Me, coder, student, cant afford mid range PCs, interested in learning computers, gamer, not professional. What about you guys?
Microsoft is clearly not making decisions to benefit the customer. The best they can do is accidentally benefiting customers every once in a while. It’s simply not good enough, since Linux is literally made by customers with the express purpose to be the best for us. 😊
Better privileges over my own hardware and the software I install on it. Less interruptions, annoyances and adware.
Was building a PC years ago, while in college, and forgot to get a Windows license (eventually got one through my university). After finishing the build I was so hyped to use it I just installed Linux (had played around in it in a VM in the past, so I knew my way around).
Got used to using Linux as my main OS after that, and stuck with it. Paying for a $100 OS is silly when the free alternative is just as good (though, I admit I do still use Windows for work).
Note: I used to game in Windows as well, I don’t do that anymore. Thanks, Steam!
I can continue using the hardware I already own, and it still runs well. And now I have a reason to learn how to make it work even better, so that’s fun
Freedom.
To give Microsoft the finger.
It was the night of December 24th, 1996. I turned on the family PC, then running Win95, and found my D:\ drive corrupted. Windows had no tools nor docs how to resurrect a corrupted filesystem. I cried, and two days later installed SuSE on a spare disk.
Some 20 years later, I restored about half of the disk lost in 1996, because Linux had the tools, and the docs, and encouraged me to learn.
One reason. Anti -Windows 11.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m glad you said this. I think it’s important to be honest about the Linux experience. It is not perfect. My Boomer parents could not use it. It often is plug and play, and often you don’t have to do anything with Terminal. But, there are times when it’s not plug and play and there are many times when you have to use Terminal to make something happen.
For example, Lubuntu updater keeps telling me there’s a new version of Lubuntu, but does nothing when I click upgrade. OK. I think it’s because there is a beta upgrade available that the updater sees but won’t upgrade to.
I’ve been using Linux since about 2003, off and on. It’s much better than it was. For me, it’s better than windows. For my 70-year-old mother, she should stick with the windows environment.
I have no issue with using the terminal myself, but you’re expecting other people to use something that’s foreign and unneeded when it’s not even safe to do so. Copying scripts from the internet is dangerous, and even a minor typo when you know what you’re doing can bring your system down. -Which happens even to senior system admins at times.
Some people don’t want to run Linux for the same reason they don’t want a job where a slightly off measurement in a chemical factory can destroy a town.
