What pushed you over the edge?

[Curlydave]

I was bored and wanted to try something new.

[sapo]

virus, spywares, constant crashes, slowdowns after 1 month of a fresh installation.. i think you all know wich OS i m talking about...

And now i m happy with ubuntu...

Ubuntu rules!

[poofyhairguy]

I was bored and wanted to try something new.

Same for me too.

[virgule]

Its a old Macintosh. It ran only MaCOS 9. Whats a joke to call than an 'OS' in the first place. I was about to trash it when I noticed a YDL3 cd I burned about a year ago... My very first experience with Linux was with Linux/PPC 1999. so huh.. never worked properly. So I installed YDL3 and I was pleasantly surprised by *finally* IRC, the command line, the community and that much softwares available for free! It got me sky high. I even bough YellowDog t-shirts. I joyfully ran it for a couple years. It never crashed by itself!! You know what "a mac never crash.." actually mean, heh? yeah.. it just crashed. But Linux made it sooo stable and reliable that must be heaven! YellowDog eventually got old. I wanted someting more 'en vogue' and current. YellowDog4 is was dog to me. Slow and badly maintained, IMO. Ubuntu was the newest kid in town, Debian never installed, mandrake either. Things were getting lame I must say. Same old same old. Hoary released and I managed to install with not much problems. Im still running it since then. I was hopping for more actually. I want my beloved Linux speed and snappiness back. Whats up with multi-thread kernels?!?!

[TristanMike]

Geeze, what out of the hundrededs do you want. Explore crashing all the time, sound goes in and out, games installing twice, toolbars (god I hate toolbars), unable to add/remove programs, have to install 15 different programs to get the things that it ships with are suppose to do, the list goes on, but the reformat once every 6 months or so, can be a bit of an anyoance, the list goes on....
TristanMike

[davahmet]

Ages ago, some techy friends and I were argueing over trhe best way to get around Microsoft's new licensing scheme. This was back in the days when we wrote our own memory managers because the one in MS-DOS 2.11 was faulty. Viruses were unheard of, and the closest thing any of us had to the internet was our lists of phone numbers for bulletin boards. Microsoft up until then had been very helpful, encouraging independent developers as we added functionality. We had no problem with giving our work back to Microsoft, since that was the most efficient way to get improvements to the computing community and it helped us all. Then Microsoft did the unthinkable. They shut us out and demanded a licensing fee from developers!

We were stymied about how to get around it. Some of us even wrote letters to Microsoft and Bill Gates, sure that if Bill knew what was happening he'd correct such an obvious oversight. I and another hobbyist decided perhaps we wouldn't share our hand-crafted TCP stack with Microsoft afterall. The company we had trusted and felt good about had changed somehow, and now demanded that all developers pay for access to the APIs, which was essentially the right to develop software for them.

After we gained internet access, these friends and I argued about how to develop software underground, without Microsoft's paid approval. One of us found a reference online to Linux and curiousity got me searching for it. Although it took me nearly a year to get my hands on a set of rool-your-own vanilla Linux floppy disks, I could haedly wait to try it. It was rough, definitely user-hostile. It took me nearly a week of fiddling to get it to boot to a ready prompt, and then there was little I could do with it. X was horrible to configure...I literally set fire to my monitor by misconfiguration, and getting a serial modem to work was just this side of impossible. Despite all of these headaches, it was free, and the user community encouraged independent development. This made it well worth following.

Eventually, I found Red Hat 6.0 and never looked back. Although I have gone through many distros, I have never forgotten what sent me searching in the first place. Thanks Microsoft for giving me the incentive to endure those early, painful days of Linux.

[primeirocrime]

Microsoft did. If windows worked in a proper manner I would never consider to install another OS.

My problems with microsoft and/or Windows operating systems:

1. their Help system, it just doesn't help. it is just one of those snakes biting their tales.
2. restrictive attitude from them [can't unisntall IE for example, can't make annything out of registry]
3. demagogic corporation
4. spyware, viruses, bluescreens, defrag
5. insufficient base system for something that is entitled OS. Why isn't there any office suite from day one I don't no.[yes the system is being operated alright but not by me]
6. promoting piracy and using strong arm tactics to rule out competition.
7. ..and lots more

I guess it all builded up to me trying to find a way out of the pit, so lot's of distro testing till I found SuSE, Fedora and Ubuntu.

also I liked what I read in the GPL... it resonates in me.

[timczer]

My move to linux was a slow build sort of thing. I am not a full on computer geek, but I like to tweak my machines, find better software, make it run faster, that sort of thing. I slowly moved to firefox, tried Openoffice, and other free software.

At the same time I was frustrated with the constant fight with spyware, mallware, what have you. I also became frustrated with how quickly the speed and performance of windows went downhill. No matter how much you cleaned up your system , defragged, etc. speed would slow down.

Eventually, cruising the net (probably slashdot) read some stuff on fc3, decided to give it a try. I screwed up the dual-boot install and couldn't get back to my XP side, ended up having to find ways to make fc3 do what I needed to get my work done.

I eventually got XP and fc3 going when I learned of Ubuntu. Loaded that on as well and found it worked great (I had probably bloated the heck out of fc3 downloading stuff trying to get it to do stuff I wanted.) I eventually was doing everything with Ubuntu, dropped fc3. I keep XP around for the few things I still can't get Ubuntu to do (work with my PDA, online poker).

[garnertr]

I'm not pushed over the edge just yet, however, my laptop is 100% Ubuntu and I've convinced a co-worker to play with it for a learning experience.

Myself, the hardest issue will be the family, my children have many kids games that are ******* and my wife is used to the "format"; getting her to switch would not be an issue, its my children's games, I've got dozens of them and if they all don't work, then my world will be a living nightmare.

Maybe a nice side thread would be where to get software by name? I don't know what software is out there that works for ubuntu and if I can find childrens games that could sooze them and I could replace them, then and only then would I be pushed to switch 100%.

Also as a side note, I am finding myself more happy using linux-based products than *******, not b/c of any anti-bill gates propoganda or any such silly issues, I'm getting disheartened by the updates, upgrades, security issues (to include virus, anti-virus, issues). I am getting very very very tired of the latest/greatest ******* security issue and/or its lapse to take one seriously (there are a few cases where ppl submitted suspected holes and then where treated like criminals)...

So, I am leaning towards Linux-based products b/c the community is better, the tolerance for newbie's and oldies is wonderful I've not had an issue w/ security since I switched on my laptop. Overall, its been a great experience...

[derrick1985]

Curiousity started the fire, and microsoft fueled it.

Back about 5 years ago, I was reading a magazine and it had a small article about Linux in it, and how it was a free operating system, yadayada. So, it caught my interest and I started reading up on the different distributions available at that time.

What finally made me switch, was people. I help friends and people at work who have computer problems, and 99% of the time when I repair a windows PC, it's because of spyware/malware/virus's. I finally got fed up with it and started looking into Linux again. Mandrake started taking over most of my attention, simply because of it's GUI friendliness. So, for a while I played with it, dual booted into it when my mother wasn't using the computer (tried to get her to convert, it didn't go over too well, especially when you destroy the mbr and format the hd). But, still, it was harder for me to get everything working right, RPM hell basically drew me back to windows for another 1.5 years. Then, the crashes hit. It didn't matter how many anti-virus programs I had, or how many times a week I did a spyware scan, my computer was covered in them. It would slow down randomly, programs were crashing, and I finally got fed up and formated the PC, reloaded windows (my girlfriend still needs it for what she does, i'm working on that though) and started playing around with an apt'ed system, NOT DEBIAN (i was afraid of the configuration) and found Mepis to be suitable. STarted using that. Was trying out Warty, but the LiveCD wouldn't boot up on my system so I didn't use it. Then, Hoary came out and i've been in heaven ever since.