Attribution for featured image:

Thanks to “malkowitch” for the feature graphic of this post. No modifications were made. This image is licensed under the CC BY 3.0 licence

The start of my Linux journey

In autumn 2021, after getting more and more fed up with Windows and also really getting into software development, Windows just didn’t cut it anymore. So I decided to give Linux a shot. Also, Windows 11 was just around the corner and I absolutely hated it.

Selecting a distribution

For me, selecting a Linux distribution wasn’t all that hard, since I had been looking at various distros for quite some time and I had tested out a few of them in both VMs and live boot environments, which is also something I recommend you do.

For obvious reasons, I also had a look at Ubuntu, with it being the most famous Linux distribution for the average PC user, but I didn’t like it all that much. I also gave Linux Mint, Pop!_OS and Fedora a shot, but I ultimately settled on ZorinOS Core 16. It ended up ticking all my boxes at the time, which were:

• Being easy to use for somebody that comes from Windows (aka Windows-Like UI)
• Giving me an introduction to a new style of UI
• Being preconfigured for me, so I can just get started

ZorinOS has multiple different layouts for the desktop which you can choose from, which allows you to slowly move away from Windows, which turned out to be great.

Going full time

Whilst I have never Dual-Booted, I still had a Windows desktop at home, but I ended up using my laptop much more in the weeks after, as I started to much prefer Linux over Windows. So, about one month later, I switched my desktop to Linux as well. At that time I was still using word processors and for some reason OneDrive, so getting OneDrive to work was something I ended up never doing, because I got annoyed setting it up. In retrospect this is something that ended up helping me in the long run, as I now have completely removed Micro$oft, Google and Meta from my life, which is a truly phenomenal feeling.

I also liked the user interface of ZorinOS much more compared to Windows and even though I was at that time still using a Taskbar, it felt so much cleaner. This is especially due to the very nice dark theme ZorinOS has and the fact that it uses GNOME, which to this day still is one of my favourite desktop environments. ZorinOS’s version of GNOME though is GNOME 3.38, which ended up being one of the factors that pushed me towards more rolling distros like Fedora and then Arch Linux.

Switching to Fedora

After spending about 6 months (September to March) on ZorinOS, 5 months of it as my main OS, I wanted to try something new. As I didn’t want to go hard-core yet, I tried to switch to Fedora on my Laptop. But DNF ended up annoying me quite a bit, as it sometimes Did Not Finish…

About one month after switching to Fedora, I gave up and switched to Arch Linux to which I have stuck for the past about one and two thirds of a year at the time of writing, with only a few experiments on other distros, like Gentoo, Debian and Fedora.

Nowadays, there are only a few options of distros I’d actually consider daily driving, which are Debian and Arch, with Fedora and Gentoo being less desired options. Additionally, I have grown a massive hate on Ubuntu because of all their missteps.