It happened really slowly for me, over a period of years. We have multiple PCs (several media PCs, a home server, and our personal PCs) that we’ve built over the years. Aside from our personal PCs, the OS chosen was always just whatever was free to us at the time. Over time this became overwhelmingly Linux. But the real turning point for me at least was the end of 2021.

Our oldest media PC still had Win 7 on it and it was showing it’s age. We’d had a lot going on in our lives when Win 7 support ended, and upgrading it was just not a priority until then. Long story short, I put Ubuntu on it.

While I definitely had my gripes about Ubuntu (which caused me to move to Mint a few months later), it was nothing compared to the problems I’d had with Win 10 on my personal machine a couple years prior. Compared to Windows, everything was just so… Easy. I didn’t have to fight for my right to just change shit I didn’t like. Installing applications was a fucking dream. Most games I cared about playing worked as well or better than they did on Windows.

So I put Mint on my personal machine and never looked back. Moved over to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed a few months after that, but I’m thinking about going back to Mint now that 22 is out.

TL;DR I was real tired of paying for software that would try to tell me what I could and couldn’t do. Thought Linux was “too hard,” found out it’s not (at least for me).

OpenSUSE user here, “patiently” waiting for it to hit the repos.

The amount of anxiety I’d get just posting comments on reddit was insane. I’d spend a stupid amount of time rereading and editing my comment, and then there was still probably a 50% chance I’d discard it anyway. On Lemmy, after an adjustment period, it’s much easier. I don’t think I realized how hostile and toxic a lot of online spaces really are.

This is a really good point, I never thought about this. While we still haven’t seen the anti-adblock message from YT (Firefox + uBlock Origin on Linux Mint), we’ve been using Nebula more and more lately. It would be great if there was a similar service for quality kids content. As it stands we stick to just a couple YT channels for our 2.5 year old because of how much absolute, irredeemable garbage there is targeted at kids there. I can’t imagine how shit the ads are for them.

My husband is an engineer that works in plants and factories. The last three places he’s worked at were rural, or at least further from the city center. COL is typically lower in these areas, too, so lot of people get by on lower paying factory or service jobs, and as someone else said, a lot of retirees, too.