Think about why you joined Lemmy. Reddit has been getting greedier and greedier, so you left to a place where the grass is greener. The same thing is true with Windows and Linux (and Linux is also much more big and mature than Lemmy). It attracts the same kind of people.

1. Windows is a privacy nightmare. The OS is constantly sending data to Microsoft while being used.

2. Windows hogs resources. If you don’t shovel money out for new hardware every few years, your computer will run like shit.

3. Windows is full of ads.

4. The majority of malware is written for Windows. Not really a selling point for me, but it’s a bonus.

5. Linux is free.

6. Linux doesn’t force updates. You update when you want to, and it takes less than a minute to do.

Lemmy generally attracts the same kind of person that would also use Linux. Both of them are open source and community driven alternatives to software otherwise provided by large corporations and milked for every last cent. Both of them require just a bit more knowledge in order to comfortably use them. Linux with all the distro’s and desktop environments, Lemmy with all the instances and apps/front-ends. We’re very much a bubble here.

There are political, practical and aesthetic reasons to choose GNU/Linux as an operating system.

Political Reasons

The Linux kernel, various components from GNU, a large part of the software library etc. are released under Copyleft licenses such as the GNU Public License (GPL), which cannot be revoked. This prevents a lot of evil shit the corporate world likes to do with software. It also menas it can’t be taken away; My license to copy, examine, modify and redistribute the Linux source code is irrevocable.

The kernel and much of what goes into a Linux OS these days are largely developed by larger corporations (Red Hat is now owned by IBM) but a lot of the app ecosystem is community driven. A lot of applications in the Linux ecosystem exist because someone wanted the tool to exist, not because someone begrudgingly accomplished something to increase shareholder value.

Practical Reasons

The vast majority of Linux distros are provided free of charge.

The majority of Linux distros are lighter on system resources than Windows; Windows’ system requirements have forced a lot of perfectly functional hardware into retirement where they run just fine with Linux.

With a few notable exceptions the Linux ecosystem is free of the ads and spyware built into Windows these days.

Microsoft has a habit of rearranging their UI kind of for the hell of it, meaning constant retraining for users. In the Linux ecosystem, only Gnome is in the habit of making drastic unasked for design changes, and it’s very much not a user’s only choice.

Microsoft has a lot of monetary incentives to be user hostile. Not a lot of people use the Microsoft Store to search for software because much of the software the userbase wants competes with a Microsoft product, so they aren’t found in the store. For example, Edge is the only web browser found in the Microsoft Store. Microsoft will not distribute a product that competes with one of their own. A typical package manager on Linux is full of actual useful software and is the preferred way of managing software on Linux. In fact, Windows is basically the only platform that hasn’t managed to make a package manager or app store the default way of handling software.

Microsoft has been eroding the end user’s ability to control or even own their devices. Linux does not become unusable for several minutes due to updates the way Windows does. Linux doesn’t routinely take away features the way Windows has been doing lately.

Aesthetic Reasons

Windows is becoming less customizable as time goes on. Linux is only getting more impressive. It’s not difficult to make the experience YOU want on Linux. Windows doesn’t let you put the Taskbar on the side of the screen anymore. Get a load of this, I’m using Fedora KDE right now. By default there’s a thing that works very much like the Start button on Windows; icon in the lower-left corner that pops up a menu from which to launch applications. I can right click that, click “Show Alternatives” and I can have a full screen thing similar to the MacOS launcher, a smaller cascading menu type thing that works like the Windows 85 Start menu, or by default a two-pane thing that’s more typical of Linux systems. It’s just so much more flexible.

Everything is free and 100% customizable if you want to put a little bit of effort in (I’m sure this varies wildly depending on technical abilities).

I drive Linux for a similar reason to why some people prefer driving manual transmission cars to automatics.

Automatic transmission cars are ideal for a certain kind of driver that has no interest in how the machine actually works, they just want the machine to do its job as smoothly as possible without them having to think about it. Not bothering with the details is the whole point.

For those of us who do have an interest in knowing how the vehicle works, automatics become kind of suffocating. They’re designed to only ever behave in certain specific ways. If there’s a weird niche thing that we know is possible for the machine to do with manual control, but the automatic system doesn’t support, you’re just SOL. You can’t. This starts coming up in all sorts of annoying little ways, increasing in frequency as your knowledge increases. Death of a thousand cuts. You start feeling like you’re not really driving this car, you’re being taken for a ride.

Windows is like the automatic. It is a black box designed to allow people who don’t care how the computer works to use the computer. To prevent morons from breaking the internal components, they put up barriers around everything and tell you to keep out.

Linux is like the manual. Yes, it does demand more finesse and active knowledge about how the computer works to drive properly. But you’re in maximum control of it. If you want to pop the hood and tinker with every facet of its innards for whatever reason, it does not attempt to stop you. It’s all open, laid bare for you to do whatever you want with it.

Linux has a lot of options available to make it more automatic like Windows, if you want it. The difference is that the automatic-ness is completely optional in Linux. Imagine a car that can be automatic most of the time when you don’t care, but can become manual at the drop of a hat when you need it. Linux can be that if you want it to be. Windows can’t.

There’s nothing special about it. Linux distros are one of the options, alongside windows and osx as desktop systems.

What there are are preferences, morals, affordability. Linux is generally free, has different approaches to how the system is structured, how software is installed, how much access to the system you have, and how much responsibility for setting it up you have.

This will also vary from distro to distro, but generally software is installed from the distribution’s repositories, not downloading files from various websites - and instead of having some different scheme for updating every program on your computer, you use a single command (or button in an app) to update your system and all your software. This is one of the main things I love about Linux - you get to update your stuff when you want, all at once.

I’ll tell you why I use it: to use open source software. I noticed whatever freemium program I used on Windows that was cool eventually got enshittified and became spyware. Like fucking clockwork, the author of uTorrent sold out and all the new versions became cancer

Linux has better support for a lot of open source software, you can use a package manager to download most of it, and flatpak for a bunch that’s not there

It’s just so much easier than trying to find the official site for the program you want.

We can’t tell you. It’s a secret.

Short Hipocrisy version, because people I also wrote books there:

Windows sucks your data and tries to put ads everywhere. Linux is a type of operating system, that is free and open source - everybody can make their version. Thus, there are no ads, and the moment they try to spy on you, community picks up the torches. So, people who know their stuff rally behind linux. HOWEVER. Linux isn’t windows - it doesn’t support the same programs and needs you to fight off command line anxiety.

Today linux is basically botherless to work with, but even then, I still had to boot up command line to install some old ass drivers or some shit.

Heck, what’s more - there’s only one/two version of active windows, but there’s many linux distributions (which are the “made by other folk” version I talked before), so you can pick the one that fits you. Most folks recommend Linux Mint as it’s the most Windows like experience, but if you like chromebooks there’s also Peppermint OS, and if you want full versatility there’s also Debian.

https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0&t=297s

Mr. Kernighan explains it nicely I think.

Linux is free open and hackable, Lemmy is free open and hackable

Also 50% of the population of Lemmy seems to be diehard communists, open source is a similar idea to communism and Microsoft is a pretty good representation of late stage capitalism