My Experience Daily Driving GNU/Linux For a Year

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:51:11 -0400

Intro

About a year ago, I had no idea how to actually use my computer. I found simple things like installing an app to be confusing. At that time, I had been learning to code in Python for about 5 months and was using Windows as my operating system. However, I would soon discover that Windows is not optimal for development, so I made the jump to dual booting GNU/Linux. Switching to GNU/Linux was a great decision and I have been daily driving it as my main OS for a year now. This is my experience.

The Beginning
Goodbye Windows
The Switch
I Use Arch BTW
Hyprland
Two Machines, Two Systems, Too Many Problems
NixOS
Conclusion

The Beginning

After working through some articles on coding online, I began seeing a recurring theme: developers should use Linux. But I disagreed, believing Linux was unnecessary and difficult to use. Eventually, after reading the Odin Project’s list of reasons as to why they don’t support Windows, I was convinced to make the switch. I googled (yes, I still used Google back then) “Best Linux distro for beginners” and saw Linux Mint was a great choice. After I managed to get in to the Linux Mint live environment, I had no idea what to do. I know that Linux Mint installation is literally just clicking next a bunch of times, but I was scared that I might delete my entire Windows install. This forced me to go back to Windows and do some research. During that time, I found out that the Odin Project only supports Ubuntu Linux. Back then I didn’t know that Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu and there probably would not have been any problem for me to use Linux Mint. Anyway, I downloaded Ubuntu and put it on to my USB, and then I followed an installation guide from a random person on the internet to install the OS. Luckily, my Windows install was fine. Unfortunately, I had made a fatal mistake when installing Ubuntu. When I made a custom layout for my partitions I set my root partition to something like 4GB. That is way to small, so after a couple days my GUI just… disappeared. Luckily, the fix was simple: reinstall the OS. Since I didn’t have anything important on Ubuntu, I couldn’t lose any important data. However, while I was troubleshooting, my friend that the GNOME display manager is kind of weird and that KDE plasma is better and more customizable. So, I installed KDE plasma on my fresh Ubuntu install and was very satisfied with the result.

Goodbye Windows

I had been using Ubuntu for like 5 months at this point, and I hadn’t used Windows for a few months. By this point, I had been enlightened to the disgusting practices of Microsoft. I realized that Windows was basically spyware, it was bloated, and full of slop generators that Microsoft passed off as Artificial “Intelligence”. I decided it was time to free up some space on my hard drive and DELETE WINDOWS. The first thing I did, of course, was back everything up to ensure I didn’t lose something important, like writings or pictures. After backing up my files, I decided to have some fun before deleting Windows. For some reason, Microsoft puts every critical system file in a single folder called System32. If one deletes this it causes massive and irreversible damage to Windows. So I deleted it. After deleting System32, Windows couldn’t boot, and the even the system recovery program was broken. I booted back into Ubuntu and deleted the Windows partition, finally freeing myself from the grip of Microslop.

The Switch

I had been satisfied by Ubuntu for a long time now, and never thought that I would change distros. This all changed when I saw a video from Linus Tech Tips where Linus and Linus built a Linux PC together. In this video, Linus Torvalds (The creator of Linux) said that his favorite distribution of GNU/Linux is Fedora. I immediately thought “Wow! Ubuntu sucks! Fedora is WAY BETTER and I have to install it!”, so that’s what I did. Fedora is a great distro, and between rpm and flatpak I could install just about every app I needed. Other than the package managers, however, there were very few differences between my Fedora system and my Ubuntu system. They both used KDE, they both had all the apps and features I needed, and they were both easy to use. While Fedora and Ubuntu are both easy to use, that is certainly not the case for every Linux distro, and I would soon come face to face with that fact.

I Use Arch BTW

Eventually I realized that the GUI is slow, that flatpak and rpm suck, and that Fedora is bloated by default. I decided that there had to be a better way, and, as it turns out, there was: Arch Linux. Arch is minimal, every piece of software that is installed is installed because you put it there. Not only that, but the AUR has tons of apps, making not being able to find that app you need a thing of the past. Installing Arch was really annoying. Most of the setup was easy, but one thing consistently held me up: full disk encryption. For some reason, I simply could not get full disk encryption to work and this was extremely frustrating. Fortunately, ChatGPT was able to generate some slop that managed to get full disk encryption to work, so that problem was solved! Arch was amazing: there wasn’t a single app that I didn’t ask for, there was no bloatware, no spyware, no problems. The best part: I could tell my friends that “I use Arch by the way”. Arch gave me something more than just a minimal installation, however. Before I installed Arch, I was scared to use the terminal, I thought it was slower than the GUI for everything but a few types of tasks. But once I began using Arch, I realized that the terminal was the best way to do everything (except for browse the web). I would use the terminal for everything, connecting to wifi, updating my system, syncing the system clock. With a GUI, you can only change what the people who designed the GUI want you to change, with a terminal, you can change anything. The terminal gives you incredibly fine grained control over your operating system and as someone who enjoys being able customize their operating system that is exactly what I want.

Hyprland

KDE is fine if you like using a mouse, but that isn’t for me. I edit my code in neovim, after all. I’m such a hard-core vim user that I even write these blog posts in vim. Of course, the point of vim is that you never have to touch the mouse, and you maximize your productivity by using keyboard shortcuts. Hyprland does this too, except for it doesn’t just apply to text files: hyprland takes the power of keyboard shortcuts to your entire graphical user interface. To get a pure hyprland setup I reinstalled Arch Linux, which was torture but in the end I had exactly what I wanted: Arch + Hyprland. Once I had hyprland installed, it was time to rice it. Of course, I had no idea what I was doing so I just used ChatGPT to customize my hyprland setup. It looked great, but had a small problem: since it didn’t sleep when I closed my laptop my battery would die really quickly. Despite this hold-up, I continued to use my Arch + Hyprland setup every day, and this setup was so reliable that it I used it even when I went to the National Speech and Debate tournament. It was fast, it was reliable, and it made me far more productive. Eventually, I would discover end-4’s hyprland dots, which were amazing. They made me more productive, They made me faster at writing code and doing the things that I needed to get done on my computer, and most importantly, they made my computer look great.

Two Machines, Two Systems, Too Many Problems

I have two machines: a laptop and a desktop. Having two different machines caused a simple problem for me: I wanted the same exact configuration on each machine. The solution I tried to use was to export the apps I had installed to a text file using pacman -Qe > installed.txt. Then I would take those apps and install them on the other system using pacman. This was tedious, and it didn’t catch everything. Every time you run a command on Linux, you change something, and eventually, your system becomes so chaotic that it becomes impossible to recreate its current state. What I needed was a way to recreate my system on multiple machines, a system that makes it so I don’t need to worry about remembering every command I’d ever ran on each system. What I needed was NixOS.

NixOS

NixOS is a powerful operating system that makes it so you can easily reproduce your system across multiple machines. It is based on Nix, which is a declarative, functional package manager. But rather than just managing installed apps, NixOS uses the Nix language to manage the configuration of your entire system. Your entire system configuration lives in a single file, called configuration.nix, and by copying this file to another machine and running sudo nixos-rebuild switch, you get a system with the same apps and the same configuration. In addition, NixOS has atomic rollbacks, meaning that if a change to your configuration.nix file breaks something, you can just roll back to a previous version of your system when you boot. Right now, I am using NixOS with KDE plasma and Hyprland (I can choose which environment I want at login), and I think that this is the best Linux setup I have had so far.

Conclusion

Using Linux has taken me from not knowing how to do anything but browse the web and edit text files to be able to configure my system, use git and ssh, and write bash scripts to automate tasks. But I think that Linux has taught me more than just how to use computers, it has taught me the value of open source. When I began my Linux journey, I didn’t know anything about open source software, and had rarely, if ever, used it. My only experiences with open source software had been Firefox (which I hated) and Python, neither of which I knew was open source. My favorite OS was Windows, my favorite browser was Chrome, my favorite text editor was VS Code (Which includes some nonfree software from Microsoft in the official build). Now, after using Linux for a year, I can proudly say that I have almost zero nonfree software on my machine, except for some firmware blobs. My favorite OS is NixOS, my favorite browser is Zen Browser, my favorite text editor is neovim. Nonfree software tends to be a vehicle for violating user freedom. Today, we are seeing more attacks on digital freedom than ever before, with governments trying to ban open source operating systems, ban vpns, and force you to verify your age just to use your computer. Therefore, I would encourage you to protect your freedom, and to stop using Windows, stop using MacOS, stop using Chrome, stop using Safari, and begin using free software, like GNU/Linux, BSD, and Firefox. Computers are better when the software they run serves you, not big tech.

Hello

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:18:11 -0400

Hello and Welcome!

My name is Luca, and I enjoy maths, music, science, and subjects which exercise the mind. I also deeply care about health and well being, and digital freedom. On this site I will write posts related to random stuff that I find interesting. You can find me on GitHub and look at some of the code I’ve written. Most of the code is crappy Python but you might find some cool stuff. As I make more projects and push them to GitHub, I might write about them here.

How I Make This Site

The posts on this site are edited in Vim and Hugo is used to convert markdown to HTML, and also for themes. Since I am using Vim for writing posts, I will almost certianly make really dumb typos. I currently run NixOS which is a pretty cool distro, but I am still figuring it out.

Support Me

I don’t put ads on my website or sell user data because I’m not a creep (and maybe I don’t know how…). If you want to support me, you can do so by sending me Monero.

My Monero Address:

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