Privacy, no bloat (depending on distro), no Big Tech, freedom, no cost.

Because it is the least worst OS

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 couldn’t find my Windows 7 key after reinstalling.

My shift was primarily ideologically driven. I was sick of privacy encroachment, enshittification, and feeling like my computer wasn’t truly mine. Linux changed all that.

1. I’m a lifelong contrarian.
2. I refuse to overpay into the locked-down Apple ecosystem.
3. Windows has become worse with every release.
4. I use Arch btw.

because, with Linux I truly own my computer and have the freedom to do whatever I want with it

Because I’m a fucking nerd and in '99 using Linux and LaTeX was the nerdiest thing to do. Stayed because it’s fucking awesome.

Linux porn sceenshots. I wanted to have a cool cyberpunk desktop and be Hackerman.

Same as most people. OSs have just evolved to become systems made to serve their creators rather than their “customers”.

Windows wants to steal all your data and then use it to shove ads in your face.

Apple also constantly tries to push their own products and services through the OS, not to mention continually pushing the boundaries of irrepairability and locking you in an ecosystem. And just being extremely expensive.

I heard two talks around 2001 or so. one by Wolfram, after which I swore never to use mathematica again. and one by stallman after which I switched completely to Linux and never went back to windows.

still on Linux 25y later. went from days when getting sound working was a challenge , to today when even obscure tablets work out of the box.

started with red hat. used Gentoo for about 5y. then debian for 10, and now arch.

went from the old “crux” and metacity, to openbox to fvwm to gnome to kde plasma

i remember the old days I was envious of Mac users for transparency and the present windows features, and I ran this utility called Skippy that would screenshot windows and present them… all these features are now built in to the wm now, so no tweaking needed

I got sick of my devices spying on me

I was not about to put up with windows co-pilot or recall and had already put up with enough ads and bugs.

I had been running Debian on my laptop for a year without a problem and then finally Windows 11 started doing this when I was trying to update:

Click check for updates? Same result. Wait a week and try again? Same result.

I could no longer trust that the OS was secure from even 3rd parties, so I pulled the trigger and installed Debian 12 - later upgrading to Debian 13 when it released.

There just is never any going back now - Linux is just waaaaaaay too good.

Now I just need something similar to happen with phones.

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.