141

Personally, I’m not brand loyal to any particular OS. There are good things about a lot of different operating systems, and I even have good things to say about ChromeOS. It just depends on what a user needs from an operating system.

Most Windows-only users I am acquainted with seem to want a device that mostly “just works” out of the box, whereas Linux requires a nonzero amount of tinkering for most distributions. I’ve never encountered a machine for sale with Linux pre-installed outside of niche small businesses selling pre-built PCs.

Windows users seem to want to just buy, have, and use a computer, whereas Linux users seem to enjoy problem solving and tinkering for fun. These two groups of people seem as if they’re very fundamentally different in what they want from a machine, so a user who solely uses Windows moving over to Linux never made much sense to me.

Why did you switch, and what was your process like? What made you choose Linux for your primary computing device, rather than macOS for example?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] basuramannen@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 4 days ago

I switched from Win95 to Redhat out of curiously. The first attempt ended in kernel panik, the second succeeded. Despite many challenges I was happy there, because there usually was a way to fix things to work in a way I could live with. There was also lots of opportunity to break things and learn. Also the shell in Linux was much better than in windows. Been using Linux at home, university and work since. Seeing what windows has turned in to I am glad I switched many years ago.

this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
141 points (92.2% liked)

Linux

57274 readers
309 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS