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Windows 98 really sucked and running Unix at home became an option.

Enshittification. I never had any technical reasons for leaving Windows. It has its share of annoyances but so does every other OS. What really got to me was the constant pushing of their own products over others. And I don’t even want to think about switching to 11. Without the enshittification I would still be using Windows, just because of inertia.

Becoming a Communist.

That, and increased gaming support, and a Thinkpad that struggled over time given renewed life with Arch.

Late 1990s my uni had unix workstations HPUX.

So all projects etc were expected to be done on those. Linux at the time was the easy way to do it from home.

By the time I left uni in 98. I was so used to it windows was a pain in the butt.

For most of the time since I have been almost 100% linux. With just a dual boot to sort some hardware/firmware crap.

Ham radio to this day. Many products can only do updates with windows.

My first couple of computers had AmigaOS and even from the start Windows felt like complete garbage in comparison, but eventually I had to buy a PC to keep up with the times. After that I kept looking for alternative OS:es, tried Linux dual booting but kept going back to Windows since all the programs and hardware I needed to use required it. When I finally decided to go full time Linux, some time between 2005 and 2010, it was because I felt like I was just wasting my life in front of the computer every day. With Windows it was too easy to fire up some game when I had nothing else to do, and at that time there were barely any games for Linux so it removed that temptation. But that has ofc. changed now and pretty much all Windows games work equally well on Linux :)

I got a new PC. I installed Windows on it. I felt dirty, so I said fuck it, and installed Linux instead.

It wasn’t any one specific thing, but a lifetime of windows frustrations adding up, on top of a growing frustration with enshittified tools and services in general

That was 4 months ago.

I’d been dual booting with Windows 2000 Professional for a while but XP came out, I didn’t like it so fully switched.

The need for latex, in 1999.

Tried installing Windows 11. After a few hours screwing around trying to find the right drivers for everything, I tried a live USB of Mint. Everything worked great out of the box.

Also, the ads, and Microsoft’s insistence on forcing user accounts.

I read the story somewhere about a student from Finland who wrote his own kernel and discussed it with Andrew S. Tanenbaum.

Since I was reading a book of Mr. Tanenbaum at that time, this got me somewhat interested, and when I got the chance, I tried it out.

Lots of little things, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was the constant pop-ups asking me to try out Copilot in Win10, harassing me daily on both on my personal PC and my work laptop.

Windows has been on thin ice since the trash fire that was Win8, and I’d only stuck with it for Nvidia driver support for gaming. I’ve been watching Proton development for years now, and putting it through its paces on my older PCs every few months, so I knew I was ready to make the switch for about a year before I finally pulled the trigger. I justified putting it off with the thought that “I can build my next PC around an AMD graphics card amd make the switch then.”

Then Win11 and all its garbage was announced, AI took off, and Microsoft started pushing their slop on my machine harder than ever. It was too much. I switched to Mint DE on my current machine and haven’t looked back.

My reasons were more hardware related. When I was a bit younger my parents gave me a netbook which had 32 GB of storage, and Windows used almost all of it. I wanted to do creative projects in my free time, but I couldn’t install programs or save any of my work. I would often restart to clear log files and gain a bit more working storage, which was extremely annoying because it took like 5 mins for the computer to finally settle down and be usable.

I eventually got a 32GB flash drive which helped a lot, but it was not enough. With 4GB ram I could only have about 3 browser tabs open, and not all the programs I wanted could be run off the flash drive. It was still resource management hell.

Somehow, some way, I learned about Linux. I got a 128GB microSD, put Mint on it. It truly set me free. I could install the software I wanted, I could make the things I wanted to make, I could open more programs at once, and I could do it all without unbearable lag. I never looked back since.

For me, Windows 11 mandatory account, and Internet on setup. Yes there are bypasses, yes I could upgrade from 10. But where I’m from, having the internet isn’t always a given.

So imagine dropping $500-$1000 on a new laptop booting it up for the first time, and learning that its now a brick since Windows refuses to let you use it since you have no internet. No Pro license can unbork you from this.

Even MacOS isn’t that dumb (for now).

The account thing is a personal beef I have with windows. I.e. my PC my account, why does it need to be online, I have no reason for it.

So my plan was to migrate to FOSS or proper cross platform software for work, see if Linux works, and if it doesn’t move to MacOS. So far Linux Mint has been stable.

Wobbly windows, rotating cube workspace switcher, and a flaming bonanza animation when a windows was closed.

The year was ~2003