One Year on Linux - My Overall Experience

4/4/25

So, a year... Definitely not super long, but enough to change my perspective. Before I used Linux, I would've been considered a typical Windows normie, with maybe a little more computer knowledge than average. I knew how slow and bloated my OS was, but I was complacent because it was the only thing I knew how to use. The only other option without buying a whole new computer was Linux, but it was scary for me. I had to CODE and use a TERMINAL to get my OS to work!?!?!?!? On the other hand though, I'm a leftie and hate massive corporations having monopolies on entire industries and my entire life. Ultimately, my values took priority and I started to look for a distro. I also found out about the Unixporn subreddit (sfw) and ricing around that time and thought it was really cool.

First, I tried out Ubuntu in a VM, poked around in the settings menu, and saw that it had a premium subscription of sorts, and that immediately turned me off. Then I went to install the next most popular option, Linux Mint. It was very friendly and easy to use, and I didn't have to do any research to install software and use it. It (along with SteamOS) killed off any notion I had that Linux was hard. I was about to install Mint on hardware, but then I found out about this "cool kid" distro called Arch. It was supposed to be the HARDEST OS known to man, where you HAVE to use a terminal to do anything, and you HAVE to build the entire OS 100% completely from scratch. I decided to give it a shot in a VM since it's not like it was going to hurt me at all. I tried to read the wiki to install it but it was a little terse for me at the time, but then I found a video install guide that explained everything really well (it was Denshi's video iirc) and I succeeded that time. It definitely helped me get used to using a terminal and editing config files, which I think really helped early on, and I would've learned a lot slower without doing it. I liked Arch, so I installed it on my desktop, laptop, and server (pls dont use arch on a server).

I felt like a god. I was using the hardest system known to man with """zero""" issues. In reality, Arch isn't really harder than any other distro once you get past the initial hump of installing it. I found out about other independent distros, like Debian, Void, Gentoo, and Alpine (all of which i have used at some point). My ego around using specifically Arch died off pretty quick after I got over all of my initial issues. I was using KDE Plasma as my desktop, so it wasn't even that different from something like Mint. My Arch install even decided to nuke itself after a month, by removing some important library during an update, but only took me a couple hours to reinstall and get everything set back up. Everything was working pretty smoothly on that install, and it was a lot lighter and cleaner than my first one. During June of last year I started playing around with tiling window managers, and got into Hyprland (though only on my laptop, i still prefered plasma on my desktop for a while). I had a really cool Ultrakill themed Hyprland setup, but sadly I never backed up the dotfiles so it's lost to time.

I didn't really start distro hopping until September. I got a little bored of Arch and wanted something a little different but still familiar, so I went over to Artix OpenRC on my desktop, and it was identical to Arch except I needed to find shitty service scripts from the AUR instead because the Artix repos are ass. On my laptop, I tried out Void but didn't really like the init system, and then I went to Debian on it for a bit. After a little while, I decided it was time to try Gentoo. Gentoo can be a scary distro. You have to install and the configure the system yourself with a stage tarball, instead of having a command do it for you. You have to compile every package from source (i guess binpkgs exist but that kinda defeats the point). And the package manager, Portage, is one of the most complicated and messy pieces of software I have ever used. The main idea of it is that you can use USE flags to specify what things you build packages with support for. It results in a much lighter and more compact system, but you have to have a really good idea of what you want your system to be and you have to spend time configuring USE flags and fixing dependency issues. I'm probably gonna get flamed for explaining that badly but it's the best I can do. I used Gentoo on both my desktop and laptop from late October until around the beginning of this year. The reason I left it wasn't actually because it was hard or I was actually having problems, I had a great time on Gentoo. I just didn't like how long it took to compile everything from source, and I really didn't need that level of optimization. After Gentoo, I went to Alpine on both machines, which was also an interesting experience. Alpine is a very light distro that uses smaller software like the musl c library to achieve very low resource usage, which is great, but it comes at the cost of software compatibility. There aren't any big proprietary apps that run on it, most notably Steam. To get around this, I used a program called Conty, which is an Arch container that you can run binaries in, and it works really well for the most part. Alpine also has an amazing package manager, apk. Apk is REALLY fast. It can get install Firefox and all of its dependancies in like 10 seconds, and it's really simple to use. Though a couple weeks ago, I felt a little limited by musl, so I went over to Void glibc, where I am today. Obviouly nothing is perfect, I've still spend a lot of time troubleshooting an messing around when my system doesn't work, but the thing is, all of that was harder on Windows. Doing anything beyond some basic customizations is a fucking nightmare because of how restrictive and locked down windows is.

Speaking of Windows, I feel like I should give my stance on tech illiteracy. Personally, I think that proprietary software has completely melted people's brains. With most open source stuff, if there's an error, it'll tell you what went wrong, so anyone with basic reading abilities can go solve the issue themselves, and learn something in the process. I am a complete idiot, and also didn't really have the biggest tech background before I started with Linux. I was a Python kiddie for a while and had a little experience with problem-solving from that, but I'd only say it was enough to get me up to the level of an average person. Anyways, my point is that I'm the dumbest person on the entire planet and still manage to solve my own problems with tech, so anyone can. But on Windows, if something goes wrong with the OS, you just get a blue screen and a middle finger, and you probably have to reinstall. No learning, no progress, no skill. I think this has created an idea that there's some sort of natural separation between the normies and the "tech gurus", but that's really not the case. Switching to Linux and having to solve my own problems while being given the tools to has been easy and taught me a lot.

ANYWAYS

A big part of Linux or any open source project is the community. Everything is created by the community, everything is maintained by the community, and everything is documented by the community. Yet the community is scary. From the outside, everything looks very extreme. I feel like most people just see the Linux community as either the xe/xem plural furries on Arch and Void or the incels and chuds on Gentoo, but that really isn't the case (as long as you don't browse forums lol). Most users are normal people who want to use their computer without megacorporations controlling it, or harmless nerds with an autistic hyperfixation. I didn't really interact with other Linux users at all until I found a small & chill discord server in September (same time i started distro hopping, definitely not a coincidence). I also started my own server recently. Other than that I don't talk to other Linux users too much.

Overall, I've had an almost perfect time on Linux and think that everyone should at least try it. You get to customize your system to be exactly how you want it, and learn a lot in the process. It can take some time but not too much, and it's all very worth it. I have many years of using Linux ahead of me, but I doubt I'll ever learn as much as I did during the first year, let alone as much as YOU (ur much smarter than me) could learn in a year. GO TRY LINUX. YOU WILL NOT REGRET IT.