why have you chosen linux?

[boxersoft]

I used to be heavily invested in Microsoft tools and technologies, legacy of a career in software development. After retiring I retained licences for lots of MS products but as they became out of date I couldn't justify updating them for personal use, so I gradually migrated to open source alternatives. By 2014 I was less dependent on MS but my ageing laptop still ran Windows XP Professional (I had tried Windows Vista but didn't like it so reverted to XP). WinXP was already out of mainstream support and was soon to be dropped completely, so I either had to make the jump to Windows 8.x find something else...

The last time I had looked at a Linux desktop was many years earlier and it looked and felt very clunky, but I took another look at a few distributions and was impressed with how much things had improved. I decided to try it for a while to see if I could live with it, so I installed Mint (probably 16) Cinnamon edition alongside XP and tried using that pretty much exclusively. For someone so heavily steeped in Windows (and Microsoft technologies generally), Linux was quite a culture shock but I stuck with it and hardly ever needed - nor wanted - to go back to Windows. Having already migrated to multi-platform applications for various things (I moved from Outlook to Thunderbird 3-4 years earlier, for example) helped quite a bit, and LibreOffice was a pretty good alternative to my old version of MS Office, so it wasn't as painful as I expected.

Later that year I installed Mint on my wife's laptop. She's not particularly tecchie but took to it just fine and has been perfectly happy with it. A few years later I switched my household server from Windows 7 Pro to Debian-based OpenMediaVault, and haven't really used Windows since. We've both had replacement laptops/desktops since then, mostly with Windows pre-installed, but have always installed Mint on them immediately. We now have various flavours of Linux on a few machines (both bare metal and VMs). It works well, rarely needs rebooting like Windows did, does everything I need and I don't have to keep paying for upgrades. I keep a Windows VM in case I ever really need it, but I can't remember the last time I did.

[iliketrains]

Why?
Fed up with Windows and too thick to install a Mac OS on existing hardware.
It's been a fun journey. Given another 10 years I may even understand systemd..... and it will have evolved into something new. The world moves on despite my best efforts.

[Beerislife]

When IBM abandoned OS/2 Warp 4 there was no other choice...

[avidan2006]

Many reasons why I chose Linux over Windows, but only a nerd with no life would post them as some kind of numbered list, and so here it is:

1. Privacy
Easy enough. Microsoft's desktop environment vacuums up data like it's going out of style. It watches every keystroke, every mouse click, and if you have a camera, it watches you, and listens, too.

2. Inconsistency & Unreliability
I have used Windows since version 2.0, and I was a Windows fan for a very long time. For a while, Microsoft had a design language for Windows, and it was generally consistent, and made sense, primarily because it was for office environments, and while some things became more appealing for home users, the basic layouts stayed the same. Then, Windows 8 happened, and from that point onward, Microsoft has been several different design styles crammed sloppily into one OS. While KDE, GNOME, XFCE, and other DEs have their own issues (which is perfectly normal), the design language behind Windows 8+ might as well be gibberish.

Then there's the fact that Windows will just crash, and you have no control over what happened, what to do about it. The BSOD was a big deal back in the day, and it still exists, they just changed the color and added a sad face. Linux does crash from time to time, but I can always find out why. What's better, is I can choose a far more stable, more reliable distro that has those traits baked right in, like Mint.

3. Resource Usage
While my computer is rather beefy in terms of hardware resources, or at the least it's more than capable of running modern games and applications, every Linux distro I've used has mopped the floor with Microsoft Windows in terms of resource usage. Linux is faster, more responsive, and uses hardware more efficiently than its Redmond Washington counterpart.

4. No Walled Gardens
MacOS is a walled garden, and gets snippy as heck when you try to step outside of it, actively stopping you from doing so. Actually, while I'm thinking about it, MacOS is just iOS stretched out onto a desktop as far as I'm concerned. Same for Windows. They both feel like they're mobile OSes slapped onto desktop/laptop hardware, but at twice the resource usage and data weight. Microsoft is currently building their walled garden, though they're not stopping at software, they're adding in hardware, making it more difficult for people who have perfectly good systems to actually use their OS. What kind of OS says a 3 year old processor isn't capable of running it when a processor 10 years old can run it just fine without its artificial limitations? Microsoft Windows does. With Linux, I am free to run it on some much, much older hardware, and as long as there's enough to make it run, Linux will do its best to work as efficiently as possible.

5. The Open Source Idea
I love open source. When you can see what makes up your software, you can build trust with the community that created it. I like knowing that my OS is running clean, that it's not using me as a profit machine, or trying to censor what I can and can't do. I like knowing that if such a line of code is ever put in the system, it can be rooted out. That's the kind of community participation that I can get behind. Apple and Microsoft would never let people dig through their proprietary OSes. Someone might learn something they'd rather not let us know about.

Well, I hope that gives you a good idea if you read it, if you didn't, that's okay, it's a lot. Suffice to say, I love Linux, I love what it represents, and the community is awesome, and I'd be remiss if I didn't say that Linux Mint is just fantastic, as its the community.

[bendipa]

I still have a dual boot set-up with Win 10), and have Windows 2000 running in a VM in Mint. The reason for that is that I have an old HP scanner dating back to early '00s, and only Win 2000 and XP will run it. Later versions of Windows are not compatible, and I'm unable to figure out how to get LM to run it (if that's even possible). The scanner came with its own set of HP drivers on a CD. HP don't provide drivers for Linux.

I've kept Win 10 on just in case I get a failure with Linux, so I can still carry on using my PC. I still find MS card games much better than anything offered up by Linux. But I'm pretty well comfortable now with LibreOffice compared to MS Office, which I used for years and is important from a work point. I still think MS Office is a little better, but there is nothing that would stop me from achieving the same ends with LO, be it Writer, Calc or Base.

[RollyShed]

The scanner came with its own set of HP drivers on a CD. HP don't provide drivers for Linux.

Scanners - I had a good one but it started getting pink lines down it. Since then any chucked-out ink jet printer will do. We were given another one a day ago at the Shed. Possibly better than the one we were using so it has been swapped over. At home we are both using chucked-out ink jet printers as scanners, an HP and a Canon. We use Document Scanner which might have been Simple Scan. What ever, it is the default scanner app.

I still find MS card games much better than anything offered up by Linux.

AisleRiot has about 50 different game and look in the Software Manager to install it. We both always play Freecell which is one of the games offered by AisleRiot.

[Sheabert33]

For me it's cost and customization. I'd like to say it's about privacy etc, but I've got chromecasts and google homes all over my house, so that's kind of out the window.

Linux allows me to do what I want with my computer, without having to fit within the confines of the Windows environment. Also, it's free.

[Opposite_Keith]

i could easily say that i swtched to linux because i dont like how windows operates with its spyware and bloatware but its also cause i generally still want to use my computer in the future without having to switch to windows 11 once windows 10 stops getting support from Microsoft (which obviously isnt gonna happen anytime soon but just to be safe). im also most likely not gonna be able to have enough money to buy a better laptop or even a used one for how broke me and my family is since it feels like a luxury to even own one here but that may just be me on that. i did wanted to give linux a try though and so far is been not bad just need more time to work out with the terminal and such.

[Midnight True]

I changed to linux after a windows 10 update which includes drivers turned my laptop screen to pink ... this enforced my conviction since i was already anxious of Windows 10 telemetry and constant malware threat

[MurphCID]

For the most part Linux works for my use cases, with the sole exceptions of gaming, iTunes, and Photoshop, which requires me to keep at least one Windows device (my desktop). I think the new Linux is just great at doing what (little) I do on a computer.