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?
Its more why don’t I use osx anymore and why did I use windows so long. After osx came out in the new millenium and when the apple warranty was tops I was a total mac person. And yes because it was something that just works out of the box and with the warranty you did not need to worry about anything for at least 3 years. This made the extra cost worth it. It was more out of the box than windows because you could, for example, burn a disc right out of the box. I stopped doing macs when they blamed their magentic cable sheaths coming off as from use and would not cover it (at one point you could come in with a mac with a cracked screen and they would not blink and get it replaced for ya. no questions asked. Although not specifically spelled out it effectively was an accident warranty to.) So with the warranty not being any better than a windows machine the extra cost was no longer worth it. Concurrently mac went down this simplicity path (the iphonification of macs) wereas previous to that they use to extol their power and greater number of ports. Basically my last mac was the last version of the mac book pro that had a dvi slot and lots of ports in general and was large and powerful. Now linux at that point had gotten much better than it used to be in the first decade of the millenium, but yeah. It was not exactly out of box. Zorin os had just started but again was not quite there. In addition much of my work things were windows and I had this sweet solution for computer support with my wife where I got thre laptops that were cheap in a bang for the buck way and it was a nice solution for tech support for my wife. So I was on windows. Also portable apps made windows really easy to update and migrate hosts. Eventually my wife wanted to much of gaming machines to the point we got her a desktop so my tech solution was sorta out the window but there was work and the portable apps thing (I at one point voted for portable apps as the best open source enabler). Zorin had gotten much better (out of box linux distro) and I was aware of it and played with it (along with other things like puppy) but inertia won out. Then windows 11 came along and it was a no go. Especially when I was already aware of a linux distro that was as out of the box as osx and maybe a bit better really (which keep in mind was more out of the box than windows). So I finally said enough is enough and installed zorin on my old laptop. What sucks is app image is so close to what portable apps brings and it has some related projects that have the components of it but just is not packaged nicely all together in a one and done.