I’m asking what big motivational factors contributed to you into going Linux full-time. I don’t count minor inconveniences like ‘oh, stutter lag in a game on windows’ because that really could be anything in any system. I’m talking, something Windows or Microsoft has done that was so big, that made you go “fuck this, I will go Linux” and so you did.
For me, I have a mountain of reasons by this point to go to Linux. It’s just piling. Recently, Windows freaked out because I changed audio devices from my USB headset from the on-board sound. It freaked out so bad, it forced me to restart because I wasn’t getting sound in my headset. I did the switch because I was streaming a movie with a friend over Discord through Screen Share and I had to switch to on-board audio for that to work.
I switched back and Windows threw a fit over it. It also throws a fit when I try right-clicking in the Windows Explorer panel on the left where all the devices and folders are listed for reasons I don’t even know to this day but it’s been a thing for a while now.
Anytime Windows throws a toddler-tantrum fit over the tiniest things, it just makes me think of going to Linux sometimes. But it’s not enough.
Windows is just thankful that currently, the only thing truly holding me back from converting is compatibility. I’m not talking with games, I’m not talking with some programs that are already supported between Windows and Linux. I’m just concerned about running everything I run on Windows and for it to run fully on a Linux distro, preferably Ubuntu.
Also I’d like to ask - what WILL it take for you to go to Linux full-time?
I didn’t want to have spyware for an os.
Windows kept shoving their stupid Edge browser down my throat. Tried every way to remove it and it kept popping back up like malware. Kept annoying me with “upgrade to Windows 11 popups.” I’ve used windows 11 on other people’s laptops and was flabbergasted that there were ads on paid software. In addition to that I heard 10 will stop getting security updates next year so I bit the bullet and switched to mint full time. It’s worked well for me so far.
Shit just not working with no way to fix it. I had aux speakers. They didn’t work on windows. Worked on Linux out of the box. Had a micro sd card. Was detected by Windows but couldn’t mount. Try to format. Windows said your card seams to be broken. Worked on Linux out of the box. The main problem wasn’t stuff breaking, it happens on Linux too, but stuff just breaking for no apparent reason and there being no way to fix it made me use Linux full time
I know what you mean. My Linux machine breaks all the time but every time it’s my fault lol
The final straw for me was Microsoft reinstalling software I had removed with updates, as well as installing crapware like Candy Crush, all in the background and without permission or notifying me. I left Windows back in August 2021 for Arch.
Until recently I had kept a Windows VM with a GPU passthrough set up until I decided I was done with Destiny 2. Now the only remnant of Windows in my life is a simple desktop in my living room that has a game I can only play on Windows, which is currently being ported to PS5. Once that port is released, it’ll be converted to a server running some atomic distro and become a fully dedicated server, and Windows will be fully removed from my life, ignoring PCs outside of my control like embedded systems.
Two things:
- I have an old refurbished Thinkpad that I originally bought as a backup navigation computer for a month-long sailboat voyage. It had Windows originally and was “fine”, by which I mean slow but acceptable for navigation purposes. When I was forced to update to Windows 10, the performance was no longer tolerable, so I hardly used it for about four years. I also had a Windows gaming PC, so no big deal.
- About a year ago, I got a shiny new Windows gaming PC. I was trying to decide what to do with my old gaming PC, which had the same problem as my laptop: it could barely crawl under the weight of years of Windows OS “upgrades”. I got it into my head that I should build a media PC with it since Netflix kind of sucks now. That lead me down the self-hosting and Linux rabbit hole.
Before I knew it, I had my old gaming PC running Proxmox and attached to my main television, I bought an old Dell Poweredge server (also running Proxmox), an old Compellant storage shelf with 20 SAS drives, a Tripp-Lite UPS, and a 24-port network switch. I also discovered Docker. So, now I fucking love Linux and I’m a fiend for self-hosting and media streaming. And how do I centrally control all of this infrastructure? That’s right, my old Thinkpad got a new lease on life running Arch and I can run all of my server infrastructure using the terminal, emacs, and web interfaces. Fuck yeah.
And what happened to my beautiful, expensive new Alienware Windows gaming PC? After playing a couple hundred hours of Cyberpunk, it just sits there. Now I’m addicted to Dwarf Fortress on my old Arch Thinkpad and I don’t think about high-spec AAA games much.
I had no idea this would happen when I started this Linux journey. Life is strange.
Enshittification. I never had any technical reasons for leaving Windows. It has its share of annoyances but so does every other OS. What really got to me was the constant pushing of their own products over others. And I don’t even want to think about switching to 11. Without the enshittification I would still be using Windows, just because of inertia.
It used to be just because I was interested. Then life got in between and I ditched it a bit, until Microsoft announced that “find anything you ever did”-feature. I installed Ubuntu again after quite a few years and stayed because I finally did not have to spend 3 days to get my video card working “kinda” and I found out my games actually work. No need to use Windows anymore.
What pushed me over the edge was how much worse the user experience became with 8 & 10.
I really disliked the lack of control over updates, settings and defaults being reverted after minor updates, and the constant pushing of Microsoft accounts and services. The data collection and privacy issues certainly didn’t help either. I switched from 7 to 10 for a period of time, but eventually started using Linux for everything except for games. I started realizing just how good Linux gaming was getting, and I eventually had one too many issues with my Windows partition and just quit using it entirely.
I don’t remember having a lot of the frustrations I hear some talk about when switching, but I think that was because early on I realized I just needed to start figuring out the Linux way of doing things rather than bringing my Windows experience over.
The “AI” garbage on the horizon finally did it for me. I’ve been using Windows for 30-some-odd years (and DOS before that) and it always had a quirk or two but it mostly just worked, and that was enough for me. Hell, I even jumped on Win 11 when it was still in Insider Preview, just because I wanted the latest. And despite everyone always complaining about 11, for the most part, it did for me as Windows has always done - it just worked, so if it ain’t broke, why fix it?
Not that I hated Linux, I just always seemed to have an excuse. “Oh, the last time I tried to install it I was stuck at a CLI” sure, almost 20 years ago. “Well, I’m a huge gamer and Linux just doesn’t have the support”, “Man, KDE Plasma on the Steam Deck runs great and looks a lot like a fresh Windows install… ahhh, it’d be such a pain to migrate though.”
Anyway, I set up Arch on a “dual boot” partition a couple weeks ago I say “dual boot” because I haven’t booted into Windows in a week. Feels good, man. I should have done it sooner.
I will say though, if any other potential Windows refugees are reading… Migrate your Steam library to an ext4/btrfs/other Linux partition. You can successfully mount your Windows NTFS partitions. You might even be able to get them to mount as read/write. You might even be able to get Steam to read the directories! But it’s not worth the headache, and in my experience it’s a lot easier to get Windows to mount a btrfs partition. My Windows install is the last NTFS partition on my system, and I’ll keep it around for a while in case I run into something that just won’t play nice with Linux, but that’s it.
My final straw was getting a new MacBook Air (I was at that point fine with how UNIX-y macOS was) and realizing I couldn’t dock the laptop to more than one external monitor without some weird hacky third-party software fix. Why, you ask? Well not at all because the laptop technically couldn’t do it, but because Apple said it can’t, because they want to overcharge you on a Pro.
I promptly returned the MacBook, bought a Framework on eBay, and learned NixOS.
10/10, I haven’t looked back since.
Windows 11 serving me ads in the OS was a step too far. Windows 10 already had them as apps in every update that annoyed me, but 11 took them to a new level that was too far for me.
Windows 7 being discontinued.
I migrated my HTPC to Linux several years ago, and since then just transitioned more and more of my machines over.
My desktop is the only machine left running Windows at this point due to there being no Freetrack implementation on Linux for sim games
Last year my wife said “most games can be run on Linux now because of steam deck, I think I’ll switch to Linux” and I said “well I guess I’m switching too” so I un-installed windows, and I’ve been full time since, even starting to self host jellyfin and nextcloud. She and I have both done linux in the past, but gaming was what was holding us back. There wasn’t anything WRONG with windows per se , except maybe the looming threat of windows 11, I just really love linux, open source, and being able to easily lift up the hood to peek inside
I use arch BTW. And Debian, my first love.
Nothing, actually. I just decided one day I was going to install Arch Linux for no reason in particular, and now I’m on OpenBSD. I wish I had that kind of determination these days.
Finding a good MusicBee alternative on linux. I just dual boot into windows whenever I need to convert FLACs and organize it. Otherwise I’m on Linux 99% of the time now.
