Vendors don’t always update hardware drivers for other versions of those proprietary operating systems. Linux doesn’t depend on vendors directly for updated drivers. Now I can use my old hardware without being stuck on an old OS version.

Windows

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The stereotypical story actually happened to me.

My parents had the habit of disabling the wifi if I didn’t want to do chores.

So I looked up how to hack the neighbors’ wifi. People online told me it wasn’t possible, unless I installed “Kali Linux”. I tried it and failed. I looked up why and people told me I should start with a beginner distro, lik Ubuntu. So I installed that.

No joke! A friend told me it was “the year of the Linux desktop”, because of all the recent breakthroughs in drivers and usability.

I love how this story doesn’t even remotely let you guess what year it was.

My first Linux installation was based on curiosity, which was short lived, because Linux (Mandrake) at the time was too challenging.

I moved permanently onto Linux after I could no longer use my SCSI card on Windows 7. I find Linux a joy to use even though I don’t do any programming, and rely on ChatGPT to create scripts.

Security, Software Updates

The constant OneDrive ads. I could ignore the fact that W11 is essentially spyware, but it kept fucking annoying me with ads and I had enough of it. After programming in Linux, I don’t want to go back to W11. Troubleshooting is so much easier bc the CLI is heavily used. Package managers make my life easier too. Linux is good 👍

Windows Vista on a laptop with 2gb ram :)

Great suggestion by a fellow IT student to try arch, so I learn the system from the ground up.

I dont know if this is still the case, but Windows used be very bad with downloads through Steam. They would often drop to zero throughput. Also Alt-tabbing in an out games without the system crashing also seemed to work better on linux. So for me gaming was actually better on linux.

I don’t think I’ve turned into an evangel yet. However when I’ve passed on a computer I’d just put a fresh install of fedora on it.

Honestly, the Reddit migration. I switched to Lemmy about 6 months ago. A few of the largest communities at that time were Self Hosting and Privacy related. Those naturally lead me to looking into Linux. From there I started minor self hosting on a Pi. Then, after a rather long walk through the Yongsan Electronics Market in Korea I built my own Homelab, and last week, I moved my primary desktop to Pop_OS. Honestly, It’s been a blast. A few learning curves, but the ability to have near complete control over my setup, and the increased self reliance has been delightful.

Windows 8 taking away the skeumorphic, frutiger aero theme for a plain boring flat theme as well as going with a very anti-desktop look with the start menu. I still haven’t gone back to Windows and probably never will for my personal computer (work computer is different) since I don’t see them ever bringing back the fun Vista and 7 look.

There was a ton of software sourcecode posted to the comp.sources.unix usenet group that I wanted to check out. The problem is all that software was in shar format, and there was no way to extract those files on msdos. I found Yggdrasil Linux on CD at a local software store and decided to check it out. Been using Linux in one form or another ever since.

@mac
Windows was too slow on my older laptops. Installing Linux (Ubuntu) on it gave it new life.

High school computer class. I was like: “Hey! This is pretty cool.” And the rest is history.