What was the last version of Windows you used before hopping on over? This includes the Linux greybeards too.
I was on Win10 but moved over as the end of life cycle is drawing near and I do not like Win11 at all.
Another thing for this change was the forced bloody updates, bro I just wanna shut down my PC and go to bed, if I wanna update it, I’ll do it on a Saturday morning with my coffee or something.
Lastly, all the bloat crap they chuck in on there that most users don’t really need. I think the only thing I kept was the weather program.
So what’s your reasoning for the change to the reliable and funni penguin OS?
This includes the Linux greybeards too.
I never switched to Windows, but switched directly from AmigaOS to Linux, in 1994.
I loved my A500 and A1200/030 and occasionally fire up fs-uae for the nostalgia.
Windows 10
Greybeard here.
I worked for a company with a wild mix of DOS, Win 3.1, and Win 3.11. Then we got new PCs, some ethernet hubs and switches (instead of the damn coax cable with terminators) and started to move to Win95.
Win 95 was a beast. It came in a bunch of floppies. It took ages to install, and you’d find after one hour that the last floppy was corrupt. Also, on our cheap hardware (Siemens-Nixdorf Pentium PCs) sometimes the sound card or the ethernet card would go missing. Nothing short of a reinstall would solve it. Temporarily, of course.
The Win 98 came along. All our problems were solved. It was a 32 floppy install job, if memory serves. No, no CDs on our company. Still, it crashed a lot, and Microsoft Office had a tendency to simply destroy 100+ page documents when it was not crashing.
At home I used Windows, because how else am I going to play games, right? But I kept experimenting with Linux, and liked what I saw. There were many pieces missing (no USB for a very loooong time, for instance), but what was there was rock solid compared to Windows. And you could COMPILE YOUR OWN DAMN KERNEL, fer chrissake! How powerful was that?
Eventually, distros started to emerge that made some pain points go away. I remember Corel Linux, Caldera Linux, Mandrake, RedHat, etc. I settled with Debian because ‘apt-get dis-upgrade’, of course. Then Ubuntu came along and made Linux more pretty and usable for simple folk. They even sent you a free CD by mail if you asked them.
I got ever more tired of Windows nuking my boot sector, the viruses (virii?), the hunting around for drivers, the having to throw away good peripherals because windows thought were too old to support.
I made a choice and dropped Windows. I missed a lot of the gaming scene until Wine and Steam caught up with the state of the art. In the mean time I made use of emulators and had a good time playing console and arcade games.
Oh I was teased about it. Fellow IT workers (proper MSCE type people) would give me a hard time because “Linux has no future”, “Unix is dying”. I guess the future proved I was right. I now earn more that they do.
They even sent you a free CD by mail if you asked them.
I remember thinking… Naaah, this is a gimmick, gimme 20 or so. Still have a few CDs laying around.
the future proved I was right. I now earn more that they do
Working with linux?
Yes.
For me it would be harder to gather the same know-how on closed systems, because you need your company to back your training on the tools you need to do a job, spend money on the licenses, jump tool when the vendors decide to discontinue a product, etc. Where I come from, if you work for a small company you’d be expected to learn as you go. Maybe things are better now, I don’t know.
In my opinion Linux (well, FOSS actually) gave me a great big box of small LegoTM bricks and the freedom to build anything out of it. So I’ve worked with HW clusters, then virtualization was all the rage when CPUs gained more power, then containers, then container orchestration, then cloud… Complexity is increasing, but the knowledge I gained from knowing that in the end it is just a bunch of processes running on a Linux kernel makes learning the next big thing more manageable.
I settled with Debian because ‘apt-get dis-upgrade’, of course.
A friend showed me an early version of Debian, probably sometime around 1996, and it was immediately obvious that this was the way. It’s been Debian for me ever since.
Was using Tiny 10/modified Windows 10,but switched to Linux Mint beacuse of low system requirements and low resource usage,as I have 15 year old PC
Windows was but a brief interlude between AmigaOS and Linux.
Windows 10. It was during the pandemic (late 2020), and I saw a Mutahar video of his desktop (at the time, I did not know of KDE Plasma, just gnome, unity and cinnamon) and I was like “Whoa, his desktop looks so much better than when I remember using linux. I should install Arch because that is what he used to get that desktop.”
I have used linux before on Fedora, Mint and Ubuntu, so installing arch using a youtube tutorial was not going to be that hard. Although it did take 2 days (Mostly procrastination and fear).
I will say this: I have a 98 computer and an XP computer for me to use, and I found those UIs better than in Windows 10. When I switched to linux with KDE Plasma, the oldschool UIs could not compete. Plasma is just THAT good.
I was also madly in love, with me calling KDE Plasma like being in a dream, and using Windows 10 is like waking up to the cold old stale office life.
What great timing too, with Proton kicking off right at the same time too, eventually me removing the need to dual boot.
TL;DR: I switched because I found out about KDE Plasma, and linux gaming was becoming infinitly better.
I had dabbled with Ubuntu desktop in the past, but it was the Steam Deck with KDE that really sold me on Linux for the desktop.
I do not like GNOME. KDE is great, though.
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Windows 98 second edition By then i was bored with windows and a friend told me about Linux and i haven’t looked back.
Windows 98SE for me too. I wanted to escape XP hell, so I stayed on 98SE until 2005 when I switched to linux.
i want to also help represent the 98 crowd here.
technically it was windows me in my situation; but it might as well have been called windows 98 third edition.
Not having DOS-Mode anymore must’ve been a bummer though.
Serious question how do you get bored of Windows during its heyday?
My first experience with Linux was Ubuntu 4.10 and it seemed super cool and all but I could’ve never switched fully during those days. And if we’re honest most legit Linux users up until not too long ago were forced to have a dual boot setup because so many things just hadn’t been universalized yet.
So just to illustrate where I’m coming from asking that question, my first personal computer (as opposed to family PC) ran XP and that was a pretty exciting time when it comes to market dominance and all the advantages that came with being a user of the biggest platform. Looking back I just don’t see how I could’ve ever made that switch in the noughties let alone the 90s. The adoption just wasn’t there yet.
Windows XP. I worked MSN tech support the year Blaster hit. I remember droning through the same repair steps every 15 minutes with caller after caller in a neverending stream that lasted for weeks.
After a couple of weeks of this, my coworkers and I had a weekend off together and we planned to party it up and blow off some steam with a LAN Party with Freelancer and beers. I had my comp all prepped and ready, it was freshly reinstalled and the game had been tested and benchmarked.
I came home from a long shift to find the one of the new Blaster variants, which used a new vulnerability that had not been patched until I had been at work that day. It had triggered so many reboots while I was at work it triggered NTFS corruption somehow. I had to reinstall… And I had done nothing to deserve that.
That virus fucking broke me. I went to work after that weekend and went to the Linux guru in Tier 3, and said “Teach me”.
I have never looked back with the exception of having to install it for a specific reason, and I’m usually appalled at the state of it. I just had to install Win 11 for a Google Cloud certification exam (DaFuq!?!?!) and with all the issues I encountered it took about 6 hours to get it ready for the exam. Win11 doesn’t come with network drivers anymore? Two NICs and a WiFi card in my machine, and none of them had drivers in the install. Nice to see we’ve gone full cycle back to Windows ME, except the OEM bloatware is a core part of the OS.
When my wife finally dropped Windows a month ago between the ads and recall, it marked the death of daily users of Windows in our house. I’m raising my kid on Linux.
What was the last version of Windows you used before hopping on over?
Windows 10. But I knew that I won’t have issues adjusting to Linux because I used WSL everyday and I had gallium os sideloaded on my chromebook.
So what’s your reasoning for the change to the reliable and funni penguin OS?
A series of unfortunate events in the span of a month or two along with long persisting issues that made me crack.
I had 2 machines then, a hp laptop and a PC. I used my laptop for school and financial stuff (which was shared with my father) and my PC for programming.
The first issue. The laptop had an update for a long while which it would randomly start and I was not able to put it off. But it always kept failing. It was basically a tradition for me to start my laptop on the tram to school so if there is a pending update, it will try and fail before I need it for schoolwork. I finally cracked, googled the issue and tried to trouble shoot it. The first step was to run a system integrity check. This never finished because when I went back to check up on it, an update had been started. My laptop didn’t boot after that because bitlocker couldn’t find the keys, even after I would manually input them on the prompt.
The second issue was with my PC. I used WSL everyday. But it would randomly just fail to boot. This was annoying, so I had a script to delete WSL, install it again and install all the packages I needed.
The third issue was also with my PC. I use a us keyboard layout despite not being from the us. This is because the international English keyboard does not input quotation marks when you type them, which makes it difficult to use for programming. But windows switched me to the international keyboard every now and then which made it annoying to code. I tried removing it, but I was not allowed to for whatever reason. What I did was admittedly stupid, but I used regedit and some online help to remove the international keyboard. That didn’t work, but all system apps stopped working. I kept using it like this for a bit. Eventually, I got an update. Now I was terrified because I was not able to open settings to postpone this update. I didn’t wanna have a repeat of my laptop incident.
So I just finally broke and installed Linux mint. Never looked back, ever. I use arch BTW.
TLDR: laptop got wiped due to a windows update and windows was forcing me to use an international keyboard.
Windows 2000
What was the last version of Windows you used before hopping on over?
Windows 7
So what’s your reasoning for the change to the reliable and funni penguin OS?
After years of heavily customizing and debloating Windows, i got the itch to create a custom ISO. At that point i realized, Linux would be less work.
Had to use 10 in work, there i used Chocolatey and scoop to manage my (t)rusty toolset.
Windows 95, I am ashame to admit I touched it
Windows 10. The reason I switched was pretty funny - I had previously bought a cheap SSD and moved my install over to it, and installed Arch on my HDD hoping to experiment with it.
I never really did that, but one day before Christmas my computer booted straight to Arch to my confusion, and after a while I figured out my SSD failed. I ended up installing gnome to have something to use in the meanwhile, since I wasn’t gonna be buying a new SSD in the next few days, but then I just decided to stick with Linux. As I learned more about it I realised I was barely missing anything, and I preferred Linux for what I had.
Straight from the Amiga to Slackware in 97. Never been a Windows fan.
Vista because of license shenanigans. I tried to upgrade from XP and the license wouldn’t activate. Support told me my upgrade license wasn’t compatible with my XP license, like pro vs home or some crap. I was reinstalling Vista every 30 days for a while, I even got it down to like 15 minutes using a slipstreamed DVD with all the stuff I cared about being installed with the OS. It was manageable but annoying since I paid for the OS and the upgrade but couldn’t really use it. Then I took intro to unix and found out linux is free, I’d heard of linux but didn’t know it was free. I didn’t know what a distro was, I wasted a bunch of time trying to download linux from kernel.org and I couldn’t figure out how to get linux to work. Eventually I stumbled upon Ubuntu. Folks, you might not believe this but once upon a time Ubuntu used to be great for newbies. I can still hear the startup music (which was the style at the time) and the african drums. My printer just fucking worked. Firefox and libreoffice just worked, although I quickly learned to turn in deliverables as pdf exports. There were some learning pains but nothing that was any more difficult than random shit that pops up in windows, at least with linux I might get a useful error to point me in the right direction and there was always someone out there smarter than me that posted how to fix it. I haven’t looked back.
@WagnasT @Tekkip20 my experience with switching to Linux was a mix of XP and Vista. My XP machine would get bombed with malware at my University hourly being connected to their wifi, yes my fault sort of. I had absolutely no computer experience and knew nothing about them. I finally gave into Vista. While that stopped the malware bombing, Vista felt like a blob eating my ram. My new friend at uni introduced me to Linux. I’m Autistic, so the whole thing became a special interest.
