Why I Switched To Linux

First of all, I just have to acknowledge that I firmly believe that 2026 is the year of Linux. Just kidding, though I do hope Linux continues to gain traction and become a true competitor to MacOS and Windows. If you haven’t been living under a rock, you probably have heard about Microsoft’s, or as I like to call them, Microslop’s ongoing enshittification of Windows. Ads, AI, bloat, and of course, the endless bugs and crashes. Then there’s MacOS, which is honestly a decent operating system in my limited experience with it, but just not as good as Windows once was. Plus, Macs are insanely overpriced (though I must admit, they do last a long time), not to mention also very locked down. For me, personally, once the door was open for Linux, I was happy to ditch Windows 11 and go straight into the world of Linux.

I realize Linux isn’t a great option for everyone. When you switch to Linux, you first have to consider app compatibility. Windows program don’t run on Linux, or even Mac for that matter. Developers don’t make their products available on Linux as often as they do for Windows or MacOS. This issue is mostly solved with products like Wine and Proton, but they’re not perfect solutions. These solutions translate Windows executable programs into something that Linux can understand, but it’s not able to translate absolutely everything, and sometimes this also introduces bugs. The real solution is generally to find an alternative that runs on Linux, like Libre Office instead of Microsoft Office, or Pinta instead of Paint.net, Inkscape instead of Photoshop, etc. Neither of these solutions always work when it comes to gaming though. While Valve’s Proton compatibility layer works decently well on most games, some games, like ones with kernel-level anti cheat, just won’t work with Proton. Lucky for me, every program and game I use on Windows either runs fine on Linux or has a free, open-source alternative for Linux.

That covers how I was able to switch to Linux, now here’s why. While I was attending coding school in 2024-25, the first course was learning how to use Linux - Linux bash commands, Linux file system, etc. I barely even knew what Linux was before this, but this got me so interested in Linux, that I actually installed Linux Mint on one of my old laptops. However, I was still using Windows on all my active machines. Not too much later, I started to get fed up with Windows. New bloatware slowing down my computer, AI slop infecting everything, serious bugs ruining the experience, and the final straw was Parental Controls preventing me from watching a family-friendly show on Paramount Plus, despite Parental Controls being disabled. I switched my primary PC to Linux that very same hour and spent the rest of the day customizing my new Fedora Linux computer and transferring files over. By that point, I had also already been dual booting Fedora Linux and Windows 11 on my primary laptop. I switched my laptop to Linux a few months prior because my C code wasn’t compiling right on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), but it worked fine on actual Linux.

Finally, despite bumps in the road trying to stay on Linux, I never switched back to Windows. Linux runs faster, has no ads, no spyware (yes, Windows has built-in spyware!), and just plain works (most of the time). As a software developer, troubleshooting Linux problems comes naturally to me, and if I run into something I can’t fix, there’s always the internet. If I can’t find anything online about my issue, I follow an AI-generated tutorial that’s usually outdated but fixes the problem after a few corrections. There has been only one incident where me following an AI tutorial ruined something, and it was a minor setback.

Would I recommend Linux for everyone? Absolutely not. At least, not yet. We need more apps and games to be made available on Linux before that happens, and we need Linux to just plain work a little more often. Linux is my dream OS because it’s a customizer’s heaven, runs faster than MacOS or Windows, doesn’t come with bloatware and spyware, is free and open-source, and works great for developer use. However, I wouldn’t say it’s the best for everyday use for the average PC user yet. Still, if you’re technical enough to use Windows, I think you can learn Linux without even having to touch the terminal. There’s plenty of beginner friendly distros out there, like Ubuntu and Zorin. Personally, I’ve settled on CachyOS, a very fast and stable distro that supports a very wide range of desktop environments, including my favorite, KDE Plasma.

If the idea of getting away from Apple and Microsoft is appealing to you, I recommend spending some of your free time trying out Linux on an older computer. Do a little bit of research on with distro and desktop environment you want, use an online tutorial to install it (I recommend dual booting if you still actively use that computer or have files on it you don’t want erased), and go online for help if you run into any problems.