What’s this? A software app store?

It’s ironic how on Linux, my distro’s app repository is always my first stop when looking for software, while on Mac or Windows it’s my last resort.

Commercialized app stores are full of spam, and Microsoft and Apple both decided that app store apps should not have the full capabilities of normal apps. It’s the exact opposite on Linux.

Linux has been the biggest rabbit hole I’ve been in. There are too many distribution for me to choose one without testing as much as I can. It made me change what I wanted/needed. I went from “I don’t want to use CLI at all” to “man, GUI is too slow for that”.

I tried many Debian children and grand children distributions, Fedora based ones (Nobara, atomics bases,…), Opensuse, NixOS, Solus, arch based distributions…

Now, I’m on cachyOS, that seems to be the good balance I need (for now), between GUI/already configured and “I can do it the way I want”.

One year after starting using Linux, I’ve switched from a 3060ti to a 6700xt, just because it made hopping easier.

If you exclude me not being able to settle down on a distro, Linux is a funny experience to me. My needs are not that big, as I just play some games, have a light need of an office suite. I can do anything I used to to in windows, but without Microsoft and his friends looking above my shoulder.

I’ve used linux for 20 years and was generally happy. I always used my main rig to play games, so I kept windows since my tries to switch to linux for gaming ended unsatisfying. Last October I decided to get rid of ms products and said goodbye to windows for good. Gaming on linux today works great. I am constantly amazed how great everything works and happy pretty much every time I turn on the PC. A big thank you to everyone involved in linux development!

Removed by mod

Every year I upgrade to something better and found the past distros very disgusting.

6/2021: Ubuntu, Debian, Mint (for ~15 minutes), Kali Linux

2022: Ubuntu, Lubuntu, RHEL, Fedora (for some days), Arch

2023: Artix (for some days), Gentoo, Alpine (Alpine is the best distro I’ve ever seen), switched to OpenBSD in the end of the year!

2024: OpenBSD. Have a machine running FreeBSD but currently unplugged and haven’t learned anything from FreeBSD.

OpenBSD is so simple and I started reading man pages when I use it. I’m starting to learn tmux. Started to learn sed. Started writing some shell scripts. I can confirm I wasted time using all the distros above except Alpine. Except when I compile the linux kernel on Gentoo. I switched to OpenBSD without any problem. I quickly forgot the /dev/sda1 and learned disklabel. Not using vim without any problem, and I learned how to use vi efficiently.

OpenBSD is not too hard for any “newbies” that can read English. They can type “help” and it will open help(1). When they have read help(1) they will read afterboot(8). afterboot(8) is just comprehensive. It’s a pity that package management is about the end of this man page, but package management is just simple: pkg_add and pkg_delete package-name. They may read pkg_add(1) and pkg_delete(1) when they want to upgrade.

Default X11 window manager is fvwm. xterm is launched when X is started. You can move windows with mouse. Minimized windows also appear on the grey screen. But you have to double click much. This is usable. cwm is also available when you want a wm that can be used with a keyboard. It is much more efficient.

2025: plan 9 ???

Linux is my primary OS. I have no experience with Windows. Therefore, I cannot compare Linux and BSD systems with Windows. When I started using Linux, it wasn’t very functional, but I didn’t want to pay money for something as glitchy as Windows was in 1998. But for my needs at the time, Linux was sufficient. The PC usage pattern in 1998 was a bit different from today’s PC usage pattern. Mail, primitive messenger (IRC), primitive games. Torturous WEB. I’m back in the days when an html page would load within a couple minutes and I didn’t consider that unusual. I remember times when I would spend all night downloading a 5 megabyte package. The Internet connection would glitch and break and the price of the connection was no fun for anyone. Then FreeBSD 5 came out, and after the glitches of Linux it was pure bliss. I even considered switching to this system completely, but unfortunately FreeBSD quickly began to lag behind the capabilities of desktop PCs and I had to abandon this idea. I could tell IT tales for a long time, but I will say that Linux became a digestible OS relatively recently, around 2015. I currently use OpenBSD and Fedora. I’m happy with all of them.

I use Linux servers on my job and I did a ton of research. I felt confident in moving from Windows to Linux and for the most part it went very well. Most distributions provide a live environment and the installer is extremely easy.

I had a ton of small little problems with Nvidia, Wayland, audio… I ended up fixing most of them, or at least apply some workarounds but it was a painful experience.

Gaming works really really really well, which I found surprising.

In a nutshell,

Zorin > Ubuntu > Debian > Arch, while (always) pestering google about trivial stuff, “How do I install something on Linux?” – “Oh look! A package manager! Which package manager is the best?” – “Distros have their specific packages? Cool!”, etc.

AMD GPU just works, no fussing about, get straight to fragging on Xonotic and Counter Strike

Unless you have a monitor that requires HDMI 2.1 to get full resolution/refresh. Then it only works partially.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Linux, and I’ve been using it on my desktops/laptops for almost 30 years at this point.

But there are still issues to deal with on a regular basis, same as Windows or OSX.

Generally good, but fairly troublesome. I dualboot Pop_OS!, and the install was a nightmare. The live USB wouldn’t boot until I unplugged every USB device. Once it started, I could plug them back in. Then, when actually installing, the info about the various partitions I would need was apparently pretty out of date (recommend partition sizes were way off).

Once installed, though, it’s been really nice, albeit a fair bit more complicated. The only real issue I’ve had so far is that, in Unity games run through wine, video streamed in-game won’t play.

I guess it all depends on perspective.

I love that it’s free compared to those $10-20k licenses for similar systems.

I love that there are good package managers.

I love that it’s open source.

I hate that it’s GPLv2.

I hate how bloated the kernel is. I’d like it to fit into main memory.

I hate how it’s not POSIX-certified.