Me, coder, student, cant afford mid range PCs, interested in learning computers, gamer, not professional. What about you guys?
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.
I think I can handle the ads part, but the ‘lighter’ part, thats a good one.
Ads are bloat aswell.
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.
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
Because I have self-respect.
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.
What’s the option? Windows? Keeps getting shittier all the time. Now with AI Slop and bugs. No thanks. Mac? Their walled garden, making it so you can’t upgrade your existing computer? No thanks. My last mac was a 2015 that let you upgrade things but it was a pain. They’ve since removed that so they lost me as a customer.
With Linux, I have a Framework laptop that let’s me upgrade everything. It’s easy to take apart, there are hardware switches for the mic and webcam… it’s very user friendly. Linux doesn’t have any telemetry. The only AI that gets installed is if I install it myself, it’s not intrusive. I’ve been using Linux for a long, long time but the Desktop experience has been lacking in the past. It’s gotten way better recently and the last thing I would boot into windows for was Fusion 360. I spent some time learning FreeCAD and since 1.0 it is way better and now I don’t need to boot into Windows anymore. Steam has made leaps and bounds with proton and now I can even game on Linux which is pretty huge. Is Linux perfect? No, but it does everything I need it to.
Because Windows works as dumbest os for now
Sound randomly staying off, micro sometime works, sometime not, if I try to touch sounds its sometimes just slutter all the system. I checked on viruses by free and paid subscriptioned and-viruses but founs nothing. So the best way to heal was to reinstall system. And I am do this. CachyOS going great, more faster and stable for several years even with bleeding edge updates
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.
Same reason as with Google Android. These genocide supporting companies take the liberty to collect and sell my data, manage my hardware and frequently break core functionality with updates to push their slop on me, while adding ads to EVERYTHING. Most updates are not even about security. There is like a 100 reasons, really. I could sum it up as “annoying”.
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.
It was just an extension of my interest in computers since I was young ^ ^ This new, completely different OS fascinated me when I was growing up, and led to me installing Ubuntu on an old laptop. I never made an actual jump to it until I was a few years older, and had Windows slowing down my laptop that I used for work. I jumped onto the Manjaro train that was happening at the time, and eventually ended up installing Arch on my main PC (´･ᴗ･ ` )
My initial reason was computation freedom. It got so much better in years, I just take the rest as a great bonus.
