It’s been more than 2 years since I started to mainly use GNU/Linux sistems as my daily Os, so I want to share a little of the journey with the community, the ups and downs, the experiences I went through, and all of that stuff so let’s just start

I learned about free software by a friend, who is a great entusiast of it (he’s a very good friend, I love him, and also hate him like all good friends), he introduced it to me because he had think that the ideas and philosophy of the free software were very similar to my social, philosophic and political thoughts (been myself an anarchist) so I really liked the concept and the movement so I said to myself “maybe it’s worth the shot” so he recommended me linux mint, for short, I couldn’t make a dual boot with windows (I didn’t know how to make the partition scheme for the dualboot at the time), and that was something I wanted to have because I didn’t know if I was definitely going to switch, in a retrospective thought It may have been the best.

After that I tried Manjaro, and I gotta say, I loved it, ignoring the fact that I needed to get another usb wifi receptor because the one I had was not compatible, everything went smoothly, I personally wasn’t afraid of the terminal, so I kinda adapted very quickly, and after discovering yay my experience was heavily improved, one of the things I really appreciate at the time was paman, it helped me a lot as a new user, but I gotta say that paman sucks, it kinda makes your system more unstable and more give it more propensity to brake, and that was exactly what happened to me, I didn’t mind mostly because at the time I already had my external ssd to save my data, so after a quick reinstall everything went fine, it was faster, more comfortable, way more customizable and much more user respectful than windows, witch at the point of a year, I just used it for print.

The next thing I did has try debian for a month, I liked very much and is a very good distro, but I was very used to manjaro that I didn’t fully fell comfortable using it, so after that I tried using Arch with arch install, I managed to do the installation under 5 minutes, so it was pretty nice to me, I really like it but I went back to manjaro just for the autocomplete terminal built in.

So fast forward to March, when I found out about the Proton compatibility layer for Steam, I just gotta say that I love Proton, it really make my switch to GNU/Linux almost total, with issues here and there but ultimately it was just a great step in the way of the complete change, something I wanted to do since the first time I used windows 11 on my laptop, I hate it, totally, so for that time I just have it in my laptop to print, again

A fast forward to August, when I decided to install arch manually for the first time, it was a pretty straight forward process thanks to archwiki and it gave me the opportunity to tell the friend that introduced me to free software that I was finally at his level.

So in October 3 important things happened, I switched from Manjaro to Arch, I switched from bash to fish, and the most important, I managed to get my printer working, so from that moment I deleted windows in all my drives, an make the complete switch after so long, finally, I was free from windows, and I’m very happy about that, since then, I use arch both on my PC and laptop, and I’m very happy about that, the last mayor think that I had been making is a distro trying journey, where since the moment I tried debian, I’m been trying almost any distro that brings my attention, and also I installed Gentoo, so I can finally say to my friend “go cry somewhere else normie” (as a joke, obviously), still need to figure out how to install the desktop tho.

So that’s been all, I’m a happy free software enthusiast and I don’t have any intention of going back, I hope to learn more in the future and I hope for the day where the freedom in the digital era became a thing for everyone. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk

  • juli@programming.dev
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    10 months ago

    I didn’t know this for a long while when distro hopping and since every distro tinkered with grub etc and I really hated debugging grub, and I was afraid of something happening to my home directory, I overwrote it every single time. I wish I have had a separate drive just for it when I began with linux.