I woke up one day, and copilot had been installed on my PC overnight. I didn’t like that lack of control. This was, coincidentally, a weekend that my wife, kid, and dog were all gone. Since I knew Win10 only had a year left, and I had the time, I figured it was as good a time as any.

I downloaded Fedora and Kubuntu. Spent a bit of time with each, and went with Kubuntu. For a few days. It had issues waking from sleep, and I had to do some kind of tweaking with every one of my games to get them to work.

I don’t mind tinkering with stuff, but i just don’t have the time to make my computer my hobby. So, I switched to Mint. Everything just works. So, I put it on everything else. I guess the one time I really had to dig into terminal stuff was getting a wifi driver for my living room PC off git. Other than that, super easy.

Now, I’m coming up on a year of Mint. Couldn’t be happier.

It’s basically a pattern of:

Me: I have a problem and I need help fixing it

Other: ok but what’s the problem

Me: I can’t do this for some reason

Other: you’re wrong for wanting to do that when you can just do this instead besides you’re dumb and stupid and wrong and you should just deal

So I’d just keep changing things until my computer did what I wanted. I’d be fine using a Mac or windows if and only if it was ok to ask for help (meaning that I got to a point with a problem where I can’t move forward anymore myself and the only 2 options are to give up or ask for someone to contribute something that makes it so I can make progress)

I learned how far gaming on Linux had come, so during COVID I decided to try it out. I wiped my Windows 10 installation, and installed Ubuntu on it (later Pop!_OS, then Garuda, and Arch on other machines), and got to work figuring things out. I didn’t know if it’d stick, because I was still unsure of it as I wasn’t sure I’d get all of my games working. But, I got settled within a week, and over time things just got better. At that time I was so used to Windows’ bloat and other… “features” that I became blind to them. After more than five years using Linux, using Windows even for a few minutes is quite the shock!

cuz windows sucks major balls and i was sick of it breaking itself (and the spyware)

Went to Linux when I was a teenager, went back to Windows.

My return however is a lot more bittersweet. One of my cats died. The other cat went into mourning. Wanted to keep him company while doing my shit, so I took my old laptop and installed Xubuntu on it. While I was using it I realised that Linux had come a long, long way since I last used it and I could use it as a daily driver. Got a new laptop soon after and installed Mint on it.

Then Windows on my main PC started demanding I update. Realised I couldn’t afford to, both software and hardware wise, so I decided to go full Linux. Never looked back. Typing this on my Laptop running Fedora while I try kill time before an interview.

TL;DR: I came back to Linux because I wanted to hang out with my cat while he mourned.

I had been thinking about it for a while. I had played with linux before on an old laptop, but not seriously, though I had been getting more frustrated with windows every time it updated it seemed. I then got the urged to play an old game of mine that i had picked up on a steam sale recently that i hadn’t played in years. It took hours of tinkering and web sleuthing to get it to run, then i played 20 min had to run to town, so I shut down my PC and bam. Windows update. Game no longer worked again. The next weekend I installed Linux mint, then Fedora, then the weekend Bazzite the weekend after that. The game I wanted to play on windows worked right out of the box on Proton. I’ve had less problems overall with Linux than Windows too. Most of the problems I did have early on were also self inflicted. Pro-tip don’t try to remove then re-install the lastest python manually in mint. It breaks everything apparently, luckily (unlike Windows) its very easy to re-install. It’s been about 7 months now.

Back in 2002 it was eye candy.

Compiz compositor. The 3D cube and wobly windows.

And still Linux can be the most beautiful UI of all OSes out there.

Privacy, no bloat (depending on distro), no Big Tech, freedom, no cost.

1. I’m a lifelong contrarian.
2. I refuse to overpay into the locked-down Apple ecosystem.
3. Windows has become worse with every release.
4. I use Arch btw.

My old laptop was struggling with windows and it was losing support, so i consigned myself to finally unlocking the fourth greg within my soul: Open Source Greg.

My dad was a software developer so growing up, there were Linux textbooks in the bookcases. Sorry if was inspired by my dad to try Linux in and off in my teens. Was fun a kid failing and then succeeding to install Linux and distrohop through the various flavors of Ubuntu and what not.

Then in university my cheap laptop was running poorly on Windows 10 say I started experimenting again with Arch, Mankato since I didn’t really need any fancy proprietary software.

Finally, now in 2025, just pissed off with Windows and decided I’d go all in with Linux on my desktop gaming PC. It worked well enough or my laptop and my home server, and really considered that it was not games that required anti cheat that I really loved, so I just dove in with Bazzite.

I switched because freeBSD didn’t have drivers for my voodoo3 gfx card. I switched to FreeBSD from windows because I messed up my litestep config that was setup to pretend that it was an X desktop and I thought I might as well use the real thing. Dualbooted for a while for games though.

Because open source, like the right to privacy and the diversity it can offer, always has something for everyone.

In the end, W*'s recent choices, such as ReCall, and the intrusions into our privacy, finally convinced me to begin my transition.

Until now, I had been observing opinions for the past five years.

The fact is that I am not a programmer or a specialist in these subjects, just a very small amateur, and Linux has long been off-putting.

Having the time and a computer to experiment is not that easy. But with an old computer, I finally have the opportunity to test Linux Mint… Others will undoubtedly follow.

I always say that to change operating systems, you first have to figure out how to replace proprietary software or applications with open source ones, because most of them are also available on Linux.

That’s what I did on my mobile, and now the next step is to choose a custom ROM such as Lineage or /e/OS, etc.

I really, truly, seriously hate modern implementations of AI and am willing to make concessions in my life to avoid using it. Windows 11 forcing Copilot was my last straw for using Microsoft.