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?
My PC shat the bed, I needed one RIGHT NOW for university, and a roommate gifted me an old tower with OpenSUSE installed.
I hated it and couldn’t figure out how to install anything. But I was broke (as in, couldn’t afford to eat every day). So I was stuck.
When I found out how the package manager works and how much software was available, I was blown away:
No hunting for software on the internet?
Everything is free?
No limited functionality or nagging reminders to upgrade to pro?
No searching through installer submenus to find all the checkmarks that install spyware?
Never looked back after that. The next year Ubuntu appeared, and blew my mind again.