Linux doesn’t try to sell my elderly mother a subscription to onedrive

These days, Windows constantly gets in your way with ads, forced updates, crappy apps that install themselves, useless features like Cortana, forcing you to make a Microsoft account, etc. Linux or the BSDs, however, usually give you a bullshit-free and distraction-free experience. Plus, no spyware, completely free, endlessly customizable, and low resource usage (if you use a lightweight setup, but even “bloated” distros like Ubuntu and Mint are often light compared to Windows).

And what surprised me? I guess the only thing that surprised me is how easy the experience is, especially for things like gaming, which Linux has historically had a bad reputation for. Also, how nice it can be to use the terminal, not that you have to, especially as a novice user.

For me it was the philosophy behind Free (as in freedom) software. Call me a Richard Stallman fan, but I would love to live in a world were everyone is free to:

• Run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
• Study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• Redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
• Distribute copies of your modified versions to others.

Learn more at fsf.org

I just like to hang out with you guys : )

There was no special reason for switching 25 years ago. A friend of mine used Debian and I tried it out. Not being a gamer must have helped because if you like playing, chances to encounter a game that only runs on Windows are quite high.

Now the reason why I never changed back. Once the system runs, which may take some rime depending on how customized you want it, it always runs the same way. I never had a slowing down due to updates. Another reason may be not having to think about viruses or malware. Never had it and most likely never will. Antivirus? They may exist for Linux but I have never used them.

In a few words. It just works.

I don’t have ads within my OS or start menus, I can do whatever I want with it, I can customize it with different desktop environments, if I mess anything up and need to clean install I don’t need to worry about license keys.

Also chicks dig penguins.

Windows 95 was dreadful.

Yes I am old and my knees do hurt, thank you.

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The telemetry and ads baked into windows. I’m so sick of ads creeping into every corner of my life

As of W10 I stopped trusting Windows. Having ads bundled into a >$200 OS shows me that being an OS is no longer the primary goal.

Previous to that I had been using Debian as a media server so the switch was pretty painless. I can play 90% of my Steam library on Linux, edit photos, edit videos, stream, browse, and do literally everything I used to do on Windows.

I’ve been dual booting Windows and Linux since the 00s. At some point around 2015-2016 I just stopped installing and maintaining Windows altogether and now I have a virtual machine image I just transfer around my network if I ever have to use Windows for something.

I think the real turning point for me was when they introduced UAC and ever-increasing restrictions on unsigned drivers starting with Vista. Wine was already a thing and I could run most games I cared about even back then although I still had to boot into Windows for gaming sometimes. Once steam Proton starting getting really good which was around 2015, there just wasn’t a reason to be using Windows anymore. As the enshittification of Windows continued getting worse it became more tedious and time consuming to get anything done in Windows to the point you might as well use Gentoo. I do programming and game modding for fun and there’s no way I could use modern Windows for this it’s so bad and slows everything down with it’s utter bullshit.

I switched because I read Linux is secure and needs less resources, and also because of the open source philosophy. And because it’s free! Hahaha Sometimes I donate a little to different open source developers. Let’s help the community.

Embarrassingly enough, wanted to install Ubuntu on an external drive. It was early, still in bed, accidentally erased the notebook’s main drive. Thought I might as well give it a shot. That night, tried to go back to windows. Turns out that creating a bootable Windows bootable USB is nearly impossible from MacOS and Linux nowadays… gave up after a few hours.

So, giving Linux a forced try. I’ll probably make a Windows installation USB as soon as I can get someone to lend me their Windows computer. If it takes long enough, I may not though 😞

There were a few reasons I wanted to switch, but nothing pushed me much, until a lot of things culminated at once.

I’d been using Linux on servers for a long time, and a Linux desktop in an old job, and I much prefer the usability of it over Windows (I really like the command line options on Linux over CMD or Powershell, and kept having issues with Git Bash, whereas stuff would just work on Linux), as well as the customisablity, and it is more friendly for developing (at least in my opinion, web development for me specifically) so I’d been contemplating it and occasionally trying out distros in VMs. Then I found out my PC isn’t compatible with Windows 11, and it had me thinking it was dumb that I couldn’t upgrade because my PC meets all the specifications but there’s some specific thing Microsoft didn’t like and didn’t think was “secure enough” or whatever. It got me thinking that it’s dumb that a company can decide what I’m allowed to install on my PC. Even if my PC was vastly underpowered for the OS, it should be up to me to decide what I can and can’t install on my computer that I built with my money.

I looked into installing Windows 11 and bypassing the check, and it seemed like too much hassle, so I was going to stay on Windows 10, but at some point after, a Windows update completely broke my installation - which wasn’t the first time - and after hours of trying to fix it, it pushed me over the edge. I decided to completely scrap Windows at that point, because I was just fed up and preferred Linux anyway, and justified it further because of the fact Windows is essentially spyware on top of that. I nuked my OS drive and installed the distro I liked the most at that point (KDE neon) over it and never looked back.

I also have Valve to thank for that impulse too, because at the time I’d been looking at their work on Proton because I wanted to know how well gaming worked on Linux, and from what I saw, pretty much my entire library would work mostly without issues thanks to the info on ProtonDB. If I hadn’t seen this info, I might have hesitated to switch, but knowing most - if not all - of my games would work (even if I had to do a bit of tweaking) made the decision very easy.

The main thing that surprised me is just how polished it feels. At least with KDE as my desktop environment, it feels like everything has a purpose and they belong together. So many things in Windows felt tacked on and like it was an afterthought, with vastly different designs. The biggest thing I love is being able to fully (and I mean fully) customise the taskbar, window decorations, colours, animations, everything. I love being able to make things my own, and I couldn’t do that on Windows. Windows was more “Microsoft with a bit of my touches” whereas using KDE neon it feels like my computer.

Also, software repositories are fantastic. Instead of having to download an exe for each thing you install and each having their own way of updating, with package managers I can just search in a central place, install it, and the package manager itself will keep it updated for me. It’s just so much more user friendly. Although one thing that threw me off with package managers is seeing a notification that I had updates and it was like “you have 200 updates” and it shocked me, but obviously each piece of software has their own individual update, including system packages, instead of Windows update where you get a single package with a bunch of updates in it that you can’t customise, and possibly a few driver updates.

One obstacle I hit however was graphics drivers. I have an nvidia GPU and nvidia really doesn’t want to play nice with Linux for some reason, but to get a decent gaming performance you need their proprietary drivers. I had quite a few issues trying to get them properly installed, so unless you have an AMD GPU or are fine spending a bit of time possibly troubleshooting, take this as a warning (or if you don’t care about gaming, because the open drivers would probably be fine for just a basic PC)

I switched because of Bejeweled ads in the Start menu, honestly.