This was the Windows 7 days, and Microsoft had yet to figure out what a Dark Theme was. It wasn’t until Windows 10 that one was added, and even then, it took quite a few updates for it to appear across things like the file explorer and such.
Enshittification kept happening and such, but I couldn’t exactly drop windows at the time, I’d spent a fortune on a gaming PC and it was my only games machine. I longed to go back to Linux (even set up dual-boots for some time but didn’t stick with them) but couldn’t justify it vs the loss of most of my library.
Then Proton happened and things were good again. It took me a bit longer to actually take the leap, but when I did, I was so happy.
… Ironically, nowadays I only boot into Windows for work reasons. Specifically Adobe reasons. What a time to be alive that all my games and chat applications and (…) are all on Linux and Windows is basically a quarantined zone for After Effects. Life is good.
I switched probably 2010 or 2011. I think I was on windows 7, but it might have been windows vista and I never got to 7.
At some point I had made a realization that software I downloaded from sourceforge (this website has been terrible for a long while now, but I think it was decent way back) was heavily correlated with not being shitty. After making this observation, I was able to generalize it to open source software tends to be less shitty and I had a year or two of experiences afterwards that reinforced my theory, which led me to try experimenting with linux installs.
I started with dual-booting Fedora, I had no idea what I was doing and didn’t like the user experience as much as windows at first. I did a little bit of distro-hopping to see if there was something more appealing to me, but during that time I discovered the free software movement and that resonated with me a lot more than open source had, so I decided I wasn’t interested in going back to windows. Moved to Trisquel (originally an Ubuntu derivative, and fully-free to the point of being FSF-approved) and grew to love it.
After a couple years, I decided I was curious enough to learn more about how the system works, so I moved to Parabola (fully free Arch derivative) to force myself to learn. I really learned barely anything, but I got very good at getting things working by trial-and-error while reading documentation I don’t fully understand. I haven’t progressed very far beyond that point at all in the years since, but I got too comfortable to make a significant change.
In the past five or so years, I’ve to some degree dropped the free software philosophy in favor of a philosophy that the problem runs much deeper (no hope of a successful free software movement in a capitalist society, and software is not even close to the most beneficial consequence of getting past capitalism), and I’ve moved to legit Arch rather than Parabola.
I’ve basically gone ten years without real issues on arch installs, but I still have no idea what I’m doing, I’m just comfortable with it and don’t want to put any effort into a change. I feel like if anyone from the arch forums or anyone knowledgeable in general took five minutes to look at my pc they’d be like wtf are you doing. It’s whatever, it works well enough for me.
I switched because I was sick of dealing with corporate garbage and abuse at the hands of Microsoft.
It wasn’t the cost, I’ve always activated my Windows installations with gray-market keys bought on eBay for 5-10 dollars. Plus I’ve paid far more for open source software than I ever did for Windows and their proprietary trash.
I had so many problems with Windows over the years. Fighting with drivers, fighting with software installs, fighting with the registry, etc etc.
I also couldn’t stand how bad their spying was getting, how bloated and clunky their software was, and how much adware they were forcing on me.
I finally vowed about 3 years ago that I would never use Windows again for any of my personal computing, no matter what I had to sacrifice.
Turns out, I didn’t have to really sacrifice anything significant, and I gained far more than I lost. I would never go back to Windows now, especially with what is happening with windows 11.
My main computer runs Nobara, because I use it mostly for gaming. I use KDE Plasma as my DE. Both work fantastic, games run fast and smooth, and everything looks so pretty lol.
I use Mint Debian Edition with Cinnamon on my laptop and it’s awesome too. Almost never have any problems with it.
My work allows me to use Linux, so I run Debian with KDE Plasma. It took a bit of work to get everything running smoothly, but I’m enough of a power user that it wasn’t too bad.
My phone runs GrapheneOS, I’m on it right now typing this. Love it also, so glad to be off a corporate version of Android. GrapheneOS is awesome and does everything I need very well.
I’ve used a ton of different distros. Different strokes for different folks. I’ve used Arch, Fedora, Zorin, Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, Alma, and several others. Some were a fad, some I use for my servers, some I use for home lab testing, etc.
Perhaps a different perspective, but I am gearing up to switch at the moment.
While I have previously used Linux (I have been running Debian 12 on my laptop for about a year), I bought windows 11 for my Desktop as I was still under the impression that is was the only real way to play games.
I recently learned about what Proton has done for games on Linux and also noticed how many games are truly playable on Linux now with the ever increasing market share.
Even though I am using NVIDIA hardware, I have looked up the process for installing the NVIDIA drivers on Linux and while not as easy as AMD, it appears to be quite easy anyway (I am an IT graduate so it seems pretty straightforward to me).
It really was only games that was holding me back I think.
Windows, especially lately has been growing more and more and more and more invasive. I feel like in the last 6 weeks I have read tens of articles on how Microsoft is trying to insert ads into the OS, watermark the OS, install AI into the OS, force the use of MS accounts instead of local accounts etc, and it is completely disgusting. At this point given the recent activity, I would not at all be surprised if they started to try to enforce the OS as a “subscription service”.
The moment I installed windows 11 I knew it was going to be a poor experience, considering I had to create registry keys and manually relaunch the OOBE with flags in order to use a local account.
For all these reasons (Gaming becoming ever more accessible on linux, and MS consistently making their product less valuable), I will be switching to either Debian 12 on my desktop or Arch in the near future.
It is a disgusting corporate world we find ourselves in right now, but while this is in many ways a bad thing, I have never in my life noticed more people taking notice of that, becoming interested in FOSS, in Linux, in even considering no longer putting up with this kind of thing, and that gives me hope.
Coming from Windows and DOS originally Linux was the first OS that made me realize that computers actually behave in deterministic ways when you get the ability to look at everything that is going on. And I also realized that given a proper OS you can actually automate most of the common tasks instead of doing the same things over and over again by hand.
Yes, I install Libreboot myself with a RaspberryPi and Pomona 5250 testing clip. Anything that’s already supported by Coreboot, can be supported to Libreboot. They have a list of hardware that they currently support listed here:
I actually sold Libreboot laptops previously on eBay, I used to sell the T440p a lot. Now, I’m about to setup my own website so I can start selling them for even cheaper. I also helped add Libreboot support for the Dell Optiplex 9020/7020 (Real thanks goto Mate Kukri, as I used his Optiplex port from Coreboot).
I was born into it. I stayed with it for some mix of gratis and libre. I’m not rich or dumb enough to buy an Apple device or Windows licence, and I like having a computer that won’t turn on me.
My laptop with windows 10 shit the bed, it would let me type in my pin but get hung up on the spinny loady wheely thing never moving past that. I used a linux liveUSB to rescue my files from the disk, and while I was using it I noticed how my computer did things like “still work.” So I switched! Actually had two laptops at the same time I had to switch too, the other would let me log in but was bogged down and barely responsive, ran like a top for years but now I’m upgrading to a framework. The framework can probably run windows but it would’ve been like $200 more and like, why? I might just run a VM of WatermarkWindows for the few times I need it but really the only thing I need works in wine well enough.
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