I was on windows and just got tired of the larger amount of spyware in my os. The last windows I used was 8, but I did hold out on that for a long time.

I switched because Windows 2000 was total garbage, and because Linux gave me actual programming tools. I was like a kid in a candy store. Suddenly I had all these amazing professional software packages, and scripting languages that weren't fucking garbage. I'm still WAY too good at DOS scripts. The number of years I wasted learning DOS. Fuck microsoft. I'm still a little mad.

Wanted a new adventure to go on and a chance of pace from Windows 10 at the time. Benefits were a less bloated system and more customizability and a way to strengthen my command line skills. I was surprised by how light weight and overall polished the experience was.

Foss software for everything that's a one click install got me. I'm surprised msft doesn't make Winget more visible

My reasoning is nothing big and fancy or philosophical. Hell what had happened was: I upgraded from windows 8.1 to windows 10 and I couldn't pair my phone to my laptop via bluetooth in a way that allowed me to use my laptops speakers and the music on my phone. I started looking for a fix and ended up finding some article or forum about how to do that in linux. Installed ubuntu 17.04 or something like that because I didn't know the release cycle of ubuntu. I never looked back. After that tried Fedora then KDE Neon then back to Fedora then openSUSE Tumbleweed, and now EndeavourOS.

Back in 2003 my sister needed a computer of her own to do schoolwork on. We couldn’t afford a new computer and the only other system we had in the house other then the laptop I had just bought was still running Windows 98 on a failing hard drive and the Windows install disk we had was borked.

I replaced the hard drive, started looking for options and found Ubuntu. And it made sense to me. Once I wrapped my head around the idea of the console, everything made sense in a way that Windows and DOS before that didn’t. And I had the freedom to modify anything I didn’t like, a freedom you don’t really have in Windows or Mac OS.

And it was fast! This ancient computer (AMD Athlon, 256 MB Ram, Ubuntu) was running circles around my new laptop (Pentium 4, 1 GB Ram, Windows XP).

I wound up switching my laptop from XP to Ubuntu and ran smack into why some people complain about linux being hard to use. Some of my brand new hardware just didn’t work in linux. WiFi, no go ever (proprietary firmware), audio, ditto. I liked Ubuntu well enough that I decided to work around the nonfunctional hardware with usb WiFi and a audio expansion card until the next update to Ubuntu when the built in audio just started working.

Download a linux distro iso file

Burn iso to usb using rufus

Restart computer with usb plugged in

Get into bios by pressing your system's specified key to get into bios while booting

Go to the boot settings

Select your usb

Linux should pop up after a minute with install menu

If you configure the settings right, you can have a dual boot setup with both windows and linux

After linux is installed you no longer need the usb

The easiest way to try linux is to install it from the Microsoft App Store — not joking, windows officially supports running Linux now. Here’s a random tutorial: https://adamtheautomator.com/windows-subsystem-for-linux/

Because it was mandated by our communist party!