The Switch to Linux Mint
Windows lagged sometimes and really made me rage. I had to wait for some seconds just for a right click on the desktop and some of my operations just froze for some time. On top of that, blue screens of death whenever I updated drivers or idk and long updates introducing nothing useful but just delaying my work. I was really done and decided to move to Linux permanently. I had already booted into Kali Linux before but never really spent hours using it. I searched about the distro most convenient to me. There were a lot of people using Ubuntu but I found myself attracted to Linux Mint. Mint is pretty similar to Ubuntu except that it offers more customisability as far as I know. I made my partitions, a live disk and tada! It wasn’t that hard to adjust. I found tools to replace the ones I had on Windows and with the themes and the various options, I was quite used to it. I also loved the terminal and no longer wanted to use a mouse. Of course, whenever I wanted to game or use a program that I didn’t find a replacement for on Linux, I’d pay a visit to dear Windows since I was using a dual boot configuration.
Learning more and more
I continued to research and this yielded in me understanding a lot on how Linux worked.
Everything fascinated me; how the great Linus Torvalds built the Linux Kernel, the
evolution of OS from the time Unix was created into BSD and all the other ones, etc… In
Linux, everything is treated as a file and this is how I understood the purpose of folders
in the root (/) directory. I loved the history of how everything evolved into what they are
today and being a distro-hopper, I switched to other distros around each 2 weeks (need time
to prepare, do my partitions and wait for the ISP to provide some more GBs of Internet).
The final switch (Arch linux)
I tried several linux distros (Ubuntu, Mint, POP! OS, Elementary OS) and desktop environments (XFCE, KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon) but in the end, I found my sweet spot. I always hoped the next linux distro I’d try would have features I’d have liked that I didn’t have in my current distro but they never did; until I stepped into the Arch and Manjaro territory. While Manjaro is based on Arch, it has all of the advantages that Arch offers. Arch allows any desktop environment to be used on top of the OS and has one of the best and most complete documentation and community I have ever seen. The docs possibly have solutions for any issues and distros based on Arch profit from all of its commands. I opted for Manjaro instead because it is supposedly more stable and refined than Arch. There are tons of ways to install packages on Arch based distros (pacman, AUR, snap, AppImages, compile from source) and they provide much more customizability than other popular distros. They also get package and kernal updates fast as they are rolling releases.
I tried a lot of desktop environments on Manjaro but finally settled for the Deepin one. The Deepin edition can be toggled to look like many desktop environments and also uses its own apps (not third-party like Dolphin as file manager for example) as default ones, boosting performance. This was the second distro I used most after Linux Mint.
In the end, I fell in love with Arch as I used Manjaro and decided I was ready to take up the challenge and build it from the commandline setup. I booted the live disk of Arch, configured it using help from the amazing documentation and installed a lot of desktop environments. I settled for KDE Plasma as desktop environment because it was much more customizable than others. Lastly, I swapped out the hard disk of my laptop for one with more storage and installed several distros on partitions. This includes Ubuntu Budgie, Deepin, Fedora, openSUSE and Linux Mint along with my favorite one, Arch.