Linux

Windows used to break all the time, Microsoft was evil, that Ubuntu thing showed up.

Windows update that ruined 3 months of work.

Im not into it yet.

But the answer is windows.

Self hosting. I was using windows to host teamspeak and game servers. I first got into linux by switching my homelab to linux and running everything in docker containers and VMs. Then from there I started using it on a desktop and laptop as well. Started on manjaro for years. Then went to arch for a year or two. And now I've switched everything over to NixOS.

While at university I did a lot of work on the SPARCs and this lead to Unix development as an early career for me. I moved into the windows world after that and I missed Unix so I picked up Linux around 98. I installed it on my work laptop of all things and made everything I needed work. Never looked back since although I run Windows VM for office and testing stuff.

It was love at first sight when I saw xeyes in a desktop environment with multiple workspaces, then the colorized terminal was a cherry on top. DOS and windows 95 were the other main options at this time around the mid-90s. Needing the boot disk and root disk to bootstrap the system was a real adventure for teenage me. The adventure continues almost 30 years later.

easier Stable Diffusion setup

Tried it out cause of curiosity and the allure of not being subject to a corporation's whims. Discovered package managers, aur, how customizatable the whole experience is and never looked back

I still dual boot Windows for a select couple games that don't run on Linux (anticheat) but I try to use it as little as possible cause it just feels gross.

The Uni Eng department ran a SunOS email server for students and a SunOS lab for our coding projects. We were taught UNIX in the intro engineering class.
A couple of my friends in the dorm fired up Linux servers (early Debian and RedHat systems), bought domains (3 character .coms!) and setup email servers for our friend groups. It also was a lot faster to do our C/C++ dev there because it wasn't an overloaded machine.
Within a couple of years I had two systems, one Win98 and the other RedHat. From there it has been a winding tale of Linux distros, a stint of OpenBSD fun until SMP boards became common, the occasional Windows machine (back when I gamed more, but after Tribes 2 on Linux), and a short work-related dalliance with OSX (10.1-10.4). For the last decade it's been almost 100% Linux anymore. If there's a tool you need on a given OS, use what you need to, but if it runs on Linux I wouldn't use anything else. I've got a pile of machines for work and home, including servers (Debian), laptops/desktops (Mint), and SoC boards (Raspberry Pi OS, Armbian, etc).
There's just too much control and not a bunch of company-driven shit (See: Ads in your start menu? WTF kind of dystopian universe are you accepting?) with Linux distros.

Got an entry level job as a network engineer at a large ISP that everyone has heard of, six months later I'm taking the RHCA and the rest is history.

Curiosity, followed by realizing how good it is for development.

I had dual boot with Win10, which I used for almost everything, and Arch, for SSH-able stuff for work and university. One day Windows decided to nuke both the EFI partition and Arch, which made Windows itself unbootable, so I just wiped the entire disk and installed Manjaro. Now I'm a sysadmin and I don't think I could do my job if I had to use Windows.

I've always run Linux on my laptops. Now however I've switched on my gaming desktop as well, after W11 started randomly waking from sleep. Haven't had an issue yet. Sure, not everything gaming wise is entirely perfect (though tbh you could almost believe the games were built for Linux) but I figure that if I don't switch why would anyone else do so?

I started using Linux many moons ago when the LAMP stack was common for web development. (Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP). But that was only on servers. It's only in the last couple of years I've switched to seriously using Linux on the Desktop. I finally got fed up of Microsoft writing software as if using their OS meant they owned my machine and they could do what they liked with it. So I've switched. While windows still sits on a partition due to a couple of games, I find I'm going months without needing to touch it. I suspect I'll be rid of windows entirely in the near future.

programming. It's just a really big IDE.

Godot engine broke with windows on my hardware, Simeone suggested me to try out linux, went with ubuntu 18.10 i think. Have been using linux ever since

Tiling Window Managers. Now that I've been using them for some years I don't understand how stacking is the standard, it's such a waste of time to manage stuff.

The Odin Project

I already wanted to switch since i disliked the privacy issues, and then once my laptop got too slow for windows (1 min in a call/video before i got sound), i replaced the hdd with an ssd and installed linux mint, which i still use.

Ey @linuxguys I might install a desktop distro on a notebook with Nvidia card I no longer really use to get used to it. I sometimes have to work with Debian servers but I have no more than basic knowledge about Linux. Any distro recommendations, regarding desktop use and gaming (if the notebook is supported at all...)?

First real terminal contact (except for limited use in macOS) I had working at a company which now uses embedded Linux in their product. After that I got in a situation where I had no computing device with admin rights running anymore. iPhone, iPad, corporate locked windows. Once there was the day I needed admin again, so I went searching and found an old iMac lying around, macOS was barley useable (low spec) and I just managed to create a bootable stick with it. Fast forward 2 years, I now have the old iMac of my dad with better specs running tumbleweed with Gnome, and I love it, with the right extensions, this frontend is very fun to use.

I was broke and my hard drive failed. I've heard/read somewhere that Linux can be booted of a live cd, something quite new back in the days(like 15 years ago?). So I made one a used my broken laptop with broken hdd for about 7 months, just from the live session without persisting anything. It was a pain to wait for everything since most things would have to be loaded from the dvd, but it worked!

Canonical was giving free CDs when I was a teen and it looked cool. Later versions of Unity DE were so good, I liked older Ubuntu so much. Now I run it on older devices to give them some life back

Windows 11 has a bug that when I'm in file explorer and a drag a file out of the window or drag to the file to list of folder or drives on the left side of file explorer. It will freeze file explorer for about one minute. This only happens once in a while. I was extremely frustrated with windows 11 bugs that I thought to switch back to Arch Linux for real this time and even if I bricked Arch Linux, I would reinstall. There is also that Windows 11 AMD CPU bug where it will start to hitch every once in a while, when I was on my desktop. I have been thinking of going back but I love customizability of Linux and bash.

Windows XP Pro was the last Windows that you could install on as many of your machines as you wanted without contacting M$. When I found that out, I knew that XP would be my last Windows and that I would inevitably switch to Linux. When XP became totally obsolete, I permanently switched over to Linux Mint. I've never gone back to Windows and I have zero reason to ever do so. I promote Linux whenever I can.

Windows 11

I found an Ubuntu CD room in the trash, searched about it on the Web, which led me to install it on a low-end PC I had

Sourtcut virus

My Mac died, at which time I was already a commandline enthusiast, & unable to afford a new Mac.

For me, I was a curious and inquisitive 15 year old that wanted to try out something different to Windows. I didn't really have any gripes with Windows at the time, so I tried Ubuntu and it went from there. I mostly remember after that installing Xubuntu on everything because it was just so lightweight and to this day I still love Xfce.

I got into it when I started university and we started using Linux for a few programming classes. My dad helped me set up a dual boot as he had been a Linux user for a decade at this point, and I had used it for some time as well but had to switch to Windows for MS Office bullshit for school and games.

At this point it was kind of cool to use a different OS but I honestly wasn't much impressed, mainly because of the UI which I later learned was Gnome 3 - Ubuntu had just ditched Unity, but of course I didn't know anything about this yet.

Then I took my first internship where the first thing we did was install Linux on our computers, and the installer they gave us was Ubuntu 16.04 with the Unity desktop - which I LOVED, holy shit it was amazing, so much better than Gnome 3, and miles better than Windows. The first weeks of the internship were basically purely education, among other things an in-depth intro to Linux, command-line tools and such, and I think this was key - not being alone in the process was very important, and I'm not sure if or when I would have made the full switch without this. I started distro hopping in my free time and loved every moment of it.

This was also coincidentally when gaming on Linux really started taking off with Proton etc, so after experimenting with it, I finally ditched Windows completely and made the full switch in I think 2019, about a decade after my first encounter with Linux, and 2 years after I started using it regularly.

I wouldn't consider myself an evangelist by any means, I won't bring the topic up unless asked, but I will recommend taking a look and experimenting in a VM to anyone with an ounce of technical know-how. Furthermore, I think every programmer should be using Linux (yes, literally) unless it's impossible or too painful in their case - which I think is not many cases.

Okay, I ended up typing a novel but fuck it I'm leaving it here because I loved writing this way too much.

Once Windows got rid of the gorgeous Aero theme starting in Windows 8, plus the shitty UI/UX that Windows got again starting in Windows 8, pushed me to Linux.

MS Dos 5.0 on my first PC was a bit short on features and I had not enough money for Windows 3.1... I heard that American students were using something called Unix and that their was something close available through mail-order CDs. Yggdrasil CDs were cheap too!