what caused you to get into Linux?

Windows kept doing things I didn't want it to.

The last straw was when I had a 24 hours render running, and Windows decided to update and reboot 1 hour before it was done. I was using the computer at the time, RAM, CPU, and GPU were all at max, the mouse was being moved, I clicked "later" every time the update pop-up appeared, and it still rebooted.

Linux does what I tell it to, and doesn't do what I tell it not to do. I didn't think that was a big ask until Windows.

The Foss philosophy and being poor

Microsoft anti-consumer shitfuckery. I've never had any problems with Windows on a technical level. It has its share of annoyances, but so does Linux. But the ever increasing drive to take away control from the user in order to squeeze out the last penny of revenue just got too much.

I use Linux for about 2 years

Up until February this year, I was still using a 14 year old DDR2 desktop. Windows 10 started to get quite slow and had some annoying crashes (mainly the fault of my goofy old hardware, of course)

I learned about Linux as an alternative through a Linux Tech Tips video about gaming on Linux, and Valve's announcement of the Steam Deck, I was also interested in FOSS apps as alternative to proprietary ones.

Decided to try Linux Mint. With no prior experience with Linux, lack of luck finding good tutorials, and some weird thing happening with my games not launching, I had a very rough start.

But thanks to Mint, suddenly my DDR2 desktop got a lot smoother :D also, all of my drivers worked out of the box, and I got very surprised with Linux's plug-and-play hardware capabilities.

So I decided to learn how to use it, tinkered alot with my system, and broken it alot! It was kind of frustrating, but fun at same time.

And without noticing, I had already learned lots about Linux from a more technical, and then, philosophical point of view.

Now I'm a great fan of Linux and FOSS, and have been helping friends to move to it by giving support with issues I had in the past.

Windows 95 crashing for the 5th time that day corrupting another high school paper.

I knew nothing about Linux, but bought a red hat 6 cd and installed it. I never dual booted or ever went back.

This was in the day of getting a modem that actually worked on Linux was a PITA as everything had turned into software based winmodems. And it wasn’t like you could just order one online. You had better have hoped Best Buy/circuit city/compusa had something.

Back in the 90s when I was in uni, it was the only way to have a unix-like development environment for C/C++. I also spent an inordinate amount of time testing linux on exotic hardware, like 386 laptops or older Macs. There weren't many distros back then, but I tried them all: Debian, Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, m86kLinux and even (shudder) Slackware.

It was (and still is) an extremely fun way to tinker around. But I have to say, I'm not complaining that pretty much everything works out of the box nowadays!

Most people want to stick to Windows or MacOS, and that's fine for them if they want to put up with it. Pushing Linux or OSS in general is counter productive IMO and just puts people on the defensive. I'd rather plant a seed here and there. If someone complains about Windows on a kid's laptop, then hey, I got an old laptop for my daughter and put Fedora on it. It was easy to install and maintain, unobstrusive and she can get everything done for school she needs. Or talking about gaming - you know the Steam Deck? You can game without Windows - Linux is a painless, drop-in replacement!

It pains me that a lot of Linux users were pushy elitist neckbeards that spent so much energy defending their distro of choice and Linux in general. The community tends to make Linux appear like some difficult, arcane way of using a computer. "First you must pass the initiation rite and choose the correct distro!" Seriously, fuck that mindset. Just download whatever, install it and enjoy hassle-free computing!

I'm a cheap bastard.

Free is free

I thought maybe Minecraft would run faster on it. It didn’t, but it kicked off a learning process.

For me it was all the frustration I had trying to disable Win11 telemetry and other non-essential distruptive things like adds in the start menu.

Switched to Debian with GNOME. I have been super happy ever since. Seamless transition and awesome experience using a OS that is not adversarial.

Windows

End of Windows 7

Steam Deck. Now I have a Framework running PopOS too.

Started at college in 08. Multiple Debian internal servers, and now daily driving PopOS since 2018.

No ragrets.

Just curiosity really, it was when I first started learning Java from my father's old textbook. The "Getting your environment setup" had instructions for both Windows, OS X, and Linux/Ubuntu.

Of them all, the instructions for Ubuntu were the simplest (sudo apt-get install openjdk or a similar package), in order to get the Java dev tools installed.

Ended up giving Ubuntu a look in a VM since I hadn't heard of "Linux/Ubuntu" (which was also the first time I used a VM) during the 8.04 days!

Funnily enough I actually put Java down for a bit since I just couldn't get into it. IIRC though, my first project on my GitHub had something to do with Python+GTK. Then eventually I got back into Java when I discovered I could make Minecraft plugins/mods.

Of course I was pretty young at the time, maybe 13 or 14? So I didn't know (or would've cared) about the whole privacy aspect of Linux - that came much later. But ever since then, like many others, I've always maintained that Linux is the best development environment for me.

I needed LaTeX, and in the early 1990s, the Dos version sucked, and Scientific Word on windows 3 was very expensive.

/Oh yeah I'm old

I was a broke college student, my pc broke, I had no money for a new one and my roommate gifted me a pc with OpenSUSE installed.
It took me an embarassingly long time to figure out how to install software on it.

Being poor. In college in the 90s, my lead sysadmin couldn't afford Minix for this system we had, so we tried to compile Linux on it. Three days later, we still failed, and gave up, but this was kernel 0.93 or something, so it had a ways to go. But I learned so much from that experience without paying for a university course or something.

Years later, I bought a copy of Red Hat 6 at a Costco. Windows 95/98 was big, I didn't know how to pirate it, so I went back to Linux and it worked great on my "franken-puters" cobbled together from spare parts dumpster diving. Steep learning curve back then, though. Then I brought it to my workplace, went from UNIX admin to Linux admin, and soon I preferred it to Windows. Been my daily driver for decades, now.

Am I an evangel? A little, but I find that "right tool for right job" is a better approach. Linux is great for everything, BUT a comprehensive system like MS Office AND Active Directory simply does not exist in FOSS space yet; everything is cobbled together and a kludge still trying to catch up.

Obsessed? Kinda. I just assembled some ansible scripts to roll my own distro. Why? To see if I could.

I got tired of windows breaking its self. Windows XP would get very slow after using it for a while and would need a reinstall to fix it.

Lack of money, I couldn't afford to pay for a Windows license. After discovering how to install Linux more than 25 years ago, I became eager to learn it and never looked back.

I was all in on the Apple Eco System. I had a MacBook Pro, Apple TV, Iphone, Apple Watch etc. Then my 2010 MacBook Pro stopped getting updates because Apple said its hardware couldn't keep up with the new features they were adding.

I loved that thing. I had put extra RAM in it and replaced the Hard Drive with an SSD. Even though Apple said it was 'too old to receive support', it ran like a dream for several more years when I installed Linux on it. It was great for my constant distro hopping. I used it until it died in 2021.

I think it was around 2017 when Apple stopped supporting that generation of MacBook. High Sierra was the last Mac OS version to get native support. At that stage, I already had to use third party apps to do things like set 'night mode' to reduce eye strain at night and control my Apple TV because Apple refused to add these features natively.

Now in late 2023, you couldn't pay me to use an Apple Product. I'm all in on FOSS. I went from an Iphone to a Fairphone. From A MacBook Pro and Apple TV to a Tuxedo Aura 15, Steam Deck and running my own Jellyfin server on an Asus laptop with a headless Ubuntu installation.

I also went from iMessage to Signal, Apple Keychain to Bitwarden, Safari to Firefox etc

I have Fedora installed on my main desktop but I don't use that much these days. My gf has been hinting at getting me Fairbuds XL for Christmas and I honestly can't wait for the day that Linux will be viable instead of Android.

TL;DR Apple's greed drove me to try Linux, and now I'm never going back lol

Lemmy. Thank you guys

Curiosity at first after it was mentioned a few times by others. This was back in 2007, and I've been off and on with it over the years and being pleasantly surprised with the amount of progress it had made each time I used it.

I switched for good when I built my new PC last year. I didn't actually mind Windows until it began to get filled with crapware, which has really gotten out of control more recently. It's just as well that Proton has eliminated the last reason I needed to use it.

Bought an eeePC on WinXP that ran like trash and barely could handle simple tasks. Dropped numerous flavors of GNU/Linux on it in a few months. I remember thinking "wtf is this" because the settings and interface felt so bare without the WinXP clutter but things ran much better. Fell in love with the repository model of updating everything with a single command, found the UI was actually simple looking on the surface with a ton of depth available to me when my tinkering became more comfortable and experienced. Stayed because I don't think everything in our lives needs to be stuffed full of micro transactions and ads.

When I left the church, I started directing what was my tithes to nonprofits of my choice including FOSS projects instead.

Here I am a decade and a half later and if I didn't have Linux, I probably wouldn't use computers except in the rarest of circumstances. Its just a high quality experience that commercial software can't measure up to because they have different goals.

Resenting Microsoft more than I hated Linux basically. When Windows started pushing malware-like popups and automatically "upgrading" peoples OS without asking I started using Linux as my main OS. At that point I disliked Linux because I had had some bad experiences with attempting to use it in the past, but it was becoming clear it is the lesser of two evils. Over the years it got more tolerable while Windows just got worse. Not an evangelist or obsessed at all, I actually still dislike it, but there's no way I'm going back.

NASA.

I was PMing a student project for NASA and the sheer number of tabs and files I had open on my PC killed Windows.

I had a week until the deadline and I'm in a situation where things may or may not save, basic functionality was questionable and I had literally thousands of pages information to format and get out.

Once I turned it in I installed Linux and never looked back.

I got into Linux because I used a shitty Acer laptop in middle school and I couldn't stand how slow it was. Somehow I ended up stumbling on some article or video about Linux being faster and installed Ubuntu WUBI (I think that's what it was called, it let you install Ubuntu in Windows). Then I found myself on IRC and became a distrohopper for a few years.

When I was younger I was probably obsessed and proselytized a bit but not so much anymore. An OS is just a tool and people should use what works best for them to solve the problems they have at the time.

But I still daily drive Linux so I guess it's my preferred tool.

I bought a Steam Deck

Messing around with a Raspberry Pi was what got me over the threshold of learning enough to utilize Linux primarily, and then eventually exclusively.

Obsessed? No. Persistently interested though.

I communicate Linux as an option when the circumstance are appropriate. It is often not worth getting involved in other people's tech decisions. My mother is now a satisfied Mint user, after she asked me if there was more pleasant and private way to use her computer. It has been great for me, because my providing tech support has gone to basically zero.

Two things made me leave. Both having to do with Windows.

1. Microsoft themselves.
2. My Windows install was just...bad. I'm not sure how else to describe a Windows that frequently crashed and just gave up and Blue Screen. Sure, both probably happen to any normal Windows install (well, the 1st thing. If you get the second, yeah that's a problem)--but not at the frequency it happened with mine, I'm sure. Besides that, it was slow for no reason (AFAIA, anyways) and doing anything took a while. Yeah, I eventually reinstalled it after some hassle, and after that it was just slow, but then i made the fatal mistake of trying Windows 11 and was like "if this is what I'm eventually ganna have do deal with...no thanks." Tbf, Microsoft was promting it, so i assumed it was an upgrade to Windows 10, not a wannabe chromebook with some baffling "lets fix what isn't broken and works great as is" choices.

Well, thinking about it, there was a third reason i ususally neglect to mention:

3. I had a choice. I like looking at all my available options and choosing what to go with instead of having something chosen for me. I'm a big boy and can make my own choices for myself, thank you (looking right at you there, Bill). As soon as i heard "there's something else besides this or an Apple Product. And it's much better than some people like to give it credit for" i researched a bit on the differences, the requirements, and a good place to start, and well, here I am.

As for what I am, IDK. I'm a happy Linux user, but i also get some people are perfectly happy Windows users (or aren't, but are locked into the ecosystem regardless) and hey, as long as we agree that both OS's have their quirks, you let me keep my penguins, and I'll let ya keep your...erm, Windows (does Windows have a mascot? I doubt it, but you never know)

OS2/Warp

IBM showed us there could be a superior OS that wasn't Windows or Mac. Been chasing that dragon ever since.

The constant reinstalling of windows. I actively resisted it because I wasn’t interested in learning something new. My laziness eventually kicked in and it was easier to learn Linux.

I tried it out and discovered none of the annoyances I had with windows existed here, then I started customizing things, redesigning my interface from the ground up to make everything as optimized as possible, to an extent that would never be possible on windows.

Plus I have massive ethical concerns regarding proprietary software.

Now I can't leave.

win10 EOL support. Genuinely hate the incorporation of AI into the OS.

I had always used Windows for the longest time. I used a certain cloud service and was impressed with how easy it was to manage services with docker. Fast forward a couple of years and I got a small mini-PC with Windows. I tried to install docker on it but Windows back then had no way of using Docker without virtualizing it with Hyper-V, a Pro feature. I thought let me give this another try. I tried to replicate the same setup with NSSM tools. It kinda worked eventually but it was a dirty hack at best and I did not like this solution.

I thought to myself, why would I pay Microsoft to use a feature I can use for free with Linux and get better performance while at it.

Here we are 7-8 years later.

Linux user group at my uni. I love Unix like systems, especially Linux.