My computer's hard drive began to be less-than-reliable. And only Linux can be ran from the USB drive. I have got MX Linux, and save changes, updates etc. by remastering the image.

I was running XP at the time wanting a change. Meanwhile, a neighbor moved from Window ME to Vista and asked for help setting it up. I had never been SO irritated at an OS in my life.

Enter Debian LTS, which I’ve been running ever since.

programming. It's just a really big IDE.

Tiling Window Managers. Now that I've been using them for some years I don't understand how stacking is the standard, it's such a waste of time to manage stuff.

I've always run Linux on my laptops. Now however I've switched on my gaming desktop as well, after W11 started randomly waking from sleep. Haven't had an issue yet. Sure, not everything gaming wise is entirely perfect (though tbh you could almost believe the games were built for Linux) but I figure that if I don't switch why would anyone else do so?

The desire to be alternative and different, and now I can't use Windows for too long

I got into it when I started university and we started using Linux for a few programming classes. My dad helped me set up a dual boot as he had been a Linux user for a decade at this point, and I had used it for some time as well but had to switch to Windows for MS Office bullshit for school and games.

At this point it was kind of cool to use a different OS but I honestly wasn't much impressed, mainly because of the UI which I later learned was Gnome 3 - Ubuntu had just ditched Unity, but of course I didn't know anything about this yet.

Then I took my first internship where the first thing we did was install Linux on our computers, and the installer they gave us was Ubuntu 16.04 with the Unity desktop - which I LOVED, holy shit it was amazing, so much better than Gnome 3, and miles better than Windows. The first weeks of the internship were basically purely education, among other things an in-depth intro to Linux, command-line tools and such, and I think this was key - not being alone in the process was very important, and I'm not sure if or when I would have made the full switch without this. I started distro hopping in my free time and loved every moment of it.

This was also coincidentally when gaming on Linux really started taking off with Proton etc, so after experimenting with it, I finally ditched Windows completely and made the full switch in I think 2019, about a decade after my first encounter with Linux, and 2 years after I started using it regularly.

I wouldn't consider myself an evangelist by any means, I won't bring the topic up unless asked, but I will recommend taking a look and experimenting in a VM to anyone with an ounce of technical know-how. Furthermore, I think every programmer should be using Linux (yes, literally) unless it's impossible or too painful in their case - which I think is not many cases.

Okay, I ended up typing a novel but fuck it I'm leaving it here because I loved writing this way too much.

While at university I did a lot of work on the SPARCs and this lead to Unix development as an early career for me. I moved into the windows world after that and I missed Unix so I picked up Linux around 98. I installed it on my work laptop of all things and made everything I needed work. Never looked back since although I run Windows VM for office and testing stuff.

I already wanted to switch since i disliked the privacy issues, and then once my laptop got too slow for windows (1 min in a call/video before i got sound), i replaced the hdd with an ssd and installed linux mint, which i still use.

win98 was really really awful.

It started as a dislike of Windows 98 for me, extremely unreliable and buggy OS. I didn't switch immediately but that was what got me looking for the alternatives, having fully made the switch around the time of Windows XP. Windows only seems to have got worse since then, stories of advertising, forced updates, etc., I'm glad I never had to deal with that.

I tried Linux when I was younger. I decided to try Gentoo on underpowered hardware with zero Linux experience. I credit that uphill battle for teaching me Linux! I used that until I got into dependency hell and switched back to Windows for a while. I needed PowerShell and stuff for my old job, before it went cross-platform. It was fine.

A few years later, I was dual-booting again. Then, Windows 10 began blue-screening randomly. I couldn’t figure out why. Reinstalling didn’t work. So I started using Linux full-time and I’ve never looked back.

Even when I found out that one of my memory sticks had been half-inserted for months, and that’s probably what made Windows crash all the time. How did Linux handle it? Obviously, because it’s better.

It was a friend who helped me install ubuntu 8 on my PC in dualboot when I was like 14/15 years old. Was already a computer nerd, though my friend was way more into everything Linux related. I got hooked there, though at that time it was a real pain in the ass to use wifi in ubuntu. I wouldn't call me obsessed, but I really don't like using Windows. I have to for work and I despise it.

I had dual boot with Win10, which I used for almost everything, and Arch, for SSH-able stuff for work and university. One day Windows decided to nuke both the EFI partition and Arch, which made Windows itself unbootable, so I just wiped the entire disk and installed Manjaro. Now I'm a sysadmin and I don't think I could do my job if I had to use Windows.

I'm a pragmatic programmer. I came to Linux because we were doing server-side stuff, I stayed because bash shell is a blunt tool but command line is incoherent

Apple.

I uses to be a huge Apple fan pre-2010. Everything worked, was smooth, wasn't Windows, and it was fun trying out the terminal despite it being pretty useless for most things on Mac.

At the new decade is when it felt like Apple was becoming what it is today: a walled garden with priority of mobile devices at the detriment of Macintosh. Started to really look at Linux as an alternative (only tried Ubuntu in a VM around the time of Unity coming out) early 2010s, but didn't make the full leap until around 2013 when I installed Linux Mint and got a Raspberry Pi to begin to mess around with. Now I solely run a mix of Debian and Void on all my machines and I couldn't be happier.

I've been running Linux in some form since 2012 - I installed Ubuntu 12 on my old laptop and played around with it - was a pain so I dropped it for Windows until like.. 2015? Then I went full into it as I started getting into programming and whatnot.

Back when, after the world didn't end after Y2K got patched and saved it, I was getting tired of Windows and none of my Macs were up-to-date enough to handle my writing workload, I gave Caldera OpenLinux a shot. Ended up compiling everything myself and used that for two years. Had a copy of MetaFrame laying around from a completed project, so I installed it on Windows 2000, and served Office apps over the network so I could use Word in Linux. I've had something running Linux since.

Windows 2000 was end of life and XP looked like crap.

easier Stable Diffusion setup

Windows XP Pro was the last Windows that you could install on as many of your machines as you wanted without contacting M$. When I found that out, I knew that XP would be my last Windows and that I would inevitably switch to Linux. When XP became totally obsolete, I permanently switched over to Linux Mint. I've never gone back to Windows and I have zero reason to ever do so. I promote Linux whenever I can.

Laptop wasn't running smooth anymore. Tried a bunch of stuff in Winxows, nothing helped. Formatted the drive, installed linux, ran buttery smooth for years until some graphics shit died. Did the same to a thinkpad back in 2018 or 19. Still up an running like a champ but the thing went crazy on the original windows it came with (2nd hand. I'm also cheap...)

first just messing around with it, then starting selfhosting and then i started to dualboot just for fun, and one day i by mistake nuked my windows installation, so now i'm a full time linux user

Moving from Windows XP to Windows 7, i found that Windows 7 sucked, moved to linux and never looked back.

Mainly this stuff:

https://youtu.be/IT4vDfA_4NI?si=u1V76Mxjq8s6iAFI

Windows 8 being unusable on my shitty laptop I had back then, IIRC it would bluescreen 9 out of 10 times on startup (this same bug still persisted when eventually Windows 10 came out). I essentially switched to Linux full time after that.

Early 2000's I took a class in highschool called "What's in the box". A buddy of mine and I would hangout after school just talking and building computers. He showed me Lindows. I specifically remember looking at the clock in the dock, and thinking... "Wow!!! Look how you can customize the clock so much!"

It stuck with me. Shortly there after I dabbled with Suse. Then moved to Ubuntu. By 2005 I was almost exclusively using Linux on all my machine. Had one machine running windows for gaming, but the other machines I had were all Linux.

Used to use Windows 98 SE. First introduced to Mandrake Linux around 2000. Had no Internet, got the install media from a friend of my father. Barely got it working and couldn't read English. Went back to Windows XP. Ubuntu came. Began to use it around 2008 for a few years. Back to windows briefly and then Raspberry Pi was launched. Switched to Linux permanently.

Almost went back in 2013 due to Lightroom, gaming and a few work related medical software.

Began to grasp FOSS maturely in 2014 and switched to alterbative software. When Steam launched Proton there was no turning back.

I was obsessed but it has come and gone. Now I'm a bit of a nuissance to friends sllwly switching them to alternative software. My partner gets the worst treatment. Now she uses hardware security keys, assymetric keys auth etc

Curiosity

Pure Data

Kinda just ideological commitment. I sorta just started using Linux right off the bat, the only time I wasn't a Linux user was way back when I was using the family Mac. Linux has gone quite far over the years, in quite a positive way.

I first heard of it in the early 2000s, with my dad talking about replacing our buggy Windows ME with Lindows. Eventually, that computer died without us ever attempting to install it.

In college, I hung out with someone who used linux and thought it looked cool. I successfully dual booted Ubuntu on my PC around 2005 or 2006, but could never get the video drivers working properly (it was stuck at the lowest resolution) and eventually gave up on it.

I started adminning a web forum around 2014 or so, and the previous admin talked me into dual booting Fedora rather than only using Putty. So I started using it intermittently whenever I started working on the forum, though I never really got into GNOME. He also told me about raspberry pis, so I picked up a pi 2 and started tinkering with it.

When my wife moved in (2018), she (a software developer) was working on a project and asked me if I’d heard of raspberry pis, as she was recommended to use one but hadn’t looked into it yet. I pulled my pi 2 out of storage and she fell in love with it, so we started buying loads of pi 3s and zeroes, with me testing out different distros and setups for her while she was working on the project code.

Finally, somewhere around 2018 or 2019 my laptop started running like shit on Windows. I tried out Xubuntu and fell in love with it. It ended up becoming our go-to distro, getting slapped on old desktops she brought home from work and a used laptop I bought for our daughter. So that became the daily driver on my laptop, even as she moved onto Alpine with i3wm.

And now we both have Pinetab 2s, so I think it’s fair to say we’re full on linux nerds at this point. We still have Windows on some of our desktops, though, so we’re more pragmatists than linux proselytizers.

TL;DR: I heard about it young, and that interest grew into dabbling, until I finally got addicted to it.