What was the last version of Windows you used before hopping on over? This includes the Linux greybeards too.
I was on Win10 but moved over as the end of life cycle is drawing near and I do not like Win11 at all.
Another thing for this change was the forced bloody updates, bro I just wanna shut down my PC and go to bed, if I wanna update it, I’ll do it on a Saturday morning with my coffee or something.
Lastly, all the bloat crap they chuck in on there that most users don’t really need. I think the only thing I kept was the weather program.
So what’s your reasoning for the change to the reliable and funni penguin OS?
Windows 10 before I used Linux full-time, though I did try out Windows 11.
Windows 2000
Windows 7 starter
The last Windows I used was Windows 2000 Professional. I bought a new PC, didn’t like XP so I switched to Linux full time as I’d been using it more and more anyway. Windows has only gotten worse since then so I’ve never looked back.
Last Windows I ran full-time was XP, ran Win7 for a couple of months before switching Ubuntu 10.04; still used Win XP and Win7 in VM’s for years for specific applications.
Win10 is the OS on the work machines, some of it is really nice, but so much feels backward. I don’t get why there is still control panel and the settings app. Why is notepad so shit…
I used Win11 recently, it looks quite nice, more consistent than 10 at least. But everything I have read makes me want to stay away.
Ran Ubuntu LTS’s finishing with 20.04, have since been running Mint. Snap’s made Ubuntu a worse experience for me.
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.
I had dabbled with Ubuntu desktop in the past, but it was the Steam Deck with KDE that really sold me on Linux for the desktop.
I do not like GNOME. KDE is great, though.
Windows 98 second edition By then i was bored with windows and a friend told me about Linux and i haven’t looked back.
Windows 98SE for me too. I wanted to escape XP hell, so I stayed on 98SE until 2005 when I switched to linux.
i want to also help represent the 98 crowd here.
technically it was windows me in my situation; but it might as well have been called windows 98 third edition.
Not having DOS-Mode anymore must’ve been a bummer though.
XP…my laptop was an old Acer my mom passed to me and couldn’t run vista so I never got it… Hopped on Ubuntu 09.04
Windows XP pre-SP1 at home. For Work I always had to use Windows.
I’ve flirted with Linux for years, all the way back to Fedora Core 6. I still use Windows, so 11 is my most recent version, but it’s stripped down using the AME playbook. I use it to play some games with anti-Linux anticheat. I also have a minimal Windows VM on my desktop for playing Destiny 2.
That being said, my primary computers run Arch (custom built desktop) and Fedora (Framework laptop) and I have zero intention of ever using Windows as a primary OS ever again.
For personal use it was probably Windows 98 SE.
For professional use i’m currently forced to use 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.
I settled with Debian because ‘apt-get dis-upgrade’, of course.
A friend showed me an early version of Debian, probably sometime around 1996, and it was immediately obvious that this was the way. It’s been Debian for me ever since.
They even sent you a free CD by mail if you asked them.
I remember thinking… Naaah, this is a gimmick, gimme 20 or so. Still have a few CDs laying around.
the future proved I was right. I now earn more that they do
Working with linux?
Yes.
For me it would be harder to gather the same know-how on closed systems, because you need your company to back your training on the tools you need to do a job, spend money on the licenses, jump tool when the vendors decide to discontinue a product, etc. Where I come from, if you work for a small company you’d be expected to learn as you go. Maybe things are better now, I don’t know.
In my opinion Linux (well, FOSS actually) gave me a great big box of small LegoTM bricks and the freedom to build anything out of it. So I’ve worked with HW clusters, then virtualization was all the rage when CPUs gained more power, then containers, then container orchestration, then cloud… Complexity is increasing, but the knowledge I gained from knowing that in the end it is just a bunch of processes running on a Linux kernel makes learning the next big thing more manageable.
Windows 10. I originally tried Linux out of morbid curiosity and because KDE plasma looked cool… And when windows 11 got announced and later released, I just sorta decided stick with Linux, as by that point I was quite familiar with it…
I haven’t seriously used windows for things other than
piracygaming in a long time… I can do everything I wanna do on Linux and my Mac so yeah.Vista. Why the change to Linux? See previous answer.
I switched two times. WinXP to Mandriva, because of devastating rootkits. Win8.1 to Mint because of performance decrease.
