Windows XP, but I was dual booting windows 95 and red hat 5 (not RHEL 5) in the 90s :)

Windows 10

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.

WinX. If you are asking what was the catalyst. Their seizmic change from attempting to listen to what customers want. To Cloud and AI first to exploit the customer. Security, and privacy means little to nothing.

Every product team no longer targets what the customers want, none. Everything is to extend AI and rent charging at all cost. A small team infiltrated Microsoft in early 2000’s and warped what success looks like within the company to profit, at any cost.

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

windows me

i think it should be pretty self explanatory why a switch was necessary. lol

Windows 10. I originally tried Linux out of morbid curiosity and because KDE plasma looked cool… And when windows 11 got announced and later released, I just sorta decided stick with Linux, as by that point I was quite familiar with it…

I haven’t seriously used windows for things other than piracy gaming in a long time… I can do everything I wanna do on Linux and my Mac so yeah.

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 actually still end up using Windows 11 on occasion because work.

But the last windows I daily drove was 8.1

Prior to that, Linux was “the other OS” and Windows the daily driver. I started using Linux for the first time in the Windows XP era.

Windows 10.

I wanted customization. Windows provided customization, sure, but like in the worst way possible. Want to change the system colors or what buttons look like? Download this third party theme and apply it with bloated tools that are probably malware in disguise!

Meanwhile on Linux (NixOS), I can just change a few lines in my dotfiles and it works. Sometimes it’s inconvenient but I’m not really looking for convenience.

I “switched to Linux” from Windows 2000 but I have also had machines running with Windows and macOS during that time. My last work computer was Windows 11 ( but I hardly used it ).

Hard to really put into words what kept me in Linux. At times, it has required work and knowledge Windows would not have demanded of me. At the same time, Linux has been largely free of “nonsense”. It just always felt like home.

Windows 10 when I made the switch last summer. A full year now on EndeavorOS and I’ll never go back.

Windows 98

Windows XP. I worked MSN tech support the year Blaster hit. I remember droning through the same repair steps every 15 minutes with caller after caller in a neverending stream that lasted for weeks.

After a couple of weeks of this, my coworkers and I had a weekend off together and we planned to party it up and blow off some steam with a LAN Party with Freelancer and beers. I had my comp all prepped and ready, it was freshly reinstalled and the game had been tested and benchmarked.

I came home from a long shift to find the one of the new Blaster variants, which used a new vulnerability that had not been patched until I had been at work that day. It had triggered so many reboots while I was at work it triggered NTFS corruption somehow. I had to reinstall… And I had done nothing to deserve that.

That virus fucking broke me. I went to work after that weekend and went to the Linux guru in Tier 3, and said “Teach me”.

I have never looked back with the exception of having to install it for a specific reason, and I’m usually appalled at the state of it. I just had to install Win 11 for a Google Cloud certification exam (DaFuq!?!?!) and with all the issues I encountered it took about 6 hours to get it ready for the exam. Win11 doesn’t come with network drivers anymore? Two NICs and a WiFi card in my machine, and none of them had drivers in the install. Nice to see we’ve gone full cycle back to Windows ME, except the OEM bloatware is a core part of the OS.

When my wife finally dropped Windows a month ago between the ads and recall, it marked the death of daily users of Windows in our house. I’m raising my kid on Linux.

I moved to Linux full time about a year after windows 10 released