Personally, I’m not brand loyal to any particular OS. There are good things about a lot of different operating systems, and I even have good things to say about ChromeOS. It just depends on what a user needs from an operating system.
Most Windows-only users I am acquainted with seem to want a device that mostly “just works” out of the box, whereas Linux requires a nonzero amount of tinkering for most distributions. I’ve never encountered a machine for sale with Linux pre-installed outside of niche small businesses selling pre-built PCs.
Windows users seem to want to just buy, have, and use a computer, whereas Linux users seem to enjoy problem solving and tinkering for fun. These two groups of people seem as if they’re very fundamentally different in what they want from a machine, so a user who solely uses Windows moving over to Linux never made much sense to me.
Why did you switch, and what was your process like? What made you choose Linux for your primary computing device, rather than macOS for example?
I’ve used Linux since 1998 (red hat), along BeOS. But I went back to Windows because XP was rather good, Linux was becoming good too slowly, and BeOS was dead. Still kept my Linux partitions though, while my laptop was now running MacOSX. After a few years, with 7, Windows became even better, so I moved to it full time, including in laptops. In the 2010s I tried Linux a couple of times again, but it was having these small bug things that was breaking the overall good experience. It just wasn’t ready for the desktop, sorry. My laptops became once again MacOSX, while I was doing photoshop cleanup for my traditional paintings with Windows 10. Then, in 2022, I retried Linux, and it was finally ready for how I always wanted it to be. The overall experience was good. Linux came to 100% usability for me just this year, with the release of Gimp 3, which allowed adjustment layers.
Basically, I have a baseline standard of how well I expect OSes to work on the desktop. I want the number of bad surprises to a minimum. I’m too old for tinkering, I want things to work. For Linux, this came true only in the last few years. So now I’m switched to it on all my computers. I only kept one macbook air with macos, all the other older mac intel ones are now running linux too. My main OS is Debian-Testing, while on laptops I run Mint. I have no Windows PC anymore at all.