XP, to OS X 10.4-10.8, to Linux

I’ve also made the switch from win10. There are a lot of “small” things that add up. The constant nag messages. Updates. Start menu ads. That was mist of it on Win10. I’ve had some experience in win11 at work, and I can say the new UI is abysmal (honestly I couldn’t care less about the UI as far as look/textures go, but one thing I can’t stand is slow animations for every little thing. If I open the start menu, I want it open as soon as I press the keyboard button, not 0.5s later. When I snap a window, I don’t need 0.5s of my life wasted on watching the “beautiful” animation. I just want it on half the screen instantly. Whenewer I close a window, I don’t want to have it fade out and distract me, I want it either gone or a popup asking me wether to save, discard or cancel show as soon as I tried to close the window. I want the Control panel back. I knew how to use it, and navigating menus wasn’t animated to consume 0.5s for every screen change. The animations were what pushed me away the most. I assume you can turn the off, but I never bothered since I changed computers often and would just rather put up with it rather than spend time tweaking each and every computer I wanted to use. The UI is why I don’t like win11, and the MS requirement is why I won’t let it touch my computer.

I have to say, switching to Linux was very frustrating as I had to google every little thing and most sites are filled with ad garbage even with uBlock on Firefox turned in with most of the lists, so that was frustrating. But now, after just under 2 years of Linux use, I can say the switch has paid great dividends. I can do a lot of menial tasks much faster (highlights are fike conversion with ffmpeg, combining PDFs with pdfunite, navigating folders using cd and tab completion (I’m the type to have a lot of folders in one parent directory to whkch I know the names, so typing the name is faster than looking for it manuakly and clicking on it), not to mention all the programs I used that are on Linux open 3-5 times faster.

Another big quality of life improvement are updates - updating apt packages with one command and Flatpaks with another, not having to reboot while doing it and not having programs prompt for updates individually is all something I never knew was possible before switching over. Linux has really impressed me with how well it works and how much of a laid back attitude it resembles, as opposed to the whiny Windows forcing its will upon you with its updates, ads and bloat.

Straight from the Amiga to Slackware in 97. Never been a Windows fan.

Windows XP pre-SP1 at home. For Work I always had to use Windows.

What was the last version of Windows you used before hopping on over?

Windows 10. But I knew that I won’t have issues adjusting to Linux because I used WSL everyday and I had gallium os sideloaded on my chromebook.

So what’s your reasoning for the change to the reliable and funni penguin OS?

A series of unfortunate events in the span of a month or two along with long persisting issues that made me crack.

I had 2 machines then, a hp laptop and a PC. I used my laptop for school and financial stuff (which was shared with my father) and my PC for programming.

The first issue. The laptop had an update for a long while which it would randomly start and I was not able to put it off. But it always kept failing. It was basically a tradition for me to start my laptop on the tram to school so if there is a pending update, it will try and fail before I need it for schoolwork. I finally cracked, googled the issue and tried to trouble shoot it. The first step was to run a system integrity check. This never finished because when I went back to check up on it, an update had been started. My laptop didn’t boot after that because bitlocker couldn’t find the keys, even after I would manually input them on the prompt.

The second issue was with my PC. I used WSL everyday. But it would randomly just fail to boot. This was annoying, so I had a script to delete WSL, install it again and install all the packages I needed.

The third issue was also with my PC. I use a us keyboard layout despite not being from the us. This is because the international English keyboard does not input quotation marks when you type them, which makes it difficult to use for programming. But windows switched me to the international keyboard every now and then which made it annoying to code. I tried removing it, but I was not allowed to for whatever reason. What I did was admittedly stupid, but I used regedit and some online help to remove the international keyboard. That didn’t work, but all system apps stopped working. I kept using it like this for a bit. Eventually, I got an update. Now I was terrified because I was not able to open settings to postpone this update. I didn’t wanna have a repeat of my laptop incident.

So I just finally broke and installed Linux mint. Never looked back, ever. I use arch BTW.

TLDR: laptop got wiped due to a windows update and windows was forcing me to use an international keyboard.

Windows 10 before I used Linux full-time, though I did try out Windows 11.

XP…my laptop was an old Acer my mom passed to me and couldn’t run vista so I never got it… Hopped on Ubuntu 09.04

I had Windows 8.1 but as the end of its maintenance was approaching I saw the writing on the wall with Windows 10 and especially 11 and I wanted no part of that. When 8.1 was put to pasture I returned to Linux and I have been content ever since. Seeing where Microsoft is taking Windows I’m more and more convinced that Stallman Was Right. I control my software, not the other way around.

!stallmanwasright@lemmy.ml

I switched to Linux permanently in 2008. Last OS I used before Linux was Mac OS X version 10.4 “Tiger” (if I recall correctly) which is what came with the Macintosh PowerBook that I had bought roughly in the year 2004. I have never used Microsoft software unless someone was paying me to, but at the time, Windows XP was still all the rage even though Microsoft was trying to get everyone to switch to Windows Vista. (Vista got a lot of well-deserved hate too, sort of similar what we see with Windows 11 right now, actually.)

Anyway, I was a die-hard Apple fanboy, but getting more and more into free software and I kept on using Macports/Homebrew to build Linux stuff I found online, but back in those days a lot of apps I wanted to try did not have good support for the Darwin kernel build of GCC which was pretty old compared to what Linux was using at the time. Occasionally a build would fail, and I would try to port the software on my own, with the idea of maybe submitting a package to Macports. But after a while I realized, “if I want to use Linux software, why not just use Linux?”

So I bought a Netbook (Dell Inspiron Mini 10) with Ubuntu pre-installed. I really loved that little computer, I used it for a good 5 years until I needed a more powerful computer. I still have it, actually. I never went back to Apple until this year when I took a new job where they wanted me to use a MacBook Pro. (Again, not using proprietary software unless I am well paid.)

I can say with confidence that Linux is considerably better than Apple’s operating systems. I use Aarch64 Debian 12.5 in a QEMU on that MacBook for most things, only switching over to Mac OS when I really need to.

Greybeard here.

I worked for a company with a wild mix of DOS, Win 3.1, and Win 3.11. Then we got new PCs, some ethernet hubs and switches (instead of the damn coax cable with terminators) and started to move to Win95.

Win 95 was a beast. It came in a bunch of floppies. It took ages to install, and you’d find after one hour that the last floppy was corrupt. Also, on our cheap hardware (Siemens-Nixdorf Pentium PCs) sometimes the sound card or the ethernet card would go missing. Nothing short of a reinstall would solve it. Temporarily, of course.

The Win 98 came along. All our problems were solved. It was a 32 floppy install job, if memory serves. No, no CDs on our company. Still, it crashed a lot, and Microsoft Office had a tendency to simply destroy 100+ page documents when it was not crashing.

At home I used Windows, because how else am I going to play games, right? But I kept experimenting with Linux, and liked what I saw. There were many pieces missing (no USB for a very loooong time, for instance), but what was there was rock solid compared to Windows. And you could COMPILE YOUR OWN DAMN KERNEL, fer chrissake! How powerful was that?

Eventually, distros started to emerge that made some pain points go away. I remember Corel Linux, Caldera Linux, Mandrake, RedHat, etc. I settled with Debian because ‘apt-get dis-upgrade’, of course. Then Ubuntu came along and made Linux more pretty and usable for simple folk. They even sent you a free CD by mail if you asked them.

I got ever more tired of Windows nuking my boot sector, the viruses (virii?), the hunting around for drivers, the having to throw away good peripherals because windows thought were too old to support.

I made a choice and dropped Windows. I missed a lot of the gaming scene until Wine and Steam caught up with the state of the art. In the mean time I made use of emulators and had a good time playing console and arcade games.

Oh I was teased about it. Fellow IT workers (proper MSCE type people) would give me a hard time because “Linux has no future”, “Unix is dying”. I guess the future proved I was right. I now earn more that they do.

Windows XP. Windows itself was fine, I only moved because the programming languages I wanted to use ran better on Linux and ran in a way that was more likely to be the same as in production.

Windows 10. The reason I switched was pretty funny - I had previously bought a cheap SSD and moved my install over to it, and installed Arch on my HDD hoping to experiment with it.

I never really did that, but one day before Christmas my computer booted straight to Arch to my confusion, and after a while I figured out my SSD failed. I ended up installing gnome to have something to use in the meanwhile, since I wasn’t gonna be buying a new SSD in the next few days, but then I just decided to stick with Linux. As I learned more about it I realised I was barely missing anything, and I preferred Linux for what I had.

I’ve flirted with Linux for years, all the way back to Fedora Core 6. I still use Windows, so 11 is my most recent version, but it’s stripped down using the AME playbook. I use it to play some games with anti-Linux anticheat. I also have a minimal Windows VM on my desktop for playing Destiny 2.

That being said, my primary computers run Arch (custom built desktop) and Fedora (Framework laptop) and I have zero intention of ever using Windows as a primary OS ever again.

Was using Tiny 10/modified Windows 10,but switched to Linux Mint beacuse of low system requirements and low resource usage,as I have 15 year old PC

It was Windows 10 for me but it was not my first attempt.

The first time I failed to install linux was when I was a teenager in 2003. I don’t remember which Windows version I had then, maybe 98, but I was hating it with a burning passion which hasn’t improved with the next versions. It seems every new Windows version was specifically made to piss me off even more and make the experience of using my computer worse. I tried installing linux as soon as my parents bought a new computer and gave me the old one, chose Red Hat (not RHEL) because it had an installation guide that was marginally more understandable than what I found concerning debian, but it was still pretty lacking and I failed :(

Then last year I finally tried again after accidentally letting through a Windows 10 update (“accidentally” because I had a firewall blocking everything, especially Windows services). That was the update with fucking EdgeView, which broke all my work flow by breaking the CTRL+Arrow keys+Space to select multiple files and requiring to release and re-press the CTRL key each time. This came six months after I had to wipe my entire drive and reinstall Windows after getting infected, probably by cryptomining malware, by running a random exe from github to remove the Edge browser, which I only did out of desperation after all the other solutions to remove it failed (command line, powershell, registry, etc). To be fair to the malware though, it did remove Edge, and I can respect malware developers with professional ethics. I’m much less mad at the malware than I am at Windows for stressing me so much to resort to running randoms exes. Besides, there were so many times where random exes from the internet saved my sanity from Windows induced breakdowns…

As for the why :

• I don’t want my OS deciding how I should use my computer.
• I don’t want it to serve me piss and tell me that I should like it.
• I don’t want it deciding what configuration I should be allowed to do, what needs to be hidden to make it as inconvenient as possible to change, and what it won’t let me do at all unless I try third party apps to basically hack my system.
• I don’t want it to stress me so much with the lack of control, transparency and understanding that I am often left in a burnout state, too mentally exhausted to attempt to change anything with my setup, all from the strain of constantly having to find very convoluted hacks for simple things while having no clue as to how or why anything works or doesn’t work.
• I don’t want it to prevent me from doing what I want to do. Even if what I want to do is incredibly stupid, let me do it and learn why it is stupid.
• I want to be able to actually understand how it works, at least somewhat.
• I don’t want pre-installed apps, if I want something I am perfectly capable of installing it myself thank you very much.
• I don’t want to have to spend 1-2 weeks debloating at each new reinstall.
• I don’t want updates running automatically and installing random stuff, reactivating features I had disabled or resetting stuff I had configured, all without ever telling me what it’s doing. I don’t want to get so stressed by updates that I set my firewall to block the updater, and security be damned.
• I want to be able to choose how I interact with my computer and not be forced into one way decided for me.
• GIMME BACK MS-DOS ! Or any non graphical session. I don’t care if I can do the same thing more easily and efficiently in a GUI, I want the option not to use one if only because it makes me happy. When I was a child and I thought computers were like magic, my parents showed me the magic spells to type in the DOS to run games from floppy disks or to launch Windows 3.11 and I felt like a computer wizard. I even read the MS-DOS manual that came with the computer, in secret because I wasn’t supposed to actually use the DOS except to launch games or Windows, but it was just too fascinating to resist. Then Windows 95 came along and since then I’ve felt like a child being constantly condescended to.
• I don’t want it to be a RAM blackhole.
• I don’t want it to collect information on me.
• I don’t want it to require an internet connection or an account that is not local.
• I don’t want it to be controlled by a corporation.
• I want to be able to play video games (that’s mostly what kept me from trying again to install linux for 20 years).

Since switching to linux and distro-hopping a lot I have added the following, which I hadn’t even know were even possible before :

• I don’t want anything at all preinstalled or preconfigured. Just give me a tty and let me waste my time building my system from there and learn how it works, maybe I’m crazy but it’s fun (yes I ended up on arch btw).
• If I ever again have to use a desktop cluttered with shortcuts or a start menu I’m going to scream. I used to Windows+R most of my apps because I can’t take the time wasted by endlessly clicking everywhere, but even that was a pain (rofi is great, rofi is awesome, rofi is god)
• I’m NEVER going back to floating windows. You’ll take my tiler from my cold dead hands.

Definitely not going back =D