I switched probably 2010 or 2011. I think I was on windows 7, but it might have been windows vista and I never got to 7.

At some point I had made a realization that software I downloaded from sourceforge (this website has been terrible for a long while now, but I think it was decent way back) was heavily correlated with not being shitty. After making this observation, I was able to generalize it to open source software tends to be less shitty and I had a year or two of experiences afterwards that reinforced my theory, which led me to try experimenting with linux installs.

I started with dual-booting Fedora, I had no idea what I was doing and didn't like the user experience as much as windows at first. I did a little bit of distro-hopping to see if there was something more appealing to me, but during that time I discovered the free software movement and that resonated with me a lot more than open source had, so I decided I wasn't interested in going back to windows. Moved to Trisquel (originally an Ubuntu derivative, and fully-free to the point of being FSF-approved) and grew to love it.

After a couple years, I decided I was curious enough to learn more about how the system works, so I moved to Parabola (fully free Arch derivative) to force myself to learn. I really learned barely anything, but I got very good at getting things working by trial-and-error while reading documentation I don't fully understand. I haven't progressed very far beyond that point at all in the years since, but I got too comfortable to make a significant change.

In the past five or so years, I've to some degree dropped the free software philosophy in favor of a philosophy that the problem runs much deeper (no hope of a successful free software movement in a capitalist society, and software is not even close to the most beneficial consequence of getting past capitalism), and I've moved to legit Arch rather than Parabola.

I've basically gone ten years without real issues on arch installs, but I still have no idea what I'm doing, I'm just comfortable with it and don't want to put any effort into a change. I feel like if anyone from the arch forums or anyone knowledgeable in general took five minutes to look at my pc they'd be like wtf are you doing. It's whatever, it works well enough for me.

maybe sorta. I did not even realize there was a difference at the command line and was like. ok this uses this. Loved the nextstep workstations. worked at a place that was very unix and liked a lot of it. got very excited with macosx which was pretty much nextstep with a freebsd base and macs were always easier to use. Heard stallman speak and definitely agreed and I began to recognized foss and prefer it. Im still pretty practical though so use zorin os although if I had more time I would play around with qubes os and sourcemage linux.

I tried Linux in college because it was a hot thing there. Been hooked ever since.

I'm not a distro hopper. I used Debian Testing for many years. Last year I switched to NixOS because it was a compelling value proposition for me. I'm very happy with it!

If I chose it for gratis, I wouldn't have replaced Windows with it.

Initially I was just curious and I've always loved playing with new (to me) tech. Then I began to really appreciate various things about it - not least the high configurability. As I learnt about OSS I began to also appreciate that success of things as well.

I chose it for development reasons. I kind of fell into a decent career but one I didn’t enjoy and was tied to a specific geographic region. So, I was learning to code and my coworkers who wrote code were using Linux and all our servers were CentOS (or maybe WhiteHat or whatever it was called then). So, I installed Fedora Core 4 — I’m old — and liked it better than Windows. I loved being able to customize everything.

Eventually, I learned the philosophical reasons for open source after I got into it but they matched my personal beliefs so that was no issue.

I used to distro hop frequently and I’ve probably tried all the major distros at least once but after awhile, I began to just stick to Fedora or Ubuntu LTS for servers (and I guess Arch on Steam Deck, Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi, etc.). I like Vanilla Gnome nowadays and when I want to see a new distro, I just check it out in a VM.

I think Chrunchbang (R.I.P.) was my favorite distro when I was all-in on distro hopping and customizing everything. But at some point for a developer, your OS becomes more of a tool for opening an IDE and/or terminal and you value stability over customization or having the very latest software. In the Flatpak era, that’s even more true since you can run the newest versions regardless of the system.

Partly for freedom, partly for free software, partly for tinkering opportunities. I broke some installs before I started thinking of Linux as my daily driver.

I've tried Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Puppy (and then Fatdog), Knoppix, Rasbian, Xandros, Damn Small Linux, Tiny Core, Arch and Endeavour, but Mint is my favourite. It's never failed to just work.

Honestly, because Windows is a steaming pile of garbage and using Mac feels like swimming with pool floaties.

I recently started using NixOS as my distro and it has been phenomenal. Saying the learning curve is a little steep is like calling a hurricane a little bit of rain, but once you start to get it, it's extremely powerful and delivers on the promise of "all of your configuration in one place." It gives me a lot of peace of mind to know that every time I tweak or fix something, it's reliably making it into a version controlled and backed up repository. I could throw my laptop out the window, pick up a new one, and have all my applications installed and configured within half an hour.

Initially, I chose Linux for it being gratis, but as I've used it more and more, I started to appreciate its freedom. It's really kinda moot though since I first gotten exposed to Linux because I had to. Our uni adopted Linux (some faculties used Linux Mint, others used Ubuntu) for their school computer laboratories after they couldn't pay for their Windows licenses. In a way, I indeed got into Linux because it is gratis.

I started daily-driving Linux when my Win7 desktop broke, and had to use an ancient, hand-me-down, laptop. It can barely run Win7, and so I tried installing Ubuntu on it (funny in hindsight though, I should have used a lightweight Linux distro). Then a friend of mine introduced me to Manjaro. It worked well for quite a while, until the HDD finally croaked (it's had a long life of nearly a decade). I stuck with Manjaro when I got my present desktop, but that same friend of mine who introduced me to Manjaro pushed me to using Arch despite my protests. I would have wanted to switch to Endeavour instead since I was intimidated by pure Arch. But since they offered to do the "installation and set-up process" with me, I relented. (The scare quotes are there because it was not an ordinary installation process: my friend basically exorcised the Manjaro out of my system.)

I have a few distros I would like to try, off the top of my head: EndeavourOS, Fedora Silverblue, and NixOS. However, I don't think I'm a distro hopper. I would prefer that I stay with a distro unless I get pushed off it for one reason or another. Perhaps, if I've got an extra computer to test things out, I might be a bit more adventurous and go distro-hopping using that extra machine.

To date, I've only had a bit of experience with Linux Mint and Ubuntu, and a bit more experience with Manjaro and Arch Linux. I don't think fairly limited experience with those allows me to pick a favorite, but I suppose despite its reputation for being hard to use, I quite like Arch Linux. Its package manager as well its repositories really does it for me. It's changed the way I think about installing programs, as well as updating them.

Currently, I use Arch and Win10 in a dual-boot system. After I've gotten myself an AMD graphics card, I spend my time on my Arch system almost exclusively.

For me, it was originally just an experiment because oh, I've heard about this thing and I'm curious about it. This was on my school laptop that I had managed to obtain administrator permissions on by cracking the password and installing VirtualBox. It was a Dell Latitude D505 with like 512 megabytes of RAM running Windows XP. The very first distro I booted was Ubuntu 10.10 and Oh dear God was it slow as shit. I knew that it was because of Windows, and so did not judge it for that reason, but judged it based on user interface and ease of use, which I found good enough to play with and continue messing with. Then I had a summer camp thing that I had went to with coding and we had to use a Mac in order to do it and I was used to Linux in the way Ubuntu worked so it wasn't hard for me but for other people it was difficult because of the interface change. That particular place is where I learned about SSH and SCP and started really playing with making web servers on them. And as they say, the rest is history. I've been running Linux 100% for around 5 years now, and just keep a Windows virtual machine around in case it's necessary, which it proves to be very, very rarely.

Perhaps a different perspective, but I am gearing up to switch at the moment.

While I have previously used Linux (I have been running Debian 12 on my laptop for about a year), I bought windows 11 for my Desktop as I was still under the impression that is was the only real way to play games.

I recently learned about what Proton has done for games on Linux and also noticed how many games are truly playable on Linux now with the ever increasing market share.

Even though I am using NVIDIA hardware, I have looked up the process for installing the NVIDIA drivers on Linux and while not as easy as AMD, it appears to be quite easy anyway (I am an IT graduate so it seems pretty straightforward to me).

It really was only games that was holding me back I think.

Windows, especially lately has been growing more and more and more and more invasive. I feel like in the last 6 weeks I have read tens of articles on how Microsoft is trying to insert ads into the OS, watermark the OS, install AI into the OS, force the use of MS accounts instead of local accounts etc, and it is completely disgusting. At this point given the recent activity, I would not at all be surprised if they started to try to enforce the OS as a "subscription service".

The moment I installed windows 11 I knew it was going to be a poor experience, considering I had to create registry keys and manually relaunch the OOBE with flags in order to use a local account.

For all these reasons (Gaming becoming ever more accessible on linux, and MS consistently making their product less valuable), I will be switching to either Debian 12 on my desktop or Arch in the near future.

It is a disgusting corporate world we find ourselves in right now, but while this is in many ways a bad thing, I have never in my life noticed more people taking notice of that, becoming interested in FOSS, in Linux, in even considering no longer putting up with this kind of thing, and that gives me hope.

initially i chose Linux because Windows on my laptop was way too sluggish. eventually, me and my family made a definite move to Linux because of the continuous enshittification Windows is going through in the modern days. Linux has become good enough for daily driving and even gaming that it just made no sense sticking to Windows.

i wouldn't say i'm fully out of the "distro hopping" phase just yet, but i'm certainly doing it rarely, once in, like, 3-4 months maybe. currently using Void Linux on my personal laptop.

my favorite distro is Mint. yes, it's a basic-ass choice, but it is the de-facto "just works" distro.

The freedom is great, and the fact that things don't change out from under me is awesome

I can use a basic or tiling window manager while still running a modern system. Updating Windows or macOS = new "improved" GUI, generally speaking. KDE and Gnome also change, but it's your choice to use/not use them, as it should be!

Started with Red Hat in the kernel 2.0 or 2.2 days, because I picked up a book+install CD at a garage sale.

Slackware on an old laptop got me through undergrad (desktop ran Gentoo, but I didn't use it much).

Switched to Debian after that, with a little Arch in grad school btw (not a huge fan

to each their own).

Running Debian now (desktop, laptop, and SBCs), but my heart belongs to Slackware.

I use it for its elegance mostly.
I can configure it to only contain and show the stuff I actually need and use.
So it feels like an OS that's for me, while Windows definitely shows someone else designed it with their own motives, which don't align with mine.

You can hack into Windows quite a bit, too. But it's clearly not designed for it to be done by end users.
If you want to change a deeper setting, instead of running a short terminal command with all its options documented right in the man page, you'll have to create a registry key named HFEsghireuHJHFIUEDnfu4835 and assign it the value 3.

I've hopped around quite a bit, but keep coming back to Debian and Arch. Arch is the most elegant distro under the hood IMO, and Debian is the most relaxing.

I use Linux for largely the same reasons I use Lemmy. While I'm still far from strictly using FOSS software, I respect the decentralization and freedom that comes with Linux. I have such a deep admiration and respect for everyday people that create/maintain platforms, as opposed to large companies that seeking to profit off their userbase.

While I have distro hopped a number of times over the past few years, I keep coming back to Pop!_OS. Everything just works right out of the box for me, but still gives me the freedom to tweak my environment however I choose. I love their tiling desktop feature and am anxiously awaiting the release of their new COSMIC desktop.

I switched because I was sick of dealing with corporate garbage and abuse at the hands of Microsoft.

It wasn't the cost, I've always activated my Windows installations with gray-market keys bought on eBay for 5-10 dollars. Plus I've paid far more for open source software than I ever did for Windows and their proprietary trash.

I had so many problems with Windows over the years. Fighting with drivers, fighting with software installs, fighting with the registry, etc etc.

I also couldn't stand how bad their spying was getting, how bloated and clunky their software was, and how much adware they were forcing on me.

I finally vowed about 3 years ago that I would never use Windows again for any of my personal computing, no matter what I had to sacrifice.

Turns out, I didn't have to really sacrifice anything significant, and I gained far more than I lost. I would never go back to Windows now, especially with what is happening with windows 11.

My main computer runs Nobara, because I use it mostly for gaming. I use KDE Plasma as my DE. Both work fantastic, games run fast and smooth, and everything looks so pretty lol.

I use Mint Debian Edition with Cinnamon on my laptop and it's awesome too. Almost never have any problems with it.

My work allows me to use Linux, so I run Debian with KDE Plasma. It took a bit of work to get everything running smoothly, but I'm enough of a power user that it wasn't too bad.

My phone runs GrapheneOS, I'm on it right now typing this. Love it also, so glad to be off a corporate version of Android. GrapheneOS is awesome and does everything I need very well.

I've used a ton of different distros. Different strokes for different folks. I've used Arch, Fedora, Zorin, Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, Alma, and several others. Some were a fad, some I use for my servers, some I use for home lab testing, etc.