1. Lighter
2. Better on weaker hardware
3. More options how you set up your system: Desktop Environments/Window Managers.
4. Free and Open Source (so no paying out the arse for Windows).
5. More Software options.
6. Better Security.
7. No monitoring by your OS provider.

It depends on the user. If you'll install GNU/Linux distribution as a nooby, choose some easy distribution - most probably it will install a lot of bloatware, and possibly could be unstable... But if you'll go into details and learn the basic you could install some better distro, which you will install manually, and you will install all you need, no bloat. If you will, here are the perks:

• Stability (it also depends on your hardware.. NVIDIA for example is pretty bad, but Intel or AMD is great. Must be better stability than on Windows, if you'll not fk up)
• Performance (since you installed everything by yourself, and you will have no bloat, telemetry and etc. you will run the OS with great performance)
• Security (vulns on big distros are getting fixed fastly, and there are less vulns than on Windows, also less viruses you could get on a desktop)
• Customizability (you could change anything you want, desktop environment, sometimes init system, pretty much anything but it depends on a distro and your skills)

Me, as a.. I would say half a professional GNU/Linux user, would recommend Void Linux for half-experienced or experienced user, because I like the runit init system and the stability, even though it's rolling model.

But for a newbie... I don't know. All of them I tried - they had problems. So it's better to either endure, either start from a not-so-hard distro like Void Linux.

EDIT: oh yeah.. I read a lot of comments here and I would also add that the system is free, open-source (with Linux-libre), and it's also not so bad at gaming since Steam made Proton, a fork of Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator). I also game sometimes and I use Lutris.. Don't know if there any other cooler alternative heh.

Gaming. I know Steam has done a lot for Linux gaming but most game developers focus on Windows.

Not all games run on Linux and some require extra steps. Some wont run on Linux, period. Driver supports and new features are always windows first.

Some people use other store fronts, other than Steam. It is a pain to run them on Linux. there are several launchers on Linux but they don't work for all games and support is not consistent.

For gaming, it is still windows, not Linux or Mac OS.

What finally pushed me over the edge was when I was trying to fix something in Windows and it said I couldn’t access that part of the OS. Bitch, you work for me, not the other way around. I’ve flopped back and forth between Linux and Windows for decades and just decided that anything I couldn’t do in Linux I just wouldn’t do. So far, I haven’t really encountered anything. With how much of my average computing is done in a browser these days, Firefox doesn’t really care which OS it’s running on.

Well, you actually own it for one, given Linux is an open platform, you're generally not at some corporation's will unlike with closed platforms like Windows or even macOS, you're also not arbitrarily locked out of running it on hardware made before a certain date unlike with Win11; as long as the kernel supports it, it should run on your hardware, where Windows arbitrarily locks out anything older than Zen+ or Kaby Lake without a modded install medium starting with Win11, and it generally uses less resources than Windows nowadays although that varies based on configuration.

I honestly don’t know. Every OS has its goods & bads. But generally I think it just comes down to whatever’s available. Personally, I use:
Windows on my work laptop (because that’s what they gave me),
MacOS on my personal laptop (because I like it),
Ubuntu on my home automation / media server (because it was free).

No spyware, much better performance and wear on your hardware. Actual control over your devices. The downside is, linux is complicated and a pain to learn how to use or maintain. Windows is easy to use but so is a vtech laptop which is essentiallly the trade off. It used to be that windows was easy to use and open as a platform, but microsoft is doing everything in its power to ruin windows. The modern developers also really suck and the modern codebase is buggy as hell. The OS kills your harddisks and ssds, even before the new broekn update because they are constantly scanning your files to send signitures to palantir or whatever. They are removing basic functionality and a few years from now I imagine you wont even be allowed to close or open apps, like with Android. It will just be full of ads and spyware and you will have to pay a subscription to use it or something. People have been jumping ship because at this point continuing to use windows is just going to make your life painful in the future.

Oh, now this is a shitpost.

Thought about downvoting, then realized it is top-tier.

I'm glad I noticed what community this was posted in before I responded.

It's free and runs stuff good.