It’s open source and not owned by an evil corporation. It doesn’t have ads. It doesn’t mine my data and sell it to the highest bidder. It doesn’t have AI shoved in every nook and cranny. It’s much lighter to run. I can easily run it on a 10 year old laptop.

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.

My values

IT worker, close to 50 years old, only ever could afford low-mid range tech, gamer. Been using windows for over 30 years and linux for 8. Linux works better than windows and it allowed me to improve my tech skills beyond a desktop machine.

I really like the control and malleability

Independent to the above, using windows feels really, really bad these days.

Because I have self-respect.

Steam Deck made gaming on Linux possible and that was the only thing holding me to Windows. I had been using Windows since Windows 95.

Microsoft simply stopped making an OS and started making a subscription and content delivery platform. When they did that, they lost me as a customer.

Because Windows 10 installed candy crush without my input and interrupted me to tell me how edgy it was.

Windows 11 was stress. I was spending far too much time keeping it the way I want it - stable, no cloud, no AI. A four hour call with MS tech support (that went in the most idiotic circles) kinda sealed the fate of my new desktop build (old one had a failing MB, no choice but to finally upgrade hardware) and switched both it and another desktop the next day.

Much less stressed now, even when things go weird and wonky.

I am using Linux since the 90’s, so my reasons might be different from “to leave Windows”.

I started coding at an early age, so for me, having access to all my tools free-of-charge was a big plus. Add to that the possibility of read the source code of everything, the learning potential was mind blowing.

i didnt like w10 with already pre-installed software, from games to random shareware. Didnt like that there where starting to test ads in the start menu or that OneDrive had decided to start operating in the background without notice.

I already had a mac, but didnt like that I could play most games, mainly used it as a work pc for design work. So then I searched and learned that linux was having many changes with proton and wine, and decided to give it a go, and I think its been 3 or 4 years since then. There are things, like graphic design work that I needed to re-learn, but it hasnt affected me greatly. I fully recommend it for most people. Running Mint

I switched to Linux full time because I didn’t like Windows Xp. Windows has only gotten worse since then and Linux has only gotten better.

I never bought into the ecosystem. My first laptop had os/2 warp, then I moved to slackware for years. After that onto FreeBSD when I became a sysadmin. I was turned onto Ubuntu by one of our developers (12.04) and then ended up on Debian when I started gaming. Played guild wars and bf1942 for years until ea used anticheat that was Linux compatible, but disabled it, then moved away from games with a community so toxic it requires software to stop cheaters. I even had an employer pay for a windows xp cert for me and thought it was the jankiest operating system I’d ever used. It was impossible to update everything, the command line was neutered and it t was so slow compared to everything else I used.

Currently I run proxmox and debian on home servers and cachyos on my laptop and gaming computer. I buy computers with no os, or build from scratch where I can and only choose games based on Linux compatibility. I don’t have a need for windows because I’ve never used it for anything besides software testing. I never understood how windows and a FreeBSD clone became the two biggest players in the market.

Windows is like McDonald’s. No one really likes it, but it’s ubiquitous, you know you’re not going to like it, and you’re going to regret it as soon as you bite into it, but you expect that, so you choking it down doesn’t seem so bad. It’s convenient and a lot of other people eat from there, so you try to convince yourself that it’s acceptable for dinner and eat it anyway.

Windows showed me one too many ads in the start menu.

Also, I found a distro I like and can stick with forever.

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.