Throughout my life, software and computers have always been present but they’ve never really fascinated me.
Sure, I tried a bit of programming but dealing with Windows 8, 10 and 11 was a nightmare with the lagginess, constant updates and the nightmare of the closed ecosystem I was forced to enter. I remember countless days in my university dealing with buggy Windows update or crashes that fried most of my data. Suffice to say, my computer always felt hostile to me instead of working for me.
That was until I tried Linux. My journey first started at least a month ago before I was let go from my current job when I was tinkering with Lubuntu on an old desktop. Then, when I received a new Thinkpad that I had personally ordered, I installed EndeavourOS on it and was surprised by how fast and quick the installation process was.
Cue 3 months later and using Linux has made computing infinitely more fun. I learnt to explore and download random github repos and cli apps to use and play with. I learnt how to properly use the terminal and various TUI apps to replace common GUI apps that I would normally use. Everything is more customisable and fast. I rice my setup endlessly instead of doing all night gaming now. I get to control when I want updates to happen and not the other way around. It has felt immensely more rewarding to learn about computers and the nitty gritty of how they work with Linux compared to Windows or Mac.
As of now, I’m also into my third week of doing Harvard’s CS50 course online using my current setup, using LazyVim as my editor instead of VSCode.
My tips for anyone looking to try Linux are as follows:
There are plenty of youtube tutorials out there but use the current ones.
Learn to read the documentation about your distro, package, app etc up. Man pages, github and any wikis associated with the software are your friend. If you do fuck up, remember that you can bounce back by booting into a live usb, use Timeshift or by backing up your config in a seperate drive.
Don’t distro hop. Stick to one distro and its in and outs. There is no perfect distro and you will learn with time and effort what setup and config works for your workflow and needs.
Get comfortable with the command line. CLIs and TUIs are uncomfortable at first but there are plenty of tools out there to make using the shell great! Use the command line once or twice daily for some of the tasks you would normally do on your file explorer app such as file navigation, deletion or renaming
It has been an incredible journey so far and I can’t wait to keep learning and keep tinkering with my machine!
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