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I honestly can't even remember what pushed me towards Linux in the first place. But if I were to take a guess it was something like buggy Windows updates. Back when Ubuntu was still shipping Unity by default I remember coming across a video someone made showing off their workflow on Ubuntu Gnome and I was seriously impressed. I think it was how big a role workspaces played in the workflow. As a Windows user, the idea of having multiple workspaces to organize everything you were doing seemed revolutionary and there was just something sexy about Gnome's overview mode. Windows 10 might have had workspaces at the time but they were and still are hard to work with.
So I took the plunge and installed Ubuntu Gnome alongside Windows 10 on my crappy hand-me-down brick of a laptop. I had no idea what I was doing but I was in love. I was still using Windows for a lot of daily tasks though, including for school. I had more of an interest in gaming back then and was too lazy to try using Linux for it.
At some point I just got tired with Ubuntu Gnome. I was having a few issues with it and had the feeling that maybe I'd jumped into Linux too quickly without taking a proper look at all the other distros that were out there. One distro that was getting brought up pretty often online was Mint so I decided to take a look at it.
I replaced my Ubuntu install with Mint and grew to liking the Cinnamon desktop environment. It was more customizable, was closer to the Windows layout I was used to, and I could still get a workspace-centric workflow. I even reinstalled Mint when I got a (much needed) new laptop, again with a Windows dual boot.
Linux Mint is great. It feels familiar and stable but I was getting bored of it. I gave Pop a try partly expecting to be let down because I'd used Gnome in the past. But it turns out I was pleasantly surprised. Maybe it was that Gnome had matured a little since I last used it. Maybe it was the care the Pop team were putting into the project. Probably both.
Pop brought back some memories of running Ubuntu Gnome but also brought some new experiences. It came with a default theme that didn't hurt to look at it. It came with much saner defaults than I remember vanilla Gnome ever having. It also came with some nice extensions that helped improve the vanilla Gnome experience but that you would hardly notice were there.
Most of my actual learning of Linux happened on Pop. The terminal went from something that I was comfortable using to something I actually preferred. I learned basic things like what was happening when I installed a program. I learned about all the different components of the OS like the shell, the display server, the desktop environment, the init system. Great times.
I would almost never boot into Windows at this point and was mostly just using it as a partition for media storage. Months would go by between the times I would start up Windows, and when I did it was usually only because some friends were inviting me to play a game. Side note: Windows **hates** it when you do this. It gets behind on its automatic updates quick and before long you find yourself in perpetual update hell. Add to that all the background services that it tries to run on bootup because it's been so long since they last ran and you're left with a **really** not good time. Especially on a 5400RPM hard drive. Windows also hates those.
Because Windows was such a pain to boot up I was playing more and more games in Linux. And surprise surprise: everything worked great. Wine and Steam's Proton deserve some serious praise for making Linux gaming so painless.
While I was using Pop, the System76 team rolled out their new tiling Gnome extension called Pop Shell. A lot of my workflow involved manually tiling windows with keyboard shortcuts so I decided to give it a shot. Since then I **still** have never gone back to floating Windows. Tiling is the only way I know how to use a computer anymore.
Gnome was starting to wear on me though. As great as Pop Shell is, it doesn't change the fact that Gnome was not designed with tiling in mind. I also can't stand how brittle Gnome extensions are. Seriously, they can and will break every time Gnome updates. Or whenever another extension updates. Or really just whenever they feel like it. It doesn't help that (at least on Pop) some extensions are set up to automatically update. Seriously, do not rely on Gnome shell extensions for your workflow because you'll have to change it every few weeks due to something breaking.
Because I was starting to like tiling workflows more and more and also was getting tired of Gnome's quirks, I installed i3 alongside Gnome in Pop. There's an awesome project out there called Regolith that makes this super easy and even preconfigures i3 for you (link at the end of this post). I loved it and would probably still be using it right now if it weren't for one problem.
My laptop was starting to randomly freeze. And I mean **randomly**. Sometimes it would seemingly get triggered from trying to launch a program. Other times it would freeze while just idling at the desktop. Other times it would actually wake itself up from suspend only to immediately freeze with a black screen. I tried just about everything I could to diagnose what was going on. Journalctl gave absolutely no clues. I ran a memory test and that wasn't the problem. I checked which packages had been upgraded recently and the only thing that could have been causing problems was a kernel upgrade about a week before the freezes started. So I rebooted with the older kernel and that didn't fix it. At this point I was pretty convinced there was a hardware issue. I started shopping for new laptops and almost had one picked out when I realized I hadn't tried reinstalling yet.
But if I was going to reinstall I wanted to give something new a try. For the past month or so I had been thinking about giving an Arch-based distro a try. The tales of pacman and the AUR seemed almost too good to be true, I had to experience it for myself.
I eventually settled on Arco because it was Arch-based and looked like it could install a preconfigured window manager for me. Window managers seem really appealing, but the time required to manually set everything up is a big turnoff for me. I tested out installing Arco in a VM and... the installer failed with a super ambiguous error. That's fine, I'm wanting to wipe everything at some point anyway so I'll just try running the install for real. I install it, reboot, and... oh look, a message that LightDM failed to start. If I wanted to debug install problems I would have just installed Arch proper. So that's what I did.
I had already gone through the Arch install process a few times before, once in a VM and once while helping a family member set up a home Minecraft server, so I wasn't a total stranger to it. It was painless and went without a hitch, other than having to reboot back into the install USB because I forgot to install wifi packages. Now that I had a functional base system I had to decide what I wanted to do with it.
Funny thing. After screwing around with Arch a bit I ended up with the same "LightDM failed to start" error that I got on Arco. But this time since I was the one that set up the system, I knew exactly where to look for the cause and was back up and running in five minutes. It was a simple change to a config file I had to make because I had removed a certain package. There's huge value to such a manual install process.
I settled on KDE Plasma for a few reasons. I had a friend who was using i3 as a window manager for KDE and that sounded worth looking into. It had also been a long time since I had last taken a look at KDE.
So far I've been on Arch using KDE for about a month and I'm really enjoying it. It's kinda funny. Where Gnome is almost too simple KDE is almost too configurable. It would probably be overwhelming for most new users but I feel pretty comfortable with it.
Boy I used to think apt was cool. You can find literally anything either in the official Arch repository or in the AUR. You can leave behind the headache of having to add third party repositories to apt or manually downloading .deb packages. I've been using paru as my AUR helper and am loving it.
On that note, updates are so much more hassle free on Arch than distros that go through point releases. Doing a full upgrade on Pop (or any Ubuntu derivative) usually means my computer is unusable for an hour or two, then there's also the downtime of finding out what's broken afterwards and either fixing it or adapting my workflow. Remember what I said earlier about how finnicky Gnome can be. Then there's also having to check my apt sources list and making sure that the PPAs that I've added are still there. On Arch I just run updates over the weekend and I know I'm completely up to date.
There's also some programs like IntelliJ and PyCharm that nag you to update if there's one available when you launch it. On Ubuntu you'd have to eventually update through that prompt because the initial install process for those doesn't use apt. On Arch I can completely ignore prompts like that and know that those programs will still get updated when I do a system upgrade over the weekend.
And I'm pretty happy with KDE too. A few quirks here and there (like why are there two completely different volume indicators in my default panel?) but overall things make pretty good sense. I decided to use KWin instead of i3 mostly because classes were starting and I didn't have time to configure i3, but I did find a tiling script for KWin that works pretty well so I'm happy for the time being. Maybe once I get a break from classes I'll play around with setting up a window manager.
Can't forget the Arch Wiki either. Seriously, it's some of the best documentation for any software I've ever seen.
...And that's where I'm at. I'll probably be sticking around on Arch for a while because I really don't know where I'd go after this. I guess there's always Gentoo if I ever feel like I'm not wasting enough of my time compiling all my own packages.