My First Experience with Linux

The beginning of this may sound off-topic at first but let me just tell you something real quick before we get into the elephant in the room, okay?..

By the time the current decade came rolling out, COVID and plenty of other circumstances fucked over my internet browsing experience, and for a while I felt a bleak sense of hopeless towards how such a thing will further devolve in the future... until I rediscovered internet forums. More specifically, a place called Agora Road.

Not only was this site a haven for vaporwave, Y2K, and internet nostalgia, but also a community that often valued using the internet and computer technologies in a pragmatic way and despised the enshittification of such. Plenty of examples of this enshittification can be found in the current latest versions of the two most popular operating systems; Windows and MacOS. Particularly with Windows 11, Microsoft not only had begun implementing AI by default within such, but it's become increasingly difficult to get rid of the trackers and other privacy-breaching peskiness within it. Luckily, this forum managed to recommend me a glimmer hope, and that was Linux.

In case you don't know what Linux is, well, its a kernel used for Unix-based operating systems, and there have been plenty of other lesser known operating systems that have been created from this sort of thing, which are called "distributions" or "distros". During the autumn of last year, I tried out various distros on virtual machines to see which one suited my needs best, and Fedora was the one I settled on, not just because of how easy the installation was, but it's method of getting updates is a neat equilibrium between stable and rolling release, so I can enjoy experiencing the latest features without much risk of my shit breaking.

By the time winter of this year came around, I got a new laptop with 2tb of disk space and decided to sacrifice 700gb of such in order to dual boot Fedora alongside Windows 11, so I finally got to have Linux for real!! (And yeah, I still have Windows 11 because I have the Adobe Suite that I use for college. I also keep my favorite Windows software like Ableton and PaintTool SAI on there in case I can't get them working on Wine.)

And then there's the fun part about Linux. DESKTOP CUSTOMIZATION!! (aka Ricing.) Linux distributions are very much known for their customizability, and a plenty of super incredible geniuses in the community do such amazing jobs at digging into the system and fucking around with it to create these gorgeous pieces of art. Despite not necessarily being good at programming, I went ahead and took a shot at it anyway.

I goofed around with AwesomeWM for the layout of my desktop. For a tiling window manager, this thing was nicely easy to navigate. I kinda liked how it's configuration was Lua-based considering I've had some experience with that programming language beforehand, making it fairly less difficult to rice. Because of that, it thankfully wasn't that hard to add the widgets I would need. (The stuff at the top right corner.) I've also taken and edited some graphics from awesome-copycats. Some other funky things I added onto here as depicted on these images are aerc, htop, kitty, and cmus.

This, as well as the reliance on the command line to download packages and use specific programs, made me learn about the inner workings of my operating system. Recently, my zoomer ass got taught on the same forum about how, if you think about it, everything you see on a computer is just about completely built off of text. No wonder why these people can pull off such insane shit with their desktops.

Despite all of this however, the Linux community isn't always perfect. I could probably make a separate ramble page on that but in short, when it comes to venturing on your Linux journey, expect yourself to encounter elitism and smartassery from some people, but for the most part, that shouldn't outright ruin everything for you.

Nonetheless, I've genuinely enjoyed my time trying out a new operating system, especially a free and open-source one driven by a very passionate community that has plenty of people who have felt the same kind of woes as I did about the computer technologies of the present day.