It Is Finally the Year of Linux

I finally made the switch from Windows 11 to Linux. Everything changed, and most of it for the better.

Why I left Windows

I can’t tell you how much I despised PowerShell. And I’m not talking about the shell itself. It’s the whole ecosystem around it. But the real breaking point? The updates. I’d put my PC to sleep, come back in the morning, and find it running because Microsoft decided to update my computer anyway. My machine, their schedule. That got old fast. I use a MacBook all day for work and am so used to living in the shell, that I don’t need the desktop extras that come with Windows. My browser (Firefox) feels even better on Linux. It takes up almost all of my 49" screen anyways and now I squeeze some shell windows on the side too.

The gaming question

The only thing that held me back from a full switch for years was gaming. I’d game occasionally, and Linux wasn’t there yet for that, or so I thought. But after following the SteamOS news, I felt confident enough to make the jump, gaming included.

After a few early issues (a Samsung G9 needs driver profile tweaks with an AMD card on Arch Linux), everything runs stable. Games work. Proton is doing its job. I’m not looking back. And I’m not going back. If you ask me, ARM CPUs on personal computers (outside the Apple ecosystem) will be the norm before long. I’m hoping Intel steps up their GPU game with the ARC models to compete with NVIDIA and AMD.

Living with Hyprland

Hyprland’s window management has a learning curve. I’ve come close to swapping the window manager more than once. Tiling window managers are powerful once you’ve built the muscle memory, but getting there is a process. Some days it feels like a superpower, other days I want to drag a window with my mouse and not think about pressing that darn super key.

The one thing that doesn’t work

(Work) Slack. I can’t get past the (forced) Passkey prompt. The issue is a fun combination: Bluetooth plus Passkey plus Arch Linux don’t go well together. It’s trying to get my fingerprint from a configured default fingerprint scanner, which my computer does not have. I’ll sort it out.

Was it worth it?

Absolutely. Even with the Slack situation and the Hyprland learning curve, I’m happier with this setup than I ever was on Windows. The system does what I tell it to, updates when I tell it to, and gets out of my way. OCI Containers don’t need to run on a VM layer and it feels good. That’s all I ever wanted.