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

My Linux Journey - Part 2

If you haven’t read the previous part, I’d highly suggest you read that one first.

In this part I’m going to go over where distro hopping lead me.

Switching to Arch Linux

My start with Arch Linux was pretty rough. At that time I was still using a fairly old PC as my main desktop and I had an Nvidia GPU. You can imagine where this goes if a novice user tries to configure random things that they’re not supposed to… the OS breaks… A LOT. That’s exactly what I did. Whilst installing an Nvidia driver isn’t hard, not rtfm certainly doesn’t help if you don’t know what you’re doing. On my first full week of having Arch, I spent basically all my time reinstalling the OS over and over again because I didn’t know how to fix my OS at that time. This then started annoying me, so I read through basically one quarter of the Arch Wiki to not miss anything.

One of my main reasons for switching to Arch was that ZorinOS had packages that were too outdated for my liking. Additionally, my disliking for Flatpaks and Snaps started to form around that time when I was fighting with the flathub version of Steam.

Arch + GNOME

Since I was used to the GNOME user interface (well sorta), I decided to go with GNOME on my Laptop and Desktop. The switch from GNOME 3.38 to GNOME 41 was truly remarkable, GNOME felt even cleaner and I still to this day like GNOME a lot. During this time, the amount of reinstalls also decreased rapidly from about one per week to one per month. But at some point, GNOME also got kinda boring, and I started exchanging applications I didn’t like all that much, like Nautilus, GNOME’s file manager, which was too simplistic for what I was using it, so I switched to Dolphin, the KDE file editor.

Arch + KDE

At some point I decided to give KDE a try and I switched to it full time on both my laptop and desktop and I also switched full time to the KDE apps from the GNOME apps to get the full picture. My KDE configuration started from being very GNOME-like to evolving past it and giving it my own touch. I did really enjoy the customization that KDE offers and I made full use of it, having two completely different looking user interfaces on my PC and Laptop. This ended up being kinda stupid, as I couldn’t build muscle memory. So when I built my new PC, I also redid the look and feel of my KDE install and I stuck with it until I switched back to GNOME on my Laptop.

Arch + GNOME again

Not having good touchpad gestures started annoying me after about half a year of using KDE, so on my laptop only, I switched back to GNOME, as the touchpad gestures on GNOME are even more mature than they are on macOS. At that time I was also using Macs quite often as I was developing some iOS apps and I really started to enjoy using touchpads, so I had to have good touchpad gestures on my laptop as well.

Starting to develop much more frequently

Around the time of switching to Arch, I also started developing software much more frequently. I started writing code much more frequently and by June 2023 I have reached a quote of coding every single day for at least a few minutes. This can be either working on my websites, developing open source projects or many other things. I started to appreciate being on Linux much more, the more I got into developing more complex applications, as things just work and installing tools, etc is so much easier with a package manager to keep things up to date. With my switch to Arch Linux, I also entirely ditched graphical software stores and since then I am using terminal-based package managers exclusively.

pip and npm both tried to break my system repeatedly when installing packages, but npm was more of my fault as I installed packages globally. Luckily I also learned to fix my mess and managed to salvage my system without having to reinstall.

In autumn 2022 I also changed my IDE from PyCharm to first VSCode, then to VSCodium by the end of the year. I have since stuck to that editor, and I am not really looking to replace it any time soon.

Did you ever consider switching back to Windows?

In short, no, never. There are a few instances, where I’d have loved to use another OS, like for video editing, but I’d never want to go back to Windows, as it is just plain awful for me. I’d much rather daily drive FreeBSD than Windows, even though FreeBSD is fairly limited. But since you can do coding on it, this’d be something I’d be willing to do. Also, most of the Linux software runs on FreeBSD anyway, so that wouldn’t even be a big deal.

macOS however, I have used regularly to do some music editing and to develop iOS apps, as Logic Pro X only runs on macOS, which is in my opinion one of the best if not the best music editing software. Also, macOS allows you to use a terminal that is actually competent and especially that I am familiar with. You can even install the fish shell on it.

So in long, also no. One could argue that I hate Windows, which I would agree to, to a certain extent at least. I strongly dislike it, that’s for sure.