my linux journey through years - en

yeah yeah, i know. here is not r/unixporn yet this screenshot was a must for an average linux user, lol.

well, this wasn’t my first encounter with tux to be honest, as you can understand from title. in my high school years i was distro-hopping crazily thanks to my old brick-like lenovo g-580. we were together for 9 years until i replace it in 2022 so i can’t truly complain. around 2015-2018 while it still had 4 gb of ram rather than 8, while it had a fucking hdd rather than a ssd, believe me it wasn’t the best experience of windows and i loved windows 10 in the beginning, so it was extra sad to experience just “slowness” in my beloved laptop. yeah, windows 8 was such a revolution ui-wise, windows 10 was even superior, especially after thinking of this crap called windows 11, that microsoft is forcing people to use. i am not even talking about windows 8.1, for real, what the fuck was that?

as i said above, my linux journey started around 8-9 years ago. i don’t remember exactly but i probably tried ubuntu first and it was the ugliest thing i have ever seen, yet it became even weirder with the “unity” desktop thing canonical brought. hopefully, that era didn’t last so long for ubuntu but already put a distance between me and ubuntu. then, i have tried mint, it was flawless yet kinda still ugly especially when you don’t know how to tweak and customize it. i have used elementary os and loved it so much, it was the pretty solution that i was looking for and used for some time as my main operating system. then after some time i did some hardware upgrades on my pc and returned to windows 8 and then windows 10 for such a long time.

probably around pandemic, when we were at home all the time, i wanted to dip a finger to linux ocean again somehow. tried manjaro kde, fell in love with kde via manjaro but i was used to debian based distributions, so called “stable” distros already. then i dived into kde world even more. kde was my everything and believe me, i was totally in love with kde in every sense. kde connect was perfect, customizations were so detailed and almost infinite, desktop was so beautiful looking and community was so huge. i realized these all thanks to kubuntu. kde neon was kinda useless but kubuntu was “the one” for me. and it must be the distribution that i used for the longest period of my life. around one or two years i guess. kubuntu was epic, dude!

for some reasons that era also ended at some point and i was using windows again, time passed and i also got a new thinkpad, a true linux computer, and i was ready for my third attempt of linux discovery. at least i thought like that in that time. for my internship in 2022 i needed windows and i installed windows 10 directly after buying my new laptop and didn’t face any issue to be honest. windows 11 was just a baby at that time and it wasn’t looking particulary appealing. even now, it was such an unnecessary move for microsoft from my perspective. however, months passed and windows 11 became a thing. every youtuber was making a video about and it was apparent that they kinda fixed issues coming with it and made it more usable and prettier even. i would still choose windows 10 over windows 11 but microsoft did a partially well job making windows 11 look unique and “cool”. after some time, microsoft declared so suddenly that they will end the support for windows 10 in 2025. there were still such a long period till 2025 at that point but this hidden yet powerful push to people to use windows 11 pushed me too and my windows 11 era started. until this day, i don’t enjoy it at all. i hate how it comes with so much bloatware, i hate how it uses the hardware of my computer, i hate the lack of customizations even though it’s looking inherently prettier than previous windows. but there wasn’t much option. at least that’s what i thought.

a few weeks ago, i decided to give my old friend tux another chance. windows 11 served me okayish yet it also made me hate it from various ways. i wanted to start again with an arch based distro, manjaro. but man, their team had so many scandals through years and to be honest, it didn’t make itself so appealing with these incidents. after that i tried pop! os, it was cool with the already configured window tiling stuff but gnome environment didn’t appeal me much. kubuntu was always in my mind but i wanted to see how linux mint is doing and installed it.

i realized that mint has both changed so much through years but also didn’t change at all too. solid, precise, not so pretty but well functioning. such a good distro for almost everyone. linux mint stayed away from canonical’s crappy snap package management and allows flatpak in their store, which is a plus from beginning. it has such a nice and helpful community. they design their own desktop environment which makes the experience even more seamless. yes, cinnamon is a fork of gnome but it’s way ahead of gnome in various ways if you try for a few days. the toolkit coming with linux mint is also quite good. they already have the most essential tools and also added important and needed tools like usb image writer and etc… i know that one can easily install these softwares with one click from store but these apps make linux mint also a good live-usb distro as well.

after some days of running mint and windows 11 via dual boot, i took all my data from windows and settled in to linux mint for now. i still have windows 11 in my other ssd but choosing linux mint in my boot screen. to be honest, i don’t have any particular software that i am missing from windows while using mint either. maybe the shitty tusdata app but it’s not that essential. i don’t know how long this journey will last, hopefully quite long but we will see. of course i am encountering issues and bugs occasionally but it’s okay for me to do a little research or ask people over internet about these problems.

with the new plasma 6, i wanted to give kde another chance too but they embraced “wayland” a bit early i think. it’s still possible to use “x11” but “wayland” brought its problems as well. also i learnt that i won’t be able to use my beloved dock app “latte dock” with this new kde plasma 6. alternatives were looking okayish but didn’t satisfy me. so, i will be following kubuntu and kde team for future developments from close distance. in the other hand, system76 will release pop! os with their new desktop environment “cosmic” in a few months hopefully and it’s looking very promising so far.

if you come this far, thank you for reading my weirdo digital journey through years.

sudo see ya! :-)