Linux

I had dual boot with Win10, which I used for almost everything, and Arch, for SSH-able stuff for work and university. One day Windows decided to nuke both the EFI partition and Arch, which made Windows itself unbootable, so I just wiped the entire disk and installed Manjaro. Now I'm a sysadmin and I don't think I could do my job if I had to use Windows.

programming. It's just a really big IDE.

I was broke and my hard drive failed. I've heard/read somewhere that Linux can be booted of a live cd, something quite new back in the days(like 15 years ago?). So I made one a used my broken laptop with broken hdd for about 7 months, just from the live session without persisting anything. It was a pain to wait for everything since most things would have to be loaded from the dvd, but it worked!

I found an Ubuntu CD room in the trash, searched about it on the Web, which led me to install it on a low-end PC I had

We had to do a presentation on whatever in computer class in the first year of secondary school, and I chose Linux for no apparent reason. I just kinda knew that it existed and thought what the hell.

My 'researching' led me to see what Linux offered, to learn about FOSS, listen to Stallman, and I loved tinkering so I made a dual boot (and thus learned about partitions, boot flags and such) and never looked back. ~~Even when I installed linux on my newly acquired PC a few days ago and found out that since the kernel version 5.13 some motherboards receive failure on all USB 3.0 ports and I have to fuck around with that why can't you just fucking work right away for once~~

I've always run Linux on my laptops. Now however I've switched on my gaming desktop as well, after W11 started randomly waking from sleep. Haven't had an issue yet. Sure, not everything gaming wise is entirely perfect (though tbh you could almost believe the games were built for Linux) but I figure that if I don't switch why would anyone else do so?

The desire to be alternative and different, and now I can't use Windows for too long

I'm a pragmatic programmer. I came to Linux because we were doing server-side stuff, I stayed because bash shell is a blunt tool but command line is incoherent

I tried Linux when I was younger. I decided to try Gentoo on underpowered hardware with zero Linux experience. I credit that uphill battle for teaching me Linux! I used that until I got into dependency hell and switched back to Windows for a while. I needed PowerShell and stuff for my old job, before it went cross-platform. It was fine.

A few years later, I was dual-booting again. Then, Windows 10 began blue-screening randomly. I couldn’t figure out why. Reinstalling didn’t work. So I started using Linux full-time and I’ve never looked back.

Even when I found out that one of my memory sticks had been half-inserted for months, and that’s probably what made Windows crash all the time. How did Linux handle it? Obviously, because it’s better.

Godot engine broke with windows on my hardware, Simeone suggested me to try out linux, went with ubuntu 18.10 i think. Have been using linux ever since

Back when, after the world didn't end after Y2K got patched and saved it, I was getting tired of Windows and none of my Macs were up-to-date enough to handle my writing workload, I gave Caldera OpenLinux a shot. Ended up compiling everything myself and used that for two years. Had a copy of MetaFrame laying around from a completed project, so I installed it on Windows 2000, and served Office apps over the network so I could use Word in Linux. I've had something running Linux since.

Once Windows got rid of the gorgeous Aero theme starting in Windows 8, plus the shitty UI/UX that Windows got again starting in Windows 8, pushed me to Linux.

Sco xenix way back when was required for work. I decided to run it on my desk Then i had to work on sun machine for a few years. So ive really never been a windows person except for games. Once wine then proton atrted letting me game even a little then i got rid of every windows install i had and replaced with linux

easier Stable Diffusion setup

Apple.

I uses to be a huge Apple fan pre-2010. Everything worked, was smooth, wasn't Windows, and it was fun trying out the terminal despite it being pretty useless for most things on Mac.

At the new decade is when it felt like Apple was becoming what it is today: a walled garden with priority of mobile devices at the detriment of Macintosh. Started to really look at Linux as an alternative (only tried Ubuntu in a VM around the time of Unity coming out) early 2010s, but didn't make the full leap until around 2013 when I installed Linux Mint and got a Raspberry Pi to begin to mess around with. Now I solely run a mix of Debian and Void on all my machines and I couldn't be happier.

The Uni Eng department ran a SunOS email server for students and a SunOS lab for our coding projects. We were taught UNIX in the intro engineering class.
A couple of my friends in the dorm fired up Linux servers (early Debian and RedHat systems), bought domains (3 character .coms!) and setup email servers for our friend groups. It also was a lot faster to do our C/C++ dev there because it wasn't an overloaded machine.
Within a couple of years I had two systems, one Win98 and the other RedHat. From there it has been a winding tale of Linux distros, a stint of OpenBSD fun until SMP boards became common, the occasional Windows machine (back when I gamed more, but after Tribes 2 on Linux), and a short work-related dalliance with OSX (10.1-10.4). For the last decade it's been almost 100% Linux anymore. If there's a tool you need on a given OS, use what you need to, but if it runs on Linux I wouldn't use anything else. I've got a pile of machines for work and home, including servers (Debian), laptops/desktops (Mint), and SoC boards (Raspberry Pi OS, Armbian, etc).
There's just too much control and not a bunch of company-driven shit (See: Ads in your start menu? WTF kind of dystopian universe are you accepting?) with Linux distros.

I've been running Linux in some form since 2012 - I installed Ubuntu 12 on my old laptop and played around with it - was a pain so I dropped it for Windows until like.. 2015? Then I went full into it as I started getting into programming and whatnot.

Windows XP Pro was the last Windows that you could install on as many of your machines as you wanted without contacting M$. When I found that out, I knew that XP would be my last Windows and that I would inevitably switch to Linux. When XP became totally obsolete, I permanently switched over to Linux Mint. I've never gone back to Windows and I have zero reason to ever do so. I promote Linux whenever I can.

Canonical was giving free CDs when I was a teen and it looked cool. Later versions of Unity DE were so good, I liked older Ubuntu so much. Now I run it on older devices to give them some life back

I always liked tinkering with shit. Modding gameboys, custom fw on my phones and psp... It was the next logical step.

My computer's hard drive began to be less-than-reliable. And only Linux can be ran from the USB drive. I have got MX Linux, and save changes, updates etc. by remastering the image.

The Odin Project

Early 2000's I took a class in highschool called "What's in the box". A buddy of mine and I would hangout after school just talking and building computers. He showed me Lindows. I specifically remember looking at the clock in the dock, and thinking... "Wow!!! Look how you can customize the clock so much!"

It stuck with me. Shortly there after I dabbled with Suse. Then moved to Ubuntu. By 2005 I was almost exclusively using Linux on all my machine. Had one machine running windows for gaming, but the other machines I had were all Linux.

Laptop wasn't running smooth anymore. Tried a bunch of stuff in Winxows, nothing helped. Formatted the drive, installed linux, ran buttery smooth for years until some graphics shit died. Did the same to a thinkpad back in 2018 or 19. Still up an running like a champ but the thing went crazy on the original windows it came with (2nd hand. I'm also cheap...)

Curiosity

I first heard of it in the early 2000s, with my dad talking about replacing our buggy Windows ME with Lindows. Eventually, that computer died without us ever attempting to install it.

In college, I hung out with someone who used linux and thought it looked cool. I successfully dual booted Ubuntu on my PC around 2005 or 2006, but could never get the video drivers working properly (it was stuck at the lowest resolution) and eventually gave up on it.

I started adminning a web forum around 2014 or so, and the previous admin talked me into dual booting Fedora rather than only using Putty. So I started using it intermittently whenever I started working on the forum, though I never really got into GNOME. He also told me about raspberry pis, so I picked up a pi 2 and started tinkering with it.

When my wife moved in (2018), she (a software developer) was working on a project and asked me if I’d heard of raspberry pis, as she was recommended to use one but hadn’t looked into it yet. I pulled my pi 2 out of storage and she fell in love with it, so we started buying loads of pi 3s and zeroes, with me testing out different distros and setups for her while she was working on the project code.

Finally, somewhere around 2018 or 2019 my laptop started running like shit on Windows. I tried out Xubuntu and fell in love with it. It ended up becoming our go-to distro, getting slapped on old desktops she brought home from work and a used laptop I bought for our daughter. So that became the daily driver on my laptop, even as she moved onto Alpine with i3wm.

And now we both have Pinetab 2s, so I think it’s fair to say we’re full on linux nerds at this point. We still have Windows on some of our desktops, though, so we’re more pragmatists than linux proselytizers.

TL;DR: I heard about it young, and that interest grew into dabbling, until I finally got addicted to it.

Pure Data

Windows 8 being unusable on my shitty laptop I had back then, IIRC it would bluescreen 9 out of 10 times on startup (this same bug still persisted when eventually Windows 10 came out). I essentially switched to Linux full time after that.

Moving from Windows XP to Windows 7, i found that Windows 7 sucked, moved to linux and never looked back.

Windows kept getting in the way of my productivity (I constantly needed to find workarounds for problems that didn't exist or were much easier to solve on linux, and I couldn't customize the ui to my liking) + it lacked basic things like a tabbed file-manager (before win11) and my hardware was getting slower so I jumped ship.