Story Time
I have been using ubuntu for the past 3 years or so, and honestly I love it.
When I initially installed ubuntu it was out of necessity. I had an old laptop and I wanted to do machine learning, which at that time required a GPU. Today you can just use cloud GPUs and pretty decent prices at that!
Since ubuntu is the most light operating system and beginner friendly, I thought that’d be a decent choice.
I was right.
It was one of the best decisions of my life. I got addicted to ubuntu. Typing things out in the terminal. Apt-installing stuff. I had a blast!
Even today I’d still recommend anyone to try linux. Use a VM or dual-boot, I don’t care.
Just use a linux OS. You won’t look back.
I started with a basic ubuntu setup but quickly went to the depths of linux and machines. I installed a window manger.
And I had more fun. When you install something like a i3 window manager, it’s daunting at first because you literally see a blank screen. Nothing else. A tab in the bottom. With weird IPs and stuff.
Where do you go from there?
It requires a little bit of patience, love for machines to go past that phase because I won’t lie or gatekeep, it’s hard.
The amount of debugging you have to do to your config files is outrageous.
At one point i could type -
nvim ~/.config/i3/config
in literally milliseconds!
Because of how much configuring you have to do.
The good thing is, even if not to the metal, but you still have a lot of control over your machine.
Like if something went wrong, I’d know what was wrong. If it was a config problem or something else.
It was unlike anything I ever used.
So much so that when I bought myself a new PC, I removed windows (you should do that too) and installed ubuntu on it. Didn’t dual boot, try on a VM or something, I just said - yeah, no windows.
And things went on like that for 1.5-2 years.
I got into ricing linux.
At one point my PC looked like -
Each thing, from polybar to lazyvim was configured by me.
People could not use my PC because it was all keyboard driven and personalized to me.
I won’t stop saying how much I loved it.
Every Sunday I’d sit down and rice.
Until yesterday when I decided to do the next step.
I installed arch.
I am happy (that it works)!
I can officially also say - “i use arch btw”.
The decision was not an easy one to take.
ubuntu has close to everything. A good package manager, a good community, 6-8 months releases. It supports a lot of the software out of the box.
Why compromise all of it, for what? Curiosity?
But I go where my curiosity takes me and so, I did it.
Knowing the fact that ubuntu still hides a lot of abstractions, i didn’t feel that close to the metal.
I am running a complete arch machine now.
Let’s see how this goes. The fact that I had to install the audio firmware, graphics card driver, xrandr for HDMI and brightnessctl, lazyvim, flameshot gui, rofi and what not, also proves my claim of being closer to the metal than I was on ubuntu.
That’s it for this story time.
I am the owner of my machine. Atleast more than I was on the previous os.
I hope you know are too.
~ Aayushya