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My Story with Using Linux

I’ve been using NixOS as my daily driver on my desktop and laptop for almost 3 years. Before that I was using windows with tiling window managers (whim being the best working one) customized terminal and Neovim as an editor(before that I was using vs-code with vim plugin). I was runing this windows setup for a year or so before I started trying linux. I realy wanted to try out linux because I had many small anoying poblems with my os. I hoped that I wouldn’t have them when runnign linux. So I’ve installed linux on vm at first. It was ok but very laggy(virtual box), but the kde plasma de was looking so good and eaveryone was saying that linux is so great that I really wanted to install it on the real hardware. I heard from the Chris Titus that the only 3 good distros are Arch, Debian, and Mint. The Arch was the must fancy and there were many hyprland setups for it so that’s what I’ve chosen.

At first I was following a guide that was installing arch with commands instead of just using the arch-install script. Ofcourse I had some weird error that I could propably debug right now with my linux expirience but back then I wasn’t expirienced at all. The next distro that I’ve tried was debian but it had another issue with installing that I honestly can’t really remember, I’ve debugged it and It installed normally. But I had an issue with an ethernet cable dying on me and I was debugging my internet for like 2 days straight. It worked perfectly fine but for some kind of reson when I’ve switched to linux it decided to die. I was just annoyed and went back to good old windows for a bit.

Later I’ve dicovered that there was a simple script for installing arch linux - arch-install. I used it and It worked like a charm. Happy that I finally managed to install arch (I think that I had used linux mint on one device at some point before that and it was working ok). Than I started to install software that I was using on windows. Most of it installed but with some of them I had a lot of issues. I also had problem with installing vs-code(I was using it back than) and other software that I just dont remember anymore. Annoyed with all of this linux shit I just wanted to use a working system for a bit and moved back to windows for a year or so. While on windows I found a lot of usefull software and made my setup almost look like linux: tiling window managers, unity(Fuck unity, to this day they don’t have simple features like ui scaling implementd in their editor on linux), neovim, configured terminal, etc. This setup was honestly really good but after using linux windows just felt slugish and window managers that I was using back than were a lot worse than the linux versions. Also the winget wasn’t as great as packman.Also I wanted to try something new on my pc because the previous linux experiments were really fun in the end.

So once again I’ve chosen to use arch so I’ve run the arch-install but it didn’t work. I think that the issue was that I had windows installed on a second partition on the same disk and the arch-install script didn’t know what to do. At that point I was really annoyed with arch so I’ve tried to use debian. It also couldn’t install! At that point really anoyed I remember that thre was another really popular distro that I heard of, ‘NixOS’. I geve linux the last chance and put NixOS iso on my thubdrive and started installing it, and… It worked! NixOS was the only distro that installed without any issues this time. I’ve started using it and imidietly I was amazed by the amout of packages and the quality of the documentation. I’ve configured hyprland on it and was using nixos for a week or two, but I was just developing a project that needed to be tested on the pc platform that has the biggest user base - Windows. Another issue was that thre was a lot of patrst that I didin’t fully understand in nixos so I had many issues with my configuration. Installing hyprland this fast was also an issue because it needed some software and configuration that I didin’t know about and it lacked some basic functionallity. This wouldn’t be an issue if I were using kde plasma because it is a complete desktop environment.

So I’ve switched back to windows for about 2-3 months. In this time I’ve discovered great windows software like whim or UniGetUI. The configuration that I was using was so good that I didin’t reallisticly have any reason to switch back to linux, but I just wanted to do this because the windows was just getting worse and worse.

The next time that I’ve swithced to NixOS I had a configuration that was a mess but working in the way that I’ve wanted. This allowed me to research how to improve it while having a preety nice setup. From that point I haven’t got any reason to switch back to windows. I’ve been slowly improving my configuration and making my setup so much better than anything that windows could ever offer. Having switched to linux alos improved my privacy becuase my os doesn’t send any data and it is really easy to setup an encrypted partition that makes data on your pc 100% safe(if you have a strong password ) while you are away form it. Switching to linux also allowed me to discover software that made my workflow a lot better- yazi, zoxide, etc.