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?
2001 first introduced to Fedora (1?) A friend installed on my laptop. Used it for a little; but it didn’t do the things I wanted. A little while later I was back on XP.
I tried Ubuntu 6.04; it wasn’t ready. Back to XP.
I tried Ubuntu 8.04; it was really close. Back to XP.
I tried Ubuntu 10.04; and have had Linux ever since. I have jumped to various distros over the years, I kept coming back to Mint though. I currently have a couple of computers running Bazzite and the rest on Mint.
I do keep Windows VM’s around; XP, 7 and 10. But they barely get turned on these days.
I haven’t had Windows installed on a machine in 16 years; even in 09 it only lasted a couple of months till I got time to replace it.