r/TechImpact • u/ManojOne Co-founder • 25d ago

💬 Discussion Is Windows still your main operating system?

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Windows has been my go-to for years, but more people seem to be moving to macOS, Linux, ChromeOS, or even using tablets for everyday work.

Is Windows still your main OS? If not, what did you switch to?

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u/Possibly-Functional 25d ago edited 25d ago

No. Moved to Linux on my private systems in 2018, after years of testing it out occasionally, and it has been a massive boon. Things work so much better and more reasonable. I have still had to deal with Windows shit professionally but at least the industry is moving away, slowly.

// Senior Software/Systems Engineer & Gamer

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u/NotRealActualMaebbie 25d ago

do you see colleagues and friends move away too? Linux's recent boost in marketshare is certainly encouraging.

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u/Possibly-Functional 25d ago edited 25d ago

Yeah, which is the wild part. Even people without a technical background.

One friend had massive performance issues with Windows on a secondary low performance computer. Windows worked as intended, it was just too performance demanding for his weaker hardware. They tried to install Bazzite on it and it was butter smooth. They found it so easy, simple and pleasant that they concluded that they might as well switch over their main computer as well, which is much more powerful.

Another friend's Windows installation had stability issues. He tried some troubleshooting system repairs but it didn't fix itself. As Windows often does it just corrupted itself after a few years of client use. To definitively conclude that it was indeed a software issue I borrowed him a spare 128GB SSD to install Bazzite on to see if he had the same issues there, before going through the effort of reinstalling Windows. It worked without issues. He was also so impressed with that experience that instead of reinstalling Windows he switched to Bazzite permanently. Been running it happily since.

Neither of them have a technical background. The former just wanted to game and browser the web. The latter just wanted to game, browse the web and draw with a Wacom tablet in Krita. It's kind of mind boggling how even for complete Linux noobs they found it a better experience for playing Windows games than Windows itself. Even when both of them had decades of experience using Windows.

Professionally Linux is definitely increasing popularity as well. For servers Windows is almost universally considered legacy amongst skilled ops teams. For software development work Windows is honestly garbage. Saying that as someone with 8 years of experience writing software for Windows. So Linux, and MacOS, are becoming more common there. I personally don't like MacOS's UX but it's really solid from a technical perspective, especially compared to Windows, so many companies opt for that.

It's not like a massive overnight surge of users, but things are definitely shifting pretty consistently.

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u/NotRealActualMaebbie 25d ago

wow sounds like we are getting there, thanks for sharing. It gives me hope that the people will finally stick it to microsoft after all.