Windows has so much pushy behavior - trying to trick you into using Edge, turning on OneDrive and syncing files in the background (eating bandwidth in the process), locking you out of the machine while OS updates run.

When I switched to Linux Mint in 2015, the most surprising result was how much smoother and frictionless everything became.

I genuinely believe that the “average” user outlined above would be served well by Mint. Why would I not tell people to use it?

Lots of good points have already been made, so I’ll just share a different one. IMO Linux is a lot more conducive to sane systems administration. It is designed to be used and maintained, not to sell licenses or collect marketable data or grow a media/software platform or all the other things that shape Windows.

When you start poking at the underbelly of Windows, you see decades of aged, decayed infrastructure in various stages of functionality, largely undocumented and closed-source. There are ungodly webs of inscrutable APIs and drivers and frameworks and DLLs and bullshit that is just kind of a pain to think about. Windows sys admin is at least part of my job and I still find it annoying. Venturing outside the happy path is painful.

On Linux, it feels more like a normal part of life. You might run into obscure issues, but chances are there is documentation that could help, or maybe source code, and maybe there’s a forum post about it (with replies from humans, not Microsoft spambots). It feels more like you’re working with the community instead of working against Microsoft.

What is it that they typically get out of Linux?

I’m a 25 year Linux user (Arch BTW) I’m not sure I get anything out of Linux that would be appreciated by someone who doesn’t care about anything other than getting a simple job done with tools they don’t care to think about.

This is like asking what the driver of a high quality, highly capable car gets from their car that would appeal to someone more than happy with their Yaris.

Also note, that in all my years, I’ve hardly had to think much about the kernel directly unless I’m trying something unusual. I don’t typically tinker or reinstall, my laptop works day in and day out and I do my job on it.

It seems apt

May trigger some folks here by using apt. :)

I’ve been a linux user off-and-on for about ten years. In the last two years, I’ve worked to switch to it exclusively, with the last holdout being my gaming rig that has been Windows-free for 1-1.5 years. I rely on Arch, Debian, and Pop for my daily drivers, but I’m also always trying to suggest that distro doesn’t matter a whole lot, except to simplify setup for certain use cases.

But as to the crux of your question: for me, the appeal comes down to a few different factors.

Freedom

This is the one absolutely everyone says. It’s true in some senses, but not in others. For example, I do have more or less complete freedom over my own hardware if I am using a purely FOSS setup. There is a certain power in that, but moreover, it feels like a necessity – I paid for the hardware, and am wholly opposed to handing over usage rights to it to some software black box that could be doing things outside of my best interests. Is that tinfoil hat-ty? Yep. But I also do think it’s realistic.

Practicality

This might seem out of place given Linux’s history. It’s better known as a tinkerer’s OS with lesser known procedures and mechanisms than as an easy, practical OS. But Linux has changed by leaps and bounds since its earlier days. It’s no longer difficult to set up (unless you want some crazy shit, but that’s true on the Windows side too and thus can be factored out).

I measure practicality in a few different ways. Does the machine do what I need it to? Does it waste resources doing so? Does it do things I don’t want it to do? Is it hard to do the things I need to do on the machine?

In my own experience, Linux does what I need it to do. It does it without wasting as many resources as Windows (I was still on an i7 4790k until last week, because it was plenty – I only upgraded for gaming performance). It doesn’t do things I don’t ask it to, and even if it did, I could adjust it.

The common annoyance of Windows Update being constantly in your face is a thing. Ads in the start menu. Bloatware. All of those things I don’t want the hardware that I paid for to be doing. All of those things make Windows less practical for daily use.

But what about software support? What if I need something that only runs on Windows? First, these instances are fewer and fewer. Gaming was the biggest of elephants in the room, and frankly, I find Linux gaming superior to Windows now. I can run DX12 games and pre-cache the shaders, causing less stutter in general as a result. For AMD, the graphics drivers are in the Linux kernel – never do I need to worry about manual video driver installs again. Yes, some games do not perform as well through Proton – but some perform at parity and others run better than on Windows.

There are some clear examples of software with no real Linux alternative, e.g. Adobe suite: You could use GIMP instead of Photoshop for many tasks, but not all. You could opt for Inkscape instead of Illustrator, except it doesn’t support CMYK and some other features. Need Premiere? Then you probably actually need Premiere. There isn’t really a good way to run the Windows versions (unless they now work in WINE or even Proton – I haven’t looked into it in some time), so if you need them, you may be SOL. But many people do not need them, myself included, and the alternatives work great for the limited use cases I have elsewhere.

The new reliance on web apps for so many things has been an obvious boon for Linux. You can have the same browser experience but without the extra overhead in the back.

All of this adds up, in my view, to an experience that is superior on the Linux side, and thus I stick with it.

Community

Believe it or not, this is a big one. Stereotypes aside, the Linux community (and FOSS community) in general is amazing to be a part of. You usually don’t see people discussing the finer points of Windows outside of corporate events. But Linux still rides that line between hobby and necessity. The community is one of the things that keeps computing fun, but at this point Windows just feels like the soulless. corporate option. In contrast, for as stable and easy as modern Linux can be, it can also still be a tinkerer’s playground at heart.

All of these things taken together – the freedom, the practicality, keeping the fun in computing – make Linux an obvious choice in my opinion. I really have not looked back.

People who prefer Linux generally like full control over their computer, and accept that manual control requires manual work, or are excited about learning the inner workings of their PC. These are the DIY deck builders who crown their joists and use stainless fasteners. The cooks who hone and strop their knives. The swimmers who shave their bodies. The backyard gardeners who send soil samples to the extension service and rotate their vegetables in their 1/8 acre homes. All otherwise normal and average folks who are passionate about getting the most out of some facet of their lives. And all of this stuff is “silly” or “unnecessary” to most people who build a deck, cook dinner every night, swim at the community pool, or have flowers in their yards. And so even if Linux is objectively better, it’s pretty likely the average user isn’t going to see any advantage to it.

I’m a long time Linux user and a programmer. What I love about it (besides privacy, non-pushiness etc.) is that I can pull pretty much whatever program or tool I need from package manager and that command-line lets me integrate many command line tools with graphical apps.

Just yesterday I made a little script that pulls weather data from a “non-official” weather station that is closer to me and stores it in a csv-file, then I could bind a key combination to fire another script that plots and shows me that data. It’s just a few command line tools mashed together. A few days ago I wrote little scripts that control lighting in my house and I can bind keys to those as well… maybe that’s “tinkering” too but they’re small things that make my life a little bit better :) Is that impossible to do in Windows? No, but Linux has much less friction.

Speaking as someone who’s still transitioning from windows to Linux on his machines…

1. My main concern is that the software I use should feel like it’s there for ME, not for the company it’s from. Windows does not feel like it’s putting me first. Many have covered all the reasons in detail, but I don’t like having to fight my OS to get things the way I want them… Which is funny because

2. Yeah, its fun to tinker with Linux, but there is some fighting to get it to do what you want, especially when you’re new to it. For instance, I’m on KDE, I set up a very aesthetic top bar with a calendar & time widget in the middle. It took me MONTHS and countless small sessions of reading to get my email’s events and special dates to show up on the calendar. I was missing KOrganizer, as well as some extra settings that only show up on the calendar widget if you have KOrganizer installed. I’ve yet to figure out how to refresh the data to get up to date info, because so far it seems like the data just stays stale. I’ll eventually get to it.

I also randomly corrupted my partition during an update and spent a good 5 hours getting it back. I’m experienced enough that I wasn’t worried at all, and I was even enjoying the process at the beginning…but by the end of it, I was just annoyed. The solution? Yeah my distro’s documentation mentions a specific command, “rebuild-kernels” which instantly fixed my partition. It was like the second sentence in an article about my bootloader. I felt stupid for how simple that was, compared to how much I was doing with other suggestions I found online…

So yeah, point is, it’s tough, and I personally am not fond of it, since I just want my PC to let me do my thing while I let it do its thing. Even then, I would still rather deal with that kind of thing than deal with Microsoft’s or Apple’s shenanigans (also, kinda hoping that immutable distro’s aren’t as tedious, even though I know they will be, cause I think that would be an even more ideal system, one that’s very tough to corrupt).

3. I totally get the sentiment on overpowered hardware. The nice thing about this era of Computing is that you can do a lot of things that you currently pay for as a service online. You just need some of that overpowered hardware you might already have lying around. Want to stop paying for a cloud photo backup? You can spin up an immich server. Too many streaming services with too little content? Fuck em, spin up a Jellyfin or Plex instance, automate content downloads with Arr services, hell, create your own subtitles with a speech to text language model running on your own equipment. Philips suddenly wants you to have an account to turn on your lightbulbs? Throw in home assistant to the stage, tell your lightbulbs to know their place. LastPass leaked your passwords? Throw them into Vaultwarden, throw your second factor in there as well (or don’t, convenience vs security, and I’m too fucking lazy to care).

The amount of stuff that can be self hosted is insane, and it can absolutely replace a lot of the things you’re currently using, and it can all happen in a specialized Linux-based OS for running a bunch of services, such as Proxmox, TrueNAS Scale, unRAID, etc.

In the end, though, there’s a lot of “having to learn new things” and “loving to tinker” needed for a lot of it. It’s fine that your average user isn’t interested. It’s sad for those of us who care, who truly believe we need to regain most of our freedom from this tech, but it’s totally not the end of the world either. Maybe there’s no appeal to the average user…yet.

My advice would always be to try, say, Linux mint on a spare laptop, and force yourself to use it for casual stuff. Give it a try, and if it geeks out on you too much for your liking, you go back to your platform of choice. No biggie, it just doesn’t hurt to see what’s on the other side. Who knows, maybe you don’t mind the casual tinkering that you may encounter, maybe you don’t even feel a difference in day to day use compared to your platform of choice, or hopefully you like it even more because it might do things in an easier manner than you’re used to. If that’s the case, then think about whether you’re ok with Apple’s walled garden, or Microsoft’s occasional antitrust infringements, or if you might simply want something to work your way and not the creating company’s way.

You said performance doesn’t matter. It does. If you have an older system or a system that due to Microsoft’s strict windows 11 requirement feels slow or is not able to have the latest OS, Linux can be quite worthy, as it tends to be quite lightweight. For simpler use cases, like general web browsing or simpler file editing, open source utilities are very much usable and delightful to use. In Linux, you will never (unless NVIDIA is thrown to the mix or some pesky Wi-Fi cards) have driver issues. Printers, that horrible nightmare on windows, are actually usable on Linux. For more complex documents, nowadays, with the improvements in wine, you can pretty much just install a better office suite. And for slightly more than basic users, the customisation is more than worth the slight inconvenience Linux may cause. Also, sometimes Linux just gets new features first, like workspaces, something that only came to windows 11, and has existed for years on Linux