Anyone using Linux here remember their first time using it? Why did you switch and what was it like?
IIRC I tried ubuntu first because back then it was unanimously the most recommended "noob distro" (nowadays that's mint, for very good reasons). It was bad and I hated it, the apple-like UI felt even worse than windows and I haven't read anything about how linux works so installing software left me frustrated. I gave up after a few days. I do not remember the reason for trying it out, maybe just curiosity.
After some time, I tried out Manjaro, I think mostly because I was feeling more and more schizo about windows spying - although I don't think I felt too strongly about it back then. It still wasn't pleasant, I didn't see the point and it still just felt like "knockoff windows".
Then again, around late 2019 or early 2020 (I know it was just before corona, manjaro must have been ~2018, ubuntu no idea), I was watching youtube and Luke Smiths videos have been showing me just how good linux can be if you configure it yourself and familiarize yourself with the tools you want to use. So I gave arch a try from his guide, used LARBS, too, modified that to suit me, since he included a helpful guide for doing that. For a few weeks I was dual-booting, and using both windows and linux, but gradually I was just using linux more and more because it genuinely felt better to use than windows.
I have to say that having to do a lot of that manual work and reading some of the wiki during arch install definitely helped me understand more about how linux works - and thus made me not give up due to a lack of knowledge like previously.
I still have a dual boot setup on my main PC, I keep the old windows partition in case I ever want to play any game - because I don't want to bother with wine and such for inferior experience, but I almost never use it. Last time I booted it was when KCD2 came out.
Nowadays I'm playing around with OpenBSD/Gentoo for my server, and I want to try out Antix/Artix on my laptop to see if I can use it instead of arch to avoid systemd.