I ran Manjaro Linux as my daily driver a few years ago but slowly phased it out for Windows for some reason, and I’m finally back using Linux (currently Linux Mint). I gotta say, I don’t know why I ever switched back to Windows. There’s just so much freedom Linux gives you right off the bat that Windows is just plain stubborn about. The final straw for me was a couple weeks ago when Microsoft added a Copilot (Bing AI) Shortcut to my Windows 11 taskbar. They’d already added ads to my start menu and preinstalled a bunch of garbage that should be opt-in, not opt-out, so I was just fed up with it at that point. Plus, Linux is so much more customizable. Been running Mint for about a week and a half now, and honestly, I don’t think I’ll be using Windows much anymore.
Well, if obviously comes from the world of cars. My guess is that its use there dates back to before PCs. It just make sense that people that already used it for cars would apply it to computers. It is hard to know the timing. Probably at the point that at least some people started to have access to more than one.