This article is about how I switched to Linux as a daily driver and I absolutely fell in love with it.
After being a hardcore gamer for over a decade, I recently lost pretty much most of the interest I had towards gaming. Well… mostly towards “competitive” gaming. I’ve covered this topic in a different post already, so if you are interested you can read it here.
I was fairly bored of my computer in the last couple of months. There was nothing really interesting happening there. I’d boot up my PC, launch a videogame and turn off the PC after 30 minutes, because I’d be bored. So a couple of weeks ago I had an idea of switching to Linux on my desktop as a daily driver.
I’ve been using Linux on my servers for around 6 years now, but never on a desktop as a daily driver until a few weeks ago. (I know, I know… rookie numbers compared to the Linux veterans) Of course I tried different live installations (Ubuntu and Manjaro) in the past, but it has never stuck with me, since most of the time I spent on my PC was playing games.
I started with KDE Neon, it was pretty decent. Everything worked out of the box. This is the closest you can get to a Windows-like experience on Linux in my opinion. But after a few hours of playing around I ran into issues with installing new applications comfortably. It’s mostly my issue, because I didn’t really want to use snap or flatpak packages. So I bit the bullet and went to Arch.
Yeah, I use Arch btw.
I used the “new” installation script provided by Arch, it actually worked really great and made the installation relatively user-friendly. Don’t be mad at me for using an installation script. It’s meant to be used, right? … right? Whatever… I wanted to try something other than Plasma, so I went with Xfce, and that’s when I really started falling in love with Linux.
Tinkering with the system to make it work exactly how you want it. That’s what I really liked about all of this. Setting up keybinds, using workspaces, playing with themes etc. I spent days setting up Xfce and learning how Linux works. In the past I would occasionally watch different Linux YouTube channels. Now I was watching their content left and right, gathering information and trying stuff out.
After watching ton of videos about Linux, I really liked how most of their desktops looked and heard them mention tiling window managers, so I opened up the Arch Wiki and started looking stuff up. I ended up picking i3.
This is where I am now. Setting up i3, tinkering with little things to make the system work exactly how I want it. I hope this is not where my “Linux journey” ends.
Thank you for reading.