Linux

Early in the summer of 2025, I impulsively decided I would switch my primary OS from Windows to Linux.

The inciting factor was, I believe, Windows mysteriously removing the date from under my clock, again. It had done it randomly before, and my clock eventually returned just as randomly.

I need to have the date under my clock, or I won't know what day it is.

This wasn't the only issue, of course. the previous year, I had a brief run in with Windows update, which for some reason uninstalled my graphics drivers and left me with a PC that booted up into a black screen. With the end of Windows 10 on the horizon, and zero desire to use Microsoft developed software while they're a target of BDS, the stars aligned.

To cut to the chase, it went great. I picked Arch Linux, a nerdy, minimal distro. I did want to "learn" Linux, and get to a similar level of confidence as I'd had with Windows. No point being afraid of the terminal, even if I was exposing myself to potential self-inflicted nightmares. Arch is fine - i used the archinstall script, ignored the wiki (at first), chose KDE Plasma as the most suitable and modern environment for a work/play desktop, and it all just worked. Running off ethernet, and having a wired mouse and keyboard probably helped. My wireless headset (with dongle) worked fine, as did using a Dualsense PS5 controller. Generally all the issues I ran into fell under the category of "enjoyable to resolve", which maybe just indicates I'm a huge nerd who had too much time on his hands. Things like:

• Disabling the awful middle click paste option - incomprehensible Linux thing where middle click will paste any currently selected text independent of the clipboard.
• Discord refusing to launch when there was an update that hadn't hit the Arch repos yet.
• Mounting my NTFS (Windows file system) storage drive.
• Probably many other smaller things that I've already forgotten!

I also used CachyOS, which is based on Arch with a nice default setup, for a few weeks on a loaned computer while visiting my parents. It was also a really solid experience. I used it as an opportunity to try out the bootloader Limine, and it made me decide to switch my home PC over from systemd-boot. i hadn't had any real issues with systemd-boot, but the cute theming for Limine along with the ability to boot into snapper snapshots or Windows from it was something I thought worthwhile. Miraculously, I migrated from systemd-boot and mkinitcpio to Limine and Booster without blowing anything up, just one minor hiccup (slightly misconfigured limine.conf) that I was able to quickly resolve from a live-usb. Booster especially is a pretty good quality of life upgrade if you're updating the system often, it's noticeably speedier.

I mentioned booting back into windows, and I needed to on two occasions - both for playing games with anticheat incompatibility with Linux, Fate Trigger (free-to-play anime battle royale, surprisingly entertaining), and the Battlefield 6 open beta. everything else has just worked, at worst with some proton version selection - protondb is a great reference.

I've also been playing with Raspberry Pi OS (basically Debian) on a Raspberry Pi 5, which has been fun to experiment with. Running a lighttpd web server, trying out Jellyfin (against the recommendation of the Jellyfin docs, it just barely works okay without GPU acceleration), and setting up torrents with a web UI.

I think I'd summarize my overall experience so far with Linux as basically making the computer fun again. As i said earlier, maybe I'm just a huge nerd, but running into issues that are within my power to fix is deeply satisfying.

Quick summary of some of the shit I use:

• Arch Linux (with the Zen kernel)
• BTRFS
• Booster & Limine
• KDE Plasma (on Wayland)
• nushell, with a Starship prompt.
• Aura as a pacman wrapper that can grab from the AUR.
• And most importantly, micro as an actual usable CLI text editor :)

Update (25 Oct 25):

I was using yakuake for a dropdown terminal, which was mostly fine but had some minor rendering issues. I've just switched over to ghostty, which seems great and renders perfectly. It does support a Quake mode, it's called "quick-terminal" in the config. Easy to setup, comes with a systemd service to autostart which is nice. Initial impressions are good.