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 was an edgy teenager and wanted to be different. I was already kind of into coding and it made it quite easy to try out different languages and environments.
In those days I had fun finding equivalents to Windows-only apps like MSN, and finding games that worked in Linux like UT2004 and TrueCombat:Elite. It was never a perfect solution so I always kept, and still do keep, a Windows installation around for gaming. I don’t give a shit if MS harvests my data - what are they gonna do, advertise to me? Good luck with that. But for day-to-day stuff I am far too used to how Linux works to go back. I figure Windows has improved a lot in terms of reliability and usability since those days (and if you don’t care about data harvesting or really old hardware, those are the remaining major reasons not to want to use Windows nowadays) so it might be that if I were in the same position today I’d never make the switch, but hey.
It means I don’t really like the religious OS wars that erupt here. Like OK, there are MS irritations we’re not dealing with, but what I am dealing with is that some esoteric combination of events means that a couple of times a week my laptop stops recognising my dock and all USB devices connected to it until I reboot - including if I plug the devices in directly to the laptop!
If I were just some random user who had just switched, that would send me back to whichever OS I had come from in an instant. So I feel like it’s important to be sensitive and empathetic to that.