In August 2018 I decided to switch to Linux almost entirely. In this post I will write about my journey with Linux, what experiences I made and why I switched back to windows recently.

The motif

I was tired of Windows crashes and the privacy concerns. Also, Windows brings alot of bloat with it that nobody needs.
Last but not least: Windows is flawed in it’s own ways, like the occasionally BSOD’s or the slow Windows Update.

There are several reasons to go for Linux. But that’s another topic.

The Time

The Beginning

I had my very first contact with Linux in 2007 with Ubuntu 7.04, after seeing it used by a barkeeper I know. In the time between this and 2018 I only experimented with Linux in VM’s because it’s use was very limited in my youth. But in August of 2018 I made the jump into the cold water and didn’t regret it. I was using Kubuntu for a very short time before getting into and mastering Arch Linux very quickly.

I got a lot of Games working pretty quickly, among them are for example “World of Warcraft”, “Squad” and “Elite: Dangerous”. I also got very quickly used to termainal workflow with vim, git, the file manager ranger and others.

In Feburary of 2019 was I able to play Arma on Linux for the first time. From then on ArmaOnUnix and I made almost always new improvements.

My time with Linux in general

With the time passed I developed a lot of things, mainly quality of life scripts. Early on I used KDE Plasma as my Desktop enviroment, before I experimented with several tiling window managers. I used i3 mainly up until mid-2020, where I had enough free time and boredom to get into Lua and the Awesome window manager. I began quickly to like Awesome and used it as my main window manager from then on. You can find my dotfiles here.

Moving back to Windows

In Feburary 2021 I got a new laptop with hybrid graphics. Also my private situation changed and I was looking to get a more stable system thats working without much tinkering. I tried very hard to stay with Linux, but in the end there were two factors that forced me to go back:

  • There were several Problems related to Optimus, mainly with the AMD iGPU, and driver problems with the new Renoir iGPU itself.
  • Several pieces of software I now require are not available on Linux and have no alternative that compliment my needs.
  • I don’t have the time nor the storage space to make a dual-boot system

After some weeks, I am now a fan of WSL, because it helps me to develope and use my previously started projects like Arma on Linux

The Conclusion

Note: This may or may not be very similar to a blogpost of Matthieu Commandon, the founder of Lutris. This is because i agree with most of its statements and opinions

Recently I realized that the Micorsoft hatred gets overvalued. Microsoft is no longer in Position to stop FOSS, like they tried with the Haloween documents and the EEE stategy. The hate on Windows was fun as a meme for a long while, but I now see far worse threats to online privacy and the freedom now.

When i thought about it, there is no reason to question the validity of the work of teams who ship operation systems. Its a important platform to build ontop of. Big open source projects would be in deep ship if nobody would lead the Project with governance. Open sourcing is not the solution for every project. Desktop Linux misses a stable foundation and some things may break at any given point in time. There are also problems within the Linux community, like fanboying implementation X, accusing of using “unholy” technical choices or treating bugtrackers like their Amazon wishlists. Because of latter, i think that the statement “you don’t need to be a developer to contribute to open source, you can also report bugs” is not entirely true. The unnecessary noise taht is made by such behavior hinders the developer, which is doing that voluntary.

Windows has no exclusive unpopularity. There are enough people that are complaining about PulseAudio, Systemd, Electron, PHP and others. But the most of them don’t deserve that, and so doesn’t Windows.

I hope you can understand my point of view on this topic. If you have questions, feel free to contact me