Chapter 1: Discovering Linux

I first discovered Linux when I was a little kid. I'm not entirely sure how I found out about Linux, but it was probably from endlessly scrolling through YouTube. I do remember that I used to watch a lot of OSFirstTimer, so I probably found it through them actually.

This was back in, I believe, 2014. I had no idea what a 'distro' was or that there were other options that I could've gone with, so I went with the obvious and what I thought was the only choice, Ubuntu.

I knew absolutely nothing about installing it or really even using it. I just knew that it looked like the coolest thing I had ever seen at the time, and that Wine existed so I could still play the Sims, and that's all I needed as a kid. So as any normal person would do, I did absolutely no research and instead went looking on eBay for an install disk.

Chapter 2: Installing it for the first time

When the disk arrived, I put it in the disk drive, booted it up, and got.. nothing. I didn't know why it wasn't working or if I did something wrong, but I was upset. I did some Googling around and learned that I was supposed to flash the installer to a USB drive... not buy it off of eBay. So after a lot of trial and error, and watching the OSFirstTimer's tutorial on how to flash the installer, I was able to boot into Ubuntu for the first time and I was greeted with this:

A basic page with 2 options. Try Ubuntu, and Install Ubuntu. I went straight to installing it, which was... a bad idea. I wiped my drive that had Windows 8 on it and dove right into the deep-end with no prior knowledge of how to use Linux.

The first thing I did was set up a terrible gradient background of neon green to red. After that, I tried to install Wine so I could play the Sims. And, not surprisingly, it didn't work. I was devastated. All of that work, just to have the Sims not work. [insert crying] And Proton didn't exist yet, so there was no fallback option for me, especially with the pea brain I had at the time. After that, I went back to Windows 8 and didn't mess with Linux again for at least 5 years.

Chapter 3: Linux to the Rescue

After a long time away, I finally started to tinker with Linux again when I got my first gaming PC. It had a Ryzen 3 2200G and 8GB of RAM. I didn't do much but I did mess with some live-boots and virtual machines of a few Ubuntu based distros. But once again, I lost interest after some time as using Linux just wasn't viable for me yet.

Fast-forward to 2020. This year was the first time I really got to use Linux, but only because I was forced to. It was, what I thought was a normal day. It ended up turning into the death day of my hard-drive, as my computer took a tumble off my desk while in a Discord VC. This damaged the hard-drve, which I didn't notice for at least a month, when files started to corrupt and eventually it stopped booting.

This was the start of a 3 week period of using nothing but a live-boot of Ubuntu 20.04. I was using a live-boot boot because the install would fail when trying to install to my secondary drive. The days of messing with Ubuntu in a VM helped me prep for this very moment. With it being a live-boot, everything that was installed would be deleted, so every day, I would reinstall Discord and Steam just so I could use the computer.

FINALLY, after the 3 weeks, I was able to install it and boot of the internal drive for about 1 more week until I got a new SSD for Windows. After that, I stopped booting into Linux for a couple years.

Chapter 4: Regaining Interest

In early 2023, I started to look more into Linux again. With Windows 11 being an obviously bad option for me, I got interested in Linux again as an alternative. I had been follow the development of Proton and gaming on Linux and it had been getting much better, which got me really excited. The Steam Deck was also one of the things that kept me interested in Linux.

Around this time is when I found out about Kubuntu, which ships with KDE Plasma. It was exactly what I wanted; highly customizable, easy to use, and felt similar to Windows. I spent a lot of time tinkering with layouts in a VM from within Windows.

After enough planning and tinkering, I bit the bullet and installed it on hardware. I used a cheap external drive with about 750GB of space. It was... slow. It wasn't that bad, but bad enough that I wanted to buy a new drive to use specifically for Linux. I eventually started to spend most of my time in Linux since stuff finally worked.

Eventually I joined a Linux Discord server, where I was recommended EndeavorOS. It's an Arch based disto with a minimal set of applications. I gave it a go in a VM and fell in love. The package manager was easy to use, it was fast, and gave me even more control and customization. I wiped Kubuntu and put EndeavorOS in place of it.

I ran this install for about a month until I discovered Archfi, or "Arch Fast Install Script." It allowed you to easily install base Arch Linux in a similar way to archinstall, but with much more control. This is what I would use to install Arch Linux on my new SSD that I had recently bought to be used with Linux. And to this day, I am still using that same install of Arch Linux as a daily driver with next to no issues and most games working just fine.

Bonus: Using Arch and Making it my Own.

Throughout the 4-6 months I've actively used Arch, I have made a LOT of changes. I started out using KDE Plasma Wayland with my own panel layout. One day, I decided to give Hyprland a shot. Hyprland is a wl-roots based tiling window manager. I spent a lot of my time making changes to configs to get it exactly how I wanted it. I used this for about 2 months, until I started having a lot of issues related to Hyprland. I decided to switch back to KDE Plasma and have yet to look back. For the longest time, I was using the Layan theme, but I currently have my desktop themed to look like Windows 7 as I like the aesthetic.

Thank you so much for reading. I haven't written anything like this before so this is my first attempt. I really enjoyed writing it and plan to release it as a video-essay-ish too. Overall, using Linux has been a very bumpy ride, but was totally worth the effort in the end. I feel happy when I use my computer now that it's my own and I have full control over it. I hope you enjoyed reading this and have a great night :) 

 -Winter