It’s open source and not owned by an evil corporation. It doesn’t have ads. It doesn’t mine my data and sell it to the highest bidder. It doesn’t have AI shoved in every nook and cranny. It’s much lighter to run. I can easily run it on a 10 year old laptop.

IT worker, close to 50 years old, only ever could afford low-mid range tech, gamer. Been using windows for over 30 years and linux for 8. Linux works better than windows and it allowed me to improve my tech skills beyond a desktop machine.

I really like the control and malleability

Independent to the above, using windows feels really, really bad these days.

It was the night of December 24th, 1996. I turned on the family PC, then running Win95, and found my D:\ drive corrupted. Windows had no tools nor docs how to resurrect a corrupted filesystem. I cried, and two days later installed SuSE on a spare disk.

Some 20 years later, I restored about half of the disk lost in 1996, because Linux had the tools, and the docs, and encouraged me to learn.

Steam Deck made gaming on Linux possible and that was the only thing holding me to Windows. I had been using Windows since Windows 95.

Microsoft simply stopped making an OS and started making a subscription and content delivery platform. When they did that, they lost me as a customer.

My values

Because I have self-respect.

I switched to Linux full time because I didn’t like Windows Xp. Windows has only gotten worse since then and Linux has only gotten better.

Because Windows works as dumbest os for now

Sound randomly staying off, micro sometime works, sometime not, if I try to touch sounds its sometimes just slutter all the system. I checked on viruses by free and paid subscriptioned and-viruses but founs nothing. So the best way to heal was to reinstall system. And I am do this. CachyOS going great, more faster and stable for several years even with bleeding edge updates

I am old, I have used windows for around 20 years. I am also a geek. I tried Mac OS a long time ago - not geeky enough and the hardware was too expensive for me back then.

Tried Linux several times. It was fun, but I had too many issues, up until now.

In my opinion if you plot user friendliness over time for Linux and windows, the Linux is going up on the friendliness axis, slowly but steadily. Windows on the other hand… Goes somewhere. Every good idea MS devs have is countered by 3 terrible (for users) from the marketing department.

I want to be the owner of my own PC. I want to control everything, windows was good enough a few years ago, but it is not anymore, the cloud integration plus AI bulshit, plus bloatware.

No, thanks.

1. FOSS. I’m a software engineer and making the world a better place and helping others is why I love my job and what I study. FOSS is the thing that can make tge world a better place and help others.

I also have a plethora of technical reasons, but I’m sure others will cover them. Just this ideological and philosophical reason is enough for me to be using Linux.

What’s the option? Windows? Keeps getting shittier all the time. Now with AI Slop and bugs. No thanks. Mac? Their walled garden, making it so you can’t upgrade your existing computer? No thanks. My last mac was a 2015 that let you upgrade things but it was a pain. They’ve since removed that so they lost me as a customer.

With Linux, I have a Framework laptop that let’s me upgrade everything. It’s easy to take apart, there are hardware switches for the mic and webcam… it’s very user friendly. Linux doesn’t have any telemetry. The only AI that gets installed is if I install it myself, it’s not intrusive. I’ve been using Linux for a long, long time but the Desktop experience has been lacking in the past. It’s gotten way better recently and the last thing I would boot into windows for was Fusion 360. I spent some time learning FreeCAD and since 1.0 it is way better and now I don’t need to boot into Windows anymore. Steam has made leaps and bounds with proton and now I can even game on Linux which is pretty huge. Is Linux perfect? No, but it does everything I need it to.

It was just an extension of my interest in computers since I was young ^ ^ This new, completely different OS fascinated me when I was growing up, and led to me installing Ubuntu on an old laptop. I never made an actual jump to it until I was a few years older, and had Windows slowing down my laptop that I used for work. I jumped onto the Manjaro train that was happening at the time, and eventually ended up installing Arch on my main PC (´･ᴗ･ ` )

My initial reason was computation freedom. It got so much better in years, I just take the rest as a great bonus.

i didnt like w10 with already pre-installed software, from games to random shareware. Didnt like that there where starting to test ads in the start menu or that OneDrive had decided to start operating in the background without notice.

I already had a mac, but didnt like that I could play most games, mainly used it as a work pc for design work. So then I searched and learned that linux was having many changes with proton and wine, and decided to give it a go, and I think its been 3 or 4 years since then. There are things, like graphic design work that I needed to re-learn, but it hasnt affected me greatly. I fully recommend it for most people. Running Mint