My Linux journey

It all started around early 2022. I already vaguely knew about Linux, since I had used it in school and had heard a couple of distros namedropped here and there, such as Ubuntu or Kali, but I never considered switching off Windows before this point. It was an afternoon like many others, except on this particular day I was recording a family member's poetry recital. I had an XLR mic plugged into an audio interface, which was plugged into my laptop via USB, and I was recording the audio input with Reaper.

Everything was fine at first... sure, Windows had given me issues with audio plenty of times before, I'd had to reinstall the realtek audio drivers more times than I cared to count, and I'd had dozens of little annoyances that weren't audio-related as well, but nothing really gave me the impression that this operating system, bloated and slow and ugly and ad-riddled as it was, was inadequate or useless.

Then it happened; when I listened back to the finished recording, there were 3 or 4 sections spread throughout where the audio cut out for a split second and then the voice sounded glitchy and distorted for a few seconds afterwards, completely ruining the recording. The culprit: Windows power management. Windows was automatically trying to shut off the USB device to conserve power, even though it was currently in use, and in turn wasted hours of my work. That was it, the straw that broke the camel's back. I swore on that day never to forgive Windows. Why should I let this dumbass OS suddenly decide that I no longer need a device that I've deliberately plugged into my machine and am currently using? Why does it decide to change my audio settings across updates, and why are my only options in regards to updates "Yes" and "Remind me later"? I was fed up.

A few months later I was learning about Linux through YouTube, and set up a few VMs in VirtualBox to give different distros a try. After a couple of months of getting familiar with the environment within the virtual machines, I decided to take the leap. Of course, I landed on Mint first. I had tons of audio issues at first; I was able to solve them, but it always took an uncomfortable amount of time to get satisfactory audio performance on new installations. (To be honest, I don't even remember what it was that I had to do to fix audio back then, because now we have PipeWire, the audio framework to replace all of the old and busted audio frameworks which was become widely adopted since 2024, and the audio situation is much better now.) After struggling for a while and distrohopping a few times, I finally hit my stride, and was able to daily drive Linux with few problems in the form of Fedora Xfce. I had figured out which programs to replace the old ones with, and how to use alternative packaging methods like Flatpaks and Appimages to get my hands on software that wasn't in the official repositories. I learned how to use ffmpeg and other commandline tools, then promptly forgot because I didn't need them often. It was early 2023. Everything was working fine... so fine, in fact, that I had the luxury of wasting time. I got into customization— ricing.

First, I started on Cinnamon:

Then awesomewm, spending hours upon hours tweaking and changing configs:

And i3:

And Qtile:

(had to dig up some of these screenshots from old chats)

I even got into customizing Emacs after falling in love with it when it saved me hours of work editing text files, though I never used it and probably never will use it for programming. I do love Emacs, even if I barely use it, but that's a story for another day.

Around the same time, I was putting together a new PC with an AMD RX 6700 XT. I decided that Windows' dirty fingers would not get to touch this virgin SSD. I'd had enough of old stable Debian and its derivatives, but Arch still scared me a little bit, so I decided to put Fedora on this PC, for a nice balance of stability and up-to-date software. Somewhere along the way I lost interest in ricing... I don't think it was a waste of time: I got at least a little familiar with Lua thanks to playing with awesomewm's config files so much, for one. It was a great learning experience, but I felt it was time to settle down, and moved to default GNOME.

And this brings us to today:

I do all my music production on this computer, all my gaming, browsing, image and video editing, reading, and watching, and any other ing you can think of. This year I started learning about servers: I learned how to set up a Wireguard tunnel from a VPS to my home server, how to make a simple website from scratch using only HTML and CSS (you're looking at it), and now I'm looking into replicating this setup in NixOS to make the whole thing reproducible in case I have to redo it.

I won't lie, there's been some frustrations along the way. By far the things that gave me the most frustration must've been those related to networking and hosting content. The problem is I always get a little too greedy, trying to do complicated things right off the bat. My first time ever touching a router's configuration was when I flashed OpenWrt on it, for example. NGINX also made me want to tear my hair out at first, in fact —I'll say it—, I wanted to fucking kill myself, if you'll pardon my french. BUT! I persevered, and managed to get a working (for now) set up in the end. All is well that ends well. If I had never left the land of Windows, I never would've even considered these things possible, yet here I am, and I'm here to stay.