Me, coder, student, cant afford mid range PCs, interested in learning computers, gamer, not professional. What about you guys?
I choose linux because:
- Installing a programming language doesn’t require setting up a path, the package manager does it automatically.
- It’s 100x easier to be private on linux than on Windows or macOS.
- There’s no AI in the notepad app.
- It just works.
It’s open source and not owned by an evil corporation. It doesn’t have ads. It doesn’t mine my data and sell it to the highest bidder. It doesn’t have AI shoved in every nook and cranny. It’s much lighter to run. I can easily run it on a 10 year old laptop.
I think I can handle the ads part, but the ‘lighter’ part, thats a good one.
Originally because fuck windows 10
Since then it’s the sheer joy of it all. It’s just fucking cool that a bunch of people just get together and make something that benefits everyone, with dozens of forks that allow for freedom of choice.
Windows decided my perfectly functional PC couldn’t run 11, and Linux Mint has no issues running. I’m not getting rid of a perfectly good computer just because Microsoft wants me to. My husband has to use Windows for work and it seems like a huge pain in the ass. I’m not into fiddling with computers, and Linux is at the point now where it feels no more complicated than Windows (and often significantly less complicated).
I want to use open-source software, developed from people for people. I don’t want corporates to exploit my data and take away my freedom.
I got a new PC and was really upset at the idea of putting windows on it. The ad lack of ownership of my own hardware, I couldn’t do it, and so I installed Linux (again), but this time, it stuck.
IT worker, close to 50 years old, only ever could afford low-mid range tech, gamer. Been using windows for over 30 years and linux for 8. Linux works better than windows and it allowed me to improve my tech skills beyond a desktop machine.
My values
I really like the control and malleability
Independent to the above, using windows feels really, really bad these days.
Steam Deck made gaming on Linux possible and that was the only thing holding me to Windows. I had been using Windows since Windows 95.
Microsoft simply stopped making an OS and started making a subscription and content delivery platform. When they did that, they lost me as a customer.
i like having a usable desktop and a nonblinking disk access led within 30 seconds, including bios and bootloader.
Same reason as with Google Android. These genocide supporting companies take the liberty to collect and sell my data, manage my hardware and frequently break core functionality with updates to push their slop on me, while adding ads to EVERYTHING. Most updates are not even about security. There is like a 100 reasons, really. I could sum it up as “annoying”.
It was the night of December 24th, 1996. I turned on the family PC, then running Win95, and found my D:\ drive corrupted. Windows had no tools nor docs how to resurrect a corrupted filesystem. I cried, and two days later installed SuSE on a spare disk.
Some 20 years later, I restored about half of the disk lost in 1996, because Linux had the tools, and the docs, and encouraged me to learn.
I am using Linux since the 90’s, so my reasons might be different from “to leave Windows”.
I started coding at an early age, so for me, having access to all my tools free-of-charge was a big plus. Add to that the possibility of read the source code of everything, the learning potential was mind blowing.
Privacy performance and fun
