My First Year on Linux
It's kinda wild to look back on it, but yeah, this month marks my first year using Linux!! So I thought it'd be fun to look back on everything that happened before, between and now.
First things first though, I was always scared of using Linux as I felt it was too complicated from what I saw everywhere, and even when I did attempt to give it a try back in 2020 with Ubuntu, the very next day the PC didn't want to boot up at all, which made me feel this kind of operative system was too "tech-savvy oriented", so I stuck with Windows 10 for the next few years.
As its End of Life approached closer and closer, I had to update my PC, so I wanted to try updating to Windows 11 and... It did not work, because my motherboard lacks that dreaded TPM 2.0 chip. At the time I just finished upgrading my PC from a potato in the literal sense to one that did everything I use it for (gaming, art, browsing, etc.) good enough, and I did not want to upgrade my hardware yet again because everything worked pretty well, even though Microsoft seems to think its outdated, but I decided I would wait till October 2025 to see my options.
The thing is, between that time I tried to update to Windows 11 to the next few months, my experience with Windows kept worsening more and more.
May it be the system lagging more often, using more and more resources out of nowhere, how bloated it started to feel, how things like the search bar gave me web results instead of files in my system??
But what pushed me to switch from Windows now was something very insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but something that still pissed me off due to everything prior. When I finished updating my PC one time, when I checked again I had the Copilot shortcut added to my taskbar.
I do not want your AI, I did not agree to having this in along with your browser that you keep shoving in every damn web feature, I did not want to have ads for Candy Crush in my start menu, I do not want this treatment you kept giving me for using the system.
That's when I snapped with Windows, and decided to switch off it now.
That's when Linux came into the picture, and I was hesitant at first because of both what I heard of it and my personal experience with Ubuntu, but a friend insisted for me to give it a shot again, so after figuring out if I wanted to do it or not, I went with it.
One call figuring out how to install it on my system later, I ended up having Linux Mint in my PC along with Windows 10, as a dual boot to test it out. We could not figure out how to make GRUB work (the boot loader that usually comes with Linux Distros) but from what I tried Linux Mint, I just liked it!
It was faster and felt way smoother than Windows, it didn't take an absurd amount of storage just from the system files, I could actually have a functioning search function, no AI anywhere, and even more importantly for me, I could customize it however I wanted to. Back when I was on Windows I tried different third party apps to achieve that, but here it was all built in, and I could do even more things, like add a second taskbar (panel on Linux).
I liked it so much in fact, that a week or 2 after installing that partition, I decided to nuke the windows partition and have Linux Mint as my main system. This time I installed it by myself and everything, it all felt so nice.
It felt weird for me how I didn't see any of the complains I heard online on Mint, like how you need to use the terminal at all times (everything in Mint can be done via GUI), how you can break everything at any time (Mint never broke in all my time using it), or how unhelpful and elitist/loud the community is (every time I needed help for something, everyone was very kind).
Also, Proton exists, which helped me to play most games on my Steam library from Linux just fine thanks to it being a compatibility layer for translating Windows stuff to Linux. at first I checked every game status on ProtonDB (an user contributed tracking of how well games work with Proton) but nowadays unless that game has an Anti-cheat, I just don't check it and it works fine every time, just hitting play they already work out of the box.
Over time, I wanted to try out different things from Linux, Mint was nice and all yeah, but there was things like KDE, GNOME and the at-the-time upcoming COSMIC desktop, along with Fedora and Arch that looked interesting enough, so I ended up giving them a shot each and every one.
Fedora KDE worked perfectly for me post install, though I needed to mess with the terminal every time to finish the set up as its lacking a few non-free dependencies I need. Every time a week or so passed though, something kept breaking in one way or another, and it took me weeks to find answers to those.
Fedora GNOME had the same post-install shenanigans as the one above, but it was far more stable, akin to Mint, even if I tried it for a tiny bit everything felt nice.
I tried COSMIC through Fedora, and it worked... well enough, though it was a bit laggy in some parts and buggy in others, though that's to be expected as it's in beta at the time of writing this. I'd definitely come back to it if the opportunity arises.
I also tried installing Arch and it did not work. I tried going through Archinstall but I kept getting one error after another, and the normal installation process was too complex for me, so I ended giving up on that idea.
Since then I started trying out more alternatives for apps, like Pixelorama for Pixel Art, Heroic for Epic Games Store/GOG/Amazon games, Akegrator for RSS Feeds, it all worked nicely!!
I stuck with Fedora KDE for most of that time until recently, where I decided to switch to Kubuntu.
And yeah I know, Ubuntu is bad and so are Snaps plus my last experience with Ubuntu was terrible, but I wanted to use KDE Plasma in a more stable way, Fedora KDE was nice and all, but it kept breaking the more time I used it and, as someone who works on arts and the like, I cannot really allow myself to risk losing those files, so Kubuntu seemed like the best option for me and hey, it is! I'd even dare to say it feels more stable than Mint, while still keeping things like KDE Plasma and Wayland which I use often.
If there's something I would say to the past me in 2020 is to try giving Linux a time again, because it's damn good. Thank you NullDott for helping me with this transition from one OS to the other.
Anyways, I'm off to remove the french language from my Linux Distro, bye!
- Anubi "Xenia" Arts