Linux

Windows 10

Was using Tiny 10/modified Windows 10,but switched to Linux Mint beacuse of low system requirements and low resource usage,as I have 15 year old PC

I was still using XP when Ubuntu 5.10 was released, and when I saw my audio worked out of the box, I switched :-) I had been using Mandrake Linux (since 1999) but only for servers and other work related stuff.

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 98 second edition By then i was bored with windows and a friend told me about Linux and i haven't looked back.

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

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.

Windows 7 starter

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.

Windows XP pre-SP1 at home. For Work I always had to use Windows.

Windows 2000

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'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.

Vista. Tried to make Ubuntu work for a while but that was a shit show back then... Moved over to OS X and I was home - a beautiful UNIX where everything just worked. Stayed there for close to a decade (Lion-Mavericks-El Capitan-High Sierra-Mojave), mostly on non-Apple hardware.

Sadly, the iOS-ization ramped up so I had to rip tons of iCloud related stuff everytime I did a fresh install and then Catalina killed off 32-bit apps and brought other irritants, so I tried Fedora 35 and escaped with close to no issues.

And here I am, on Fedora 40 five years later.

For personal use it was probably Windows 98 SE.

For professional use i'm currently forced to use Windows 10.

I used 11, but had tried linux when I used 10. I was never really trying to switch, more just distrohopping with windows in the mix, and eventually I just never went back.

The last Windows version I used was Windows 7 I guess, but merely to play some games. In daily use, the last Windows version I used was Windows XP

For me it was the jump between Windows 7 and Windows 8. I hated the UWP apps, the "simplified" control panel an d the full screen and tiled start menu. It worked great as a phone UI but terrible on desktop. I used it for like a month and switched to Linux Mint, which I felt was closest to W7 at the time.

i moved from w10. always felt that it requires a lot of fighting to keep it from doing stuff i don't want it to do. used win11 on our school computers and decided to switch because that garbage ain't coming near my hardware. and it's satisfying to use something that not a lot of people understand about. i distrohop every now and then, but always come back to mint because no other distro fully works on my system.

Win7. I use LMDE+Cinnamon now and I have it looking suspiciously like how I had Win7. Old habits and all that.

Though you didn't ask, Win2K was the probably the best Windows, IMO. Then came the bloat and the ugly UIs. (I've kind of got used to bloat these days. Storage is cheaper than it was, and LMDE isn't exactly the slimmest distro.)

Maybe I would have liked Win10. Similar to how it was with the old Star Trek movies, it seems like every other version of Windows is terrible, and if that remains true, maybe 12 will be better than 11. Probably not going back to find out though.

Windows XP. The moment I realized the mess Windows Vista was going to be, I knew I had to switch over.

Windows XP. Windows itself was fine, I only moved because the programming languages I wanted to use ran better on Linux and ran in a way that was more likely to be the same as in production.

Windows wasn't my first operating system. I don't even remember what my first was, but it ran on top of DOS and had a 5 and a quarter inch floppy drive. I've used pretty much every windows desktop version since 3.1, but really only installed or maintained XP, 2000 server, and Windows 10 on my own hardware. But I've also installed and maintained various Linux and BSD distros since about the turn of the millennium, including a brief relationship with a Mac laptop with OSX.

There was never a switch. I always ran whatever I could get working that would get the job done. For some tasks that was Windows, either because it was good enough and came pre-installed or it was required by the software I needed to run for school or work. I've handed in many assignments on 3.5 inch floppies. I haven't maintained a server with windows since Windows2000 server. I've tried Slackware and Corel Linux. I bought SUSE Linux in a box from a big box store. I've gotten those brown Ubuntu install CDs in the mail. I remember being delighted with the development of BitTorrent because now my downloads would check themselves for consistency as they downloaded the ISO. No more getting to the end of a download only to discover the md5sum failed to check. I've used Knoppix and Clonezilla for system recovery.

There was never a change. I'm a tech nerd that likes Linux, not a Linux nerd that likes tech. But, it was the way windows kept destroying my Linux partitions that drove me away from dual booting and installing windows on anything in general. Also the windows situation with viruses, updates, and lack of security that drove me away unless compelled. Now windows lives on its own hardware or in a VM for me.

I had Windows 8.1 but as the end of its maintenance was approaching I saw the writing on the wall with Windows 10 and especially 11 and I wanted no part of that. When 8.1 was put to pasture I returned to Linux and I have been content ever since. Seeing where Microsoft is taking Windows I'm more and more convinced that Stallman Was Right. I control my software, not the other way around.

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I had dabbled with Linux before, both at home and work. Stood up a server running Ubuntu LTS at home for serving my personal website and Nextcloud. But, gaming kept my main machine on Win10. Then I got a Steam Deck and it opened my eyes to how well games "just worked' on Linux. I installed Arch on a USB drive and booted off that for a month or so and again, games "just worked". I finally formatted my main drive and migrated my Arch install to it about a week ago.

I'm so glad that I won't be running Windows Privacy Invasion Goes to 11.

First moved from 7 on home PC as a daily driver

And then later once I stopped distro hopping (stopping at Arch) and could do my work in full from home... ( by porting time tracking app to Linux )

Moved from 10 on work PC

I used Windows 7 before, but my first computers all ran Linux. (Raspberry Pi 2b with Raspian; First 64-bit PC ran Ubuntu Mate)