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So what did it take for you to go to Linux?

I'm asking what big motivational factors contributed to you into going Linux full-time. I don't count minor inconveniences like 'oh, stutter lag in a game on windows' because that really could be anything in any system. I'm talking, something Windows or Microsoft has done that was so big, that made you go "fuck this, I will go Linux" and so you did.

For me, I have a mountain of reasons by this point to go to Linux. It's just piling. Recently, Windows freaked out because I changed audio devices from my USB headset from the on-board sound. It freaked out so bad, it forced me to restart because I wasn't getting sound in my headset. I did the switch because I was streaming a movie with a friend over Discord through Screen Share and I had to switch to on-board audio for that to work.

I switched back and Windows threw a fit over it. It also throws a fit when I try right-clicking in the Windows Explorer panel on the left where all the devices and folders are listed for reasons I don't even know to this day but it's been a thing for a while now.

Anytime Windows throws a toddler-tantrum fit over the tiniest things, it just makes me think of going to Linux sometimes. But it's not enough.

Windows is just thankful that currently, the only thing truly holding me back from converting is compatibility. I'm not talking with games, I'm not talking with some programs that are already supported between Windows and Linux. I'm just concerned about running everything I run on Windows and for it to run fully on a Linux distro, preferably Ubuntu.

Also I'd like to ask - what WILL it take for you to go to Linux full-time?

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  • It happened really slowly for me, over a period of years. We have multiple PCs (several media PCs, a home server, and our personal PCs) that we've built over the years. Aside from our personal PCs, the OS chosen was always just whatever was free to us at the time. Over time this became overwhelmingly Linux. But the real turning point for me at least was the end of 2021.

    Our oldest media PC still had Win 7 on it and it was showing it's age. We'd had a lot going on in our lives when Win 7 support ended, and upgrading it was just not a priority until then. Long story short, I put Ubuntu on it.

    While I definitely had my gripes about Ubuntu (which caused me to move to Mint a few months later), it was nothing compared to the problems I'd had with Win 10 on my personal machine a couple years prior. Compared to Windows, everything was just so... Easy. I didn't have to fight for my right to just change shit I didn't like. Installing applications was a fucking dream. Most games I cared about playing worked as well or better than they did on Windows.

    So I put Mint on my personal machine and never looked back. Moved over to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed a few months after that, but I'm thinking about going back to Mint now that 22 is out.

    TL;DR I was real tired of paying for software that would try to tell me what I could and couldn't do. Thought Linux was "too hard," found out it's not (at least for me).

225 comments