Everything began about some days ago, when I read about the new Ai changes in Windows and while I had my hands in creating human assistance systems, that include Ai in a very small and insignificant way, I don’t quite like the way how the current way around Ai is evolving.
Earlier this year Microsoft announced their copilot and their new survailance feature. Those two things have now after some time being the reason why I switched to Linux.
Being a Gamer at heart and not having a lot of time to experiment on my OS, I took the time and first looked at it in a greyed light. Should I switch? Should I better stay on Windows, despite my dislike on it’s development?
Thanks to feeling a bit down and being hospitalized (My release day in already tomorrow if nothing bad comes to it), I had the time to take a look at it better. I mostly sat in my room and played on my Phone, but luckly I had my Laptop with me.
Of course I didn’t jumpstart and had some experience with linux itself. Working in Tech gives me the small edge against those who have never touched it. Thus I know how to use the terminal, some command and worked quite some time in wsl.
But that is just the very basic beginning. There is more to it, than knowing some commands and get around a bit in the Terminal. Linux is a complex set of components that (sometimes) are thrown together to make work and I had no idea what I need, what I have to do and basically how anything works.
So I sat down and used the good old google buddy of mine and took in some research.
I basically had no Idea what anything is. I had once Ubuntu installed and made that somehow work in dual boot with my main pc and windows, but that’s all the experience I had with actually an linux OS but I didn’t want to go to Ubuntu, I know it’s quite bloated and I want to experince the true Linux experince, with all its quirks and tricks.
So I search and looked at Debian. I took my trusty USB stick, downloaded it and created a bootable USB stick, then sat down and installed it in dualboot with windows. But let me tell you it’s was pain getting it to install. Technically I had quite a problem.
For me to install debian I needed some space on my disk, where I had windows installed. And there the problem begin. I wanted to use the same disk and thus had to shrink the partition, but windows only let me shrink it about 50GB tho I had around 250GB free space. This wasn’t a problem at first but I notied later on it was going to be.
Thus I shrank how far I could and left it empty, started the dualboot install and used the guided install that debian allowes.
I had debian installed. YAY.
What now? I tried installing steam, discord, etc but it was a pain and I wasn’t looking forward on the way how debian looked out of the box and I know I could customize it. So more googling what I can do!\
After researching what I could switch and all I was quite astouned what all exists.
For short. I tried debian for a day or two and didn’t like it. Through those days I have been going around on reddit and looked at all those amaying rice from users from r/unixport and I fell in love with Hyprland
In short. Hyprland is a windows manager that allowed a lot of stuff and looked brilliant with little customization. So I had to try it. Unfortuantly It’s now available for Debian, so I had to do the painfull switch to Arch.
Arch in little words is basically just the linux kernal and enything that it need to install with. Everything else needs to be decided by the user, but there is an alternative: EndevourOS.
EOS, is arch based, but allowes for a much easier install and all the same features, while including an easy way for nvidia GPU users (let me tell you. Installing nvidia drivers on linux is a whole new world of pain in the ass.)
So I took my handy usb stick. Installed EOS on it, dualboot with windows, threw debain away and am now running it barebone with Hyprland, and sddm as the main Display and Window Manager and added stuff like Waybar to it to make it more fancy.
Technically I installed the entire hypr eco-system to make it even more easier.
I’m currently running EOS perfectly fine and can play all my games that I love to on this machine. (Mainly the good old Lego games, some terraria, minecraft, etc)
Now I need to get home and test myself on my main PC and see if it’s a good idea to use there too. I now have the experience, a ready made USB stick and my dot files for a fast start up.
But in conclusion. Linux is a an amazing OS and I love it. I will try out more, give an update or two and see how good it’s going to be for me in my daily live. I’ll probably post a guide on how some stuff work too somewhen.
Untill then o/ Have a good one and hopefully you are looking for my next post!