This includes the Linux greybeards too.

I never switched to Windows, but switched directly from AmigaOS to Linux, in 1994.

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.

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.

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 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.

XP.

Windows was getting to be too much trouble to 🏴‍☠️, Vista didn’t look that great, I couldn’t afford to upgrade my hardware to accommodate the bloat, and desktop Linux was a lot more mature and ready to go out of the box.

Vista. Why the change to Linux? See previous answer.

Windows 7.

I dabbled in Ubuntu long before.

But when they removed focus stealing prevention, I got extremely frustrated. And as soon as Steam had a beta client for Linux I completely jumped ship.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_programs/applications-stealing-focus-reg-key-no-longer/4ee5be7d-31ef-493b-b092-f6f6139f99cd?

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 2000

Sadly I can’t help but use windows at work. But in my personal life, that was around 2003. So, XP? Or something like that.

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.

I last used Windows NT 4.0

The internet was just starting to get interesting. Windows had software to browse and do e-mail.

Linux had the stuff to power the whole internet. It was just a whole lot more interesting if you wanted to be more than a consumer of the information super-highway.

windows me

i think it should be pretty self explanatory why a switch was necessary. lol