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?
Multiple reasons. Performance issues, bloatware, bullshit system requirements, forcing unnecessary and often times useless features on it’s users, restricting how much control the user has over the OS, and a lot of smaller issues that just ruin the over all user experience.
While I will admit that Linux isn’t perfect, the experience I’ve had with Linux overall has just been so much better. There are also a lot of small benefits to Linux that Microsoft will never offer. For example, if you have a computer with an older GPU, not only will it still work with newer Linux distros, it may also support newer versions of OpenGL and Vulkan. The first computer I ever used Linux on had an Intel HD Graphics 3000, and on top of getting surprising performance on Linux compared to Windows, the supported version of OpenGL went from 3.0 to 3.3, which doesn’t seem like much but, at least at the time, a lot of applications had OpenGL 3.3 as their minimum required version.
As for why I didn’t use MacOS or ChromeOS. I’ve heard that MacOS is mostly fine but I’d have to buy a brand new computer to run MacOS and their computers are just too expensive for me. And as for ChromeOS, I am aware that I could have used ChromeOS Flex but in addition to the fact that it still has some of the issues I have with Windows, I have concerns about how much I actually be able to do with it. Google is very vague when it comes to explaining the differences between ChromeOS and ChromeOS Flex.
If ChromeOS Flex allows the use of android apps just as much as the main version of ChromeOS, then I do think that might be a good choice for people who want to drop Windows but don’t want to use Linux. I do have limited experience with ChromeOS because my mom owns a Chromebook and it seems fine and they are pretty cheap, but I’d imagine that most people don’t want to buy a new computer just for a different OS.