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Why I Switched to Linux

What was I using?

I started my journey with computers using Windows 95 in the early 2000s and progressed through Windows 98, XP, Vista, 8.0, 8.1, 10, and finally 11. I won’t deny that with each Windows release, people were trying to find flaws. However, objectively speaking, each version of Windows brought some major stability improvements, except for Vista and 8.0.

The first Linux distribution I tried was Ubuntu back in 2008, and it was a bad experience. It made me stay away from Linux for the next decade, until I tried it again in 2018.

Why is Windows getting worse?

My guess is that because Microsoft invested too much in OpenAI, they fell for the sunk cost fallacy. The AI is not really intelligent and shouldn’t be used in any critical tasks like building an Operating System (OS). That might change in the future when AGI or ASI arrives, but for the meantime the use of AI for “vibe coding” an OS is definitely a mistake. The forcible integration of AI in the most recent releases of Windows, namely Copilot, adds no practical value and takes computing power from your hardware while significantly reducing your privacy.

Is Linux a viable alternative?

A few years ago, I would have said no. But now it has proven to be the superior option. The issues that I personally had with it were:

  1. The software available, especially engineering software, was very primitive and limited.
  2. The “mainstream” Linux distributions (like Ubuntu) are just awful; no matter how hard I tried to use them, I just couldn’t.
  3. The best Linux distribution is Arch, but the community around it was awful, practiced gatekeeping, and had a steep learning curve.
  4. The outdated display server technology: Xorg. The out-of-the-box experience was really awful, as it had unbearable screen tearing for both scrolling and videos. The workarounds were, to put it politely, sloppy.
  5. No truly mature DE (desktop environment). All of them seemed to have one or two nice features, but had a ton of problems overall. There is always a fork of the troubled DE that promises to fix a certain problem but introduces a million bugs with the fix.

However, now all these problems are fixed:

  1. Wine as a compatibility layer for Windows applications in Linux has come a long way, not just in gaming but also in other programs. Also, now native open source programs are being developed rapidly.
  2. Now, there is no need to suffer with Ubuntu, as there is Arch Linux, which works much better and is accessible in distributions such as CachyOS or Omarchy.
  3. Wayland has solved all those problems and is still getting better. In my opinion, it’s a truly modern and reliable display server.
  4. KDE Plasma resolved this issue; it’s mature and highly reliable.