As the realiazation hit, it was too hard to believe and too much to digest. Yes, I’ve been daily driving linux for the last 8 years now. The journey started with my annoyance with how sluggish and buggy windows was in my college days. Having developed a never-ending passionate hate for windows I installed linux by wiping my entire drive. Not dual booting, not trying it out in a VM, just simply nuking entire system and data and starting over. It was refreshing to use an operation system that respected my choices and did not think I’m stupid.

Linux is not for ordinary people who just want to get work done. It’s for enthusiast who love their computers more than themselves. PopOs! was my first foray into the linux distros and it was a breeze working with. I just loved the defaults! A lot has changed over the years but some behavorial issues still persist. I daily drive ubuntu now because it has the widest support for software out of any other distros, it also has the largest daily driving community. If you ever run into a corner case with particular setup of hardware and drivers, chances are someone else on the internet already has, makes troubleshooting that much easier.

If you ever want to daily drive linux as a personal computer. Get ready for the drop in quality. Linux is messy, it is not as polished as other proprietary conterparts and the reason for that is because it’s written for a wide variety of hardware. Another core thing is most linux software focuses correctness and functionality over polish. Companies like Microsoft and Apple build software targeting very restrictive hardware settings, which makes very easy to build polished experience for touchpads, wireless connections, microphones and speakers, cameras, support for touch devices, etc. The more you use linux the more tolerant you will become towards buggy and unpolished software. Some might say that in order to build great products you have to use great products first. And MacOs is certainly a great product, but I won’t abide by these rules. Linux desktops and experience keeps getting better year by year.

When you break the system more often you fix it more often. I’m not afraid to tweak some settings and run some commands that would potentially nuke my system because I have confidence that someone on the internet has already done so and there is an elaborte guide to fix it. The power of open source software! This teaches you a lot more about your operating system rather than just clicking some buttons inside settings app. You are naturally inclined to learn about things like display protocols, Actual Terminal(TTY) vs Psuedo Terminal, storage formats, driver compatibility, instruction architecture details, processes, cron jobs, distros, window managers, niche protocols, daemons and other endless stuff which is not common knowledge.

Daily driving linux, you certainly learn to live with what you got. That means no Adobe products, no desktop apps for Microsoft’s office suite, no widely used video editing tools and most importantly no native games that are written for linux specifically. This wasn’t a big deal breaker for me in the past or now. I have now learned to embrace imperfection, explore the alternative to alternative to make things work. As long it get’s the job done, it’s good enough. This is where most people find themselves at crossroads, they simply cannot live without their beloved premier pro or games. Although the gaming situation on linux seems to be developing quite well over the past few years and ever so since Valve decided to make SteamOS based on Arch.

Over the years Linux has made me smarter by putting me into situations that would simply not allow me to use my computer for common daily tasks. And I appreciate that a lot. There are some things I just know without having to look up for them or having no direct or inderect interest in learning them. If that is what you aspire to do as well welcome to the dark side.