Personally, I’m not brand loyal to any particular OS. There are good things about a lot of different operating systems, and I even have good things to say about ChromeOS. It just depends on what a user needs from an operating system.
Most Windows-only users I am acquainted with seem to want a device that mostly “just works” out of the box, whereas Linux requires a nonzero amount of tinkering for most distributions. I’ve never encountered a machine for sale with Linux pre-installed outside of niche small businesses selling pre-built PCs.
Windows users seem to want to just buy, have, and use a computer, whereas Linux users seem to enjoy problem solving and tinkering for fun. These two groups of people seem as if they’re very fundamentally different in what they want from a machine, so a user who solely uses Windows moving over to Linux never made much sense to me.
Why did you switch, and what was your process like? What made you choose Linux for your primary computing device, rather than macOS for example?
I was curious and done with the malware. Living in a very small city in some third world country where the internet was only for some government offices, higher social classes, universities and one or two cyber cafes, grabbing a Linux CD was a daunting task. I got a set of RedHat CDs but couldn’t make it boot in my own PC (a Compaq).
Life got me living in Mexico City to get my BS and suddenly I got many more options to try this Linux thing. Mandrake was now the go-to distro for beginners, since Ubuntu was not a name yet. Installed the Linux, loved it. After discovering the DE variety, I distrohopped for years. It was easier for me to download a Live CD somewhere, often at my University, than changing DE in my offline PC. At that time Mandrake became Mandriva, and I distrohopped between Zenwalk, Slackware, Fedora Core, Dreamlimux (lesser known Debian-based Brazilian distro), then got Ubuntu CDs by mail (they used to send them for free, and even included stickers!), and I settled there until Unity.