Why did you switch to Linux? I’d like to hear your story.
Btw I switched (from win11 to arch) because I got bored and wanted a challenge. Thx :3
It was easier for work.
Because it is the least worst OS
Nah, that’s OpenBSD.
I don’t even know what that is
It’s POSIX-compatible, so most things that work on Linux should work there too.
Well yes, but actually no.
On a more serious note, most things are available, some things are behind on updates unless you compile everything yourself (even when using the ports collection).
I haven’t used it as a desktop environment, I was just maintaining a FreeBSD server, so no idea on that end
- I’m a lifelong contrarian.
- I refuse to overpay into the locked-down Apple ecosystem.
- Windows has become worse with every release.
- I use Arch btw.
Why did you switch to Linux? I’d like to hear your story.
I had to do a job (translations) using MS Word 6.0, on a Win 3.11 PC . It was nearly a month of work and I and my gf urgently needed the money. But MS Word kept crashing and nearly obliterated all our work the day before our deadline. It was the most stressful day of my life.
After that, I installed LaTeX for DOS on that 386 PC, and wrote my university lab reports and later my bachelor thesis on it. It was running like a charm. We printed our own christmas cards using LaTeX’s beautiful old German Schwabacher font.
At uni, at that time I was working with a software called Matlab on Windows 95, and Windows always crashed after a day or two - it later became known there was an integer overflow bug in the driver for an Ethernet card. Well shit, my computations needed to run more than three days. So, I switched to a SUNOS Unix workstation which ran much better and had lots of high quality software, including a powerful text editor program called "Emacs“. I could not buy such a SUN computer for myself because its price was, in todays money, over 50,000 EUR and we did often not know how to pay 350 EUR of monthly rent.
The other day, a friendly colleague which was already doing his PhD showed me his PC, a cheap newish Pentium machine. He had installed a system on it called Linux, which I had never heard of. I logged on and started Emacs on it and I thought it must be broken: Emacs was running within less than half a second whereas on the SUN OS workstation, it would have taken five or ten seconds to start. All the computers software was free. I realized that this computer had a value of over 50,000 EUR of software for a hardware price of 800 EUR. I got an own Linux PC as soon as possible.
Yes that was in 1998. I am now almost exclusively using Linux since 27 years.
The exact shortcomings of proprietary software have changed since, and keep changing. But what is always the same is: Proprietary software does not work on behalf of you, the user and owner of the computer. Who writes the instructions for the computers CPU, controls it, and will use this power to favour their own interests, not yours. Only if you control the software, and use software written by other users, your computer will ultimately work in favour of you.
I had heard it was ready for gaming, and I wanted to see for myself. It wasn’t, at the time, but I used it for a few months before I switched back to Windows for a bit. Then, after another year on Windows, I gave Pop!_OS a chance. That sent me on a full spiral into distro hopping, and I’m on CachyOS now - not switching from Linux again.
I haven’t tried Pop or Cachy, what brought you to those?
Primarily, they’re both gaming-focused.
I found out about Pop!_OS when doing research for gaming on Linux. It’s maintained by a private company, and they invest a lot of time into keeping their drivers up-to-date. AFAIK it’s still one of the best choices if you have Nvidia cards, because they have a separate ISO just for Nvidia machines.
For a short time, I used Kubuntu because I love KDE Plasma. I had been wanting to use Plasma again, and I kinda wanted to try a non-Debian/Ubuntu-based distro. That’s when I stumbled upon CachyOS, and I don’t think I’m switching to another distro for a while.
CachyOS is Arch-based, with a super-easy install. They have their own version of the kernel, optimized for gaming. It really is fast, too. Not only does it beat Windows in most speed tests, but it beats pretty much every other distro as well. If you like Arch, I highly recommend CachyOS to keep some of the basic stuff optimized while you tinker with your system.
Thanks for the comprehensive reply. Agree on KDE being great. Idk if it is because it has more of a windows feel, or because it isn’t as flashy as GNOME.
If my current Bazzite instance doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll try Cachy.
I’ve heard great things about Bazzite, so I’m sure you’ll be fine there.
I just wanted something new, and Fedora was too similar to Ubuntu under the hood. I don’t know if I’m going to look back from Arch-based. Maybe when I break my install lol.
Yeah I was using Garuda for a minute, but two broken installs later I figured my time would be better spent on an immutable distro for the time being.
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.
I switched to Linux because of Linux gaming. Yes, I am completely serious!
Back in 2015 I had Lenovo laptop with only 2GB of RAM. Windows 7 consumed more than half of that and DotA 2 took over 2 minutes to load the map. The game was laggy. FPS was terrible even on low settings.
On another hand Ubuntu 14.04 consumed only ~350 MB of RAM. DotA on Linux loaded map in seconds. FPS was slightly better, but the game itself didn’t feel so laggy anymore.
Linux was (and still is) my only viable solution for gaming on low spec hardware.
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.
Opening up Win11 and finding out that the simplest of apps - Notepad - now has Copilot integration just enforced my stance that switching to Linux was the right move.
windows genuinely infuriates me, not only for the typical reasons like Microsoft bloat and adware. I hate how it handles a lot of systems, and much prefer the organization and relative modularity of Linux. development and software management is also a pain on windows, and it’s difficult to sandbox apps.
