What was the last version of Windows you used before hopping on over? This includes the Linux greybeards too.
I was on Win10 but moved over as the end of life cycle is drawing near and I do not like Win11 at all.
Another thing for this change was the forced bloody updates, bro I just wanna shut down my PC and go to bed, if I wanna update it, I’ll do it on a Saturday morning with my coffee or something.
Lastly, all the bloat crap they chuck in on there that most users don’t really need. I think the only thing I kept was the weather program.
So what’s your reasoning for the change to the reliable and funni penguin OS?
Greybeard here.
I worked for a company with a wild mix of DOS, Win 3.1, and Win 3.11. Then we got new PCs, some ethernet hubs and switches (instead of the damn coax cable with terminators) and started to move to Win95.
Win 95 was a beast. It came in a bunch of floppies. It took ages to install, and you’d find after one hour that the last floppy was corrupt. Also, on our cheap hardware (Siemens-Nixdorf Pentium PCs) sometimes the sound card or the ethernet card would go missing. Nothing short of a reinstall would solve it. Temporarily, of course.
The Win 98 came along. All our problems were solved. It was a 32 floppy install job, if memory serves. No, no CDs on our company. Still, it crashed a lot, and Microsoft Office had a tendency to simply destroy 100+ page documents when it was not crashing.
At home I used Windows, because how else am I going to play games, right? But I kept experimenting with Linux, and liked what I saw. There were many pieces missing (no USB for a very loooong time, for instance), but what was there was rock solid compared to Windows. And you could COMPILE YOUR OWN DAMN KERNEL, fer chrissake! How powerful was that?
Eventually, distros started to emerge that made some pain points go away. I remember Corel Linux, Caldera Linux, Mandrake, RedHat, etc. I settled with Debian because ‘apt-get dis-upgrade’, of course. Then Ubuntu came along and made Linux more pretty and usable for simple folk. They even sent you a free CD by mail if you asked them.
I got ever more tired of Windows nuking my boot sector, the viruses (virii?), the hunting around for drivers, the having to throw away good peripherals because windows thought were too old to support.
I made a choice and dropped Windows. I missed a lot of the gaming scene until Wine and Steam caught up with the state of the art. In the mean time I made use of emulators and had a good time playing console and arcade games.
Oh I was teased about it. Fellow IT workers (proper MSCE type people) would give me a hard time because “Linux has no future”, “Unix is dying”. I guess the future proved I was right. I now earn more that they do.
They even sent you a free CD by mail if you asked them.
I remember thinking… Naaah, this is a gimmick, gimme 20 or so. Still have a few CDs laying around.
the future proved I was right. I now earn more that they do
Working with linux?
Yes.
For me it would be harder to gather the same know-how on closed systems, because you need your company to back your training on the tools you need to do a job, spend money on the licenses, jump tool when the vendors decide to discontinue a product, etc. Where I come from, if you work for a small company you’d be expected to learn as you go. Maybe things are better now, I don’t know.
In my opinion Linux (well, FOSS actually) gave me a great big box of small LegoTM bricks and the freedom to build anything out of it. So I’ve worked with HW clusters, then virtualization was all the rage when CPUs gained more power, then containers, then container orchestration, then cloud… Complexity is increasing, but the knowledge I gained from knowing that in the end it is just a bunch of processes running on a Linux kernel makes learning the next big thing more manageable.
I settled with Debian because ‘apt-get dis-upgrade’, of course.
A friend showed me an early version of Debian, probably sometime around 1996, and it was immediately obvious that this was the way. It’s been Debian for me ever since.
Windows 10
Windows XP. I worked MSN tech support the year Blaster hit. I remember droning through the same repair steps every 15 minutes with caller after caller in a neverending stream that lasted for weeks.
After a couple of weeks of this, my coworkers and I had a weekend off together and we planned to party it up and blow off some steam with a LAN Party with Freelancer and beers. I had my comp all prepped and ready, it was freshly reinstalled and the game had been tested and benchmarked.
I came home from a long shift to find the one of the new Blaster variants, which used a new vulnerability that had not been patched until I had been at work that day. It had triggered so many reboots while I was at work it triggered NTFS corruption somehow. I had to reinstall… And I had done nothing to deserve that.
That virus fucking broke me. I went to work after that weekend and went to the Linux guru in Tier 3, and said “Teach me”.
I have never looked back with the exception of having to install it for a specific reason, and I’m usually appalled at the state of it. I just had to install Win 11 for a Google Cloud certification exam (DaFuq!?!?!) and with all the issues I encountered it took about 6 hours to get it ready for the exam. Win11 doesn’t come with network drivers anymore? Two NICs and a WiFi card in my machine, and none of them had drivers in the install. Nice to see we’ve gone full cycle back to Windows ME, except the OEM bloatware is a core part of the OS.
When my wife finally dropped Windows a month ago between the ads and recall, it marked the death of daily users of Windows in our house. I’m raising my kid on Linux.
This includes the Linux greybeards too.
I never switched to Windows, but switched directly from AmigaOS to Linux, in 1994.
Windows 10. It was during the pandemic (late 2020), and I saw a Mutahar video of his desktop (at the time, I did not know of KDE Plasma, just gnome, unity and cinnamon) and I was like “Whoa, his desktop looks so much better than when I remember using linux. I should install Arch because that is what he used to get that desktop.”
I have used linux before on Fedora, Mint and Ubuntu, so installing arch using a youtube tutorial was not going to be that hard. Although it did take 2 days (Mostly procrastination and fear).
I will say this: I have a 98 computer and an XP computer for me to use, and I found those UIs better than in Windows 10. When I switched to linux with KDE Plasma, the oldschool UIs could not compete. Plasma is just THAT good.
I was also madly in love, with me calling KDE Plasma like being in a dream, and using Windows 10 is like waking up to the cold old stale office life.
What great timing too, with Proton kicking off right at the same time too, eventually me removing the need to dual boot.
TL;DR: I switched because I found out about KDE Plasma, and linux gaming was becoming infinitly better.
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I used 11, but had tried linux when I used 10. I was never really trying to switch, more just distrohopping with windows in the mix, and eventually I just never went back.
For personal use it was probably Windows 98 SE.
For professional use i’m currently forced to use Windows 10.
Like many, it hasn’t been a clean “yesterday windows, today linux” thing for me. In 2004, I switched from a Dell Latitude (Windows) to a Mac, but continued to use Windows for work (because it was required), then I switched my most recent Macbook Air to Linux, kept another Mac around running macos, and still use Windows at work (because it’s a requirement). I expect I’m going to be Linux-first from now on (so macos’s days are numbered around here), but still use Windows at work.
I’m kinda bummed about moving on from macos, but the iOSification is just awful. The OS feels confused and bloated now. I honestly think Apple is due for a pretty serious reset and consolidation of operating systems.
Windows XP pre-SP1 at home. For Work I always had to use Windows.
I had Windows 8.1 but as the end of its maintenance was approaching I saw the writing on the wall with Windows 10 and especially 11 and I wanted no part of that. When 8.1 was put to pasture I returned to Linux and I have been content ever since. Seeing where Microsoft is taking Windows I’m more and more convinced that Stallman Was Right. I control my software, not the other way around.
I’ve flirted with Linux for years, all the way back to Fedora Core 6. I still use Windows, so 11 is my most recent version, but it’s stripped down using the AME playbook. I use it to play some games with anti-Linux anticheat. I also have a minimal Windows VM on my desktop for playing Destiny 2.
That being said, my primary computers run Arch (custom built desktop) and Fedora (Framework laptop) and I have zero intention of ever using Windows as a primary OS ever again.
XP…my laptop was an old Acer my mom passed to me and couldn’t run vista so I never got it… Hopped on Ubuntu 09.04
The last Windows I used was Windows 2000 Professional. I bought a new PC, didn’t like XP so I switched to Linux full time as I’d been using it more and more anyway. Windows has only gotten worse since then so I’ve never looked back.
I was still using XP when Ubuntu 5.10 was released, and when I saw my audio worked out of the box, I switched :-) I had been using Mandrake Linux (since 1999) but only for servers and other work related stuff.
Windows wasn’t my first operating system. I don’t even remember what my first was, but it ran on top of DOS and had a 5 and a quarter inch floppy drive. I’ve used pretty much every windows desktop version since 3.1, but really only installed or maintained XP, 2000 server, and Windows 10 on my own hardware. But I’ve also installed and maintained various Linux and BSD distros since about the turn of the millennium, including a brief relationship with a Mac laptop with OSX.
There was never a switch. I always ran whatever I could get working that would get the job done. For some tasks that was Windows, either because it was good enough and came pre-installed or it was required by the software I needed to run for school or work. I’ve handed in many assignments on 3.5 inch floppies. I haven’t maintained a server with windows since Windows2000 server. I’ve tried Slackware and Corel Linux. I bought SUSE Linux in a box from a big box store. I’ve gotten those brown Ubuntu install CDs in the mail. I remember being delighted with the development of BitTorrent because now my downloads would check themselves for consistency as they downloaded the ISO. No more getting to the end of a download only to discover the md5sum failed to check. I’ve used Knoppix and Clonezilla for system recovery.
There was never a change. I’m a tech nerd that likes Linux, not a Linux nerd that likes tech. But, it was the way windows kept destroying my Linux partitions that drove me away from dual booting and installing windows on anything in general. Also the windows situation with viruses, updates, and lack of security that drove me away unless compelled. Now windows lives on its own hardware or in a VM for me.
