I’m at roughly 7 years without Windows. PopOS has been rock solid for the entire time, and I installed it mostly by accident. I can just click to install games from Steam, my containers run unbelievably fast, as do my games and media. I even replaced the hardware, and the system booted up and just worked. The only issue I had was installing conflicting NVidia drivers, at which point all I had to do was boot into a terminal and run: sudo apt remove drivers && sudo apt install drivers. I rebooted and boom everything worked.

I stopped using Windows when I got an update prompt while playing a game that had two options I had never seen before, and was shocked to see at the time: “Now” or “Ok”. After clicking “Ok” the system waited a few minutes and then rebooted, causing me to lose the game, and get issued a short ban for leaving a game. And that was just the final straw. A few months prior, a Windows update corrupted two drives (NTFS) and I wasn’t able to repair them. Probably six months before either of those I was left with an inoperable system after a botched driver update for my (NVidia) GPU that caused me to do a full reinstall. Those are just issues I can remember.

Windows was a nightmare for me, in a way Linux has not been. In fact Ive had such a good time in Linux, I stopped buying Macs as well.

It’s not self-inflicted or being forced to hate windows, it’s just that for a lot of folks, myself included, Linux is a measurably better experience. If Windows works for you, that’s great, congrats I’m happy for you. But I think it’s weird to say Windows hate is forced or self-inflicted.