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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Freedom.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Im a hater and spite is a powerful motivator

so i can scroll unfocused windows with the mouse wheel

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.

microslop started being cringe. tried linux on a whim. never looked back.

Windows showed me one too many ads in the start menu.

Also, I found a distro I like and can stick with forever.

Windows is slow, buggy, and overall shit software, even on high end computers.

I got tired of Microsoft. I had seen that Linux was now good enough for what I wanted to so, so I decided to jump ship.

It wasn't a quick decision. I only transitioned from Windows because I finally got around upgrading the PC.

So far? I mean, there was the kerfuffle with the AUR recently. And I still haven't figured out a few issues here and there. But damn it just works and there is no worrying about updating or not updating or anything like it.

Freedom. Having my computer not actively work against me.

Privacy performance and fun

It's better.

What can I say? I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was. To catch them all is my real quest, to train them is my cause.

1. FOSS. I'm a software engineer and making the world a better place and helping others is why I love my job and what I study. FOSS is the thing that can make tge world a better place and help others.

I also have a plethora of technical reasons, but I'm sure others will cover them. Just this ideological and philosophical reason is enough for me to be using Linux.

I never bought into the ecosystem. My first laptop had os/2 warp, then I moved to slackware for years. After that onto FreeBSD when I became a sysadmin. I was turned onto Ubuntu by one of our developers (12.04) and then ended up on Debian when I started gaming. Played guild wars and bf1942 for years until ea used anticheat that was Linux compatible, but disabled it, then moved away from games with a community so toxic it requires software to stop cheaters. I even had an employer pay for a windows xp cert for me and thought it was the jankiest operating system I'd ever used. It was impossible to update everything, the command line was neutered and it t was so slow compared to everything else I used.

Currently I run proxmox and debian on home servers and cachyos on my laptop and gaming computer. I buy computers with no os, or build from scratch where I can and only choose games based on Linux compatibility. I don't have a need for windows because I've never used it for anything besides software testing. I never understood how windows and a FreeBSD clone became the two biggest players in the market.

Windows is like McDonald's. No one really likes it, but it's ubiquitous, you know you're not going to like it, and you're going to regret it as soon as you bite into it, but you expect that, so you choking it down doesn't seem so bad. It's convenient and a lot of other people eat from there, so you try to convince yourself that it's acceptable for dinner and eat it anyway.

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...

20+ years ago I grew tired of having to constantly buy upgrades or find cracks for Windows and a friend suggested i check out thi s new OS that was coming out called Ubuntu. I believe it was around 2004 when I installed the first distro and I have never looked back. I find it amusing that all my friends and family think im some super hacker because I use linux lol.

Because window is genuinely more of a pain to use in 2026.

Skype and OneDrive. They just WOULD NOT GO THE FUCK AWAY. My hard drive died, so I already lost everything OS related, and re-installing windows 10 was already infuriating me, and then every reboot, even after disabling them, skype and onedrive just kept popping up at boot. I used windows to download i think 8 different distro ISOs, gathered a gaggle of flash drives and set them all up. Then I tried them all out until I landed on one that did everything I wanted it to and haven't looked back. I kept that windows drive for about 6 months before I realized I was never using it and the storage space would be better served reformatted to btrfs for the linux system to use.

It's better.

FOSS and copyleft: I want software built for the good of the public, with good intentions. Anything with corporate licensing us off the table, and ideally so are non-copyleft open source programs as corporations will hijack them for their benefit and privatization.

UNIX Like: It is my preferred workflow for development and everyday use. The windows paradigm is messy, convoluted, and inconsistent by comparison.

Fast, free, customizable: all nice to haves connected to the big two above

I want to use open-source software, developed from people for people. I don't want corporates to exploit my data and take away my freedom.