I have recently switched to Arch Linux on my main computer. I started out cautiously and not expecting a lot. In my mind, I thought it would be a small novelty I would interact with for a couple of days and then forget. It was actually completely the opposite. I am not that well versed in coding, I understand it but I am no engineer, and neither I was that much into Linux distros when I installed Arch linux on my main machine. I expected hours of bugfixing, scripts breaking at a minimal update, unstable gaming performance and using the OS being overly complicated.

I was so totally wrong.

At the start it was a lot of discovery and trial and error, yes, but especially today, when we have AIs that, when supervised and when you have an idea about how something should work and some reading competences, customizing your chosen distro is trivial. I can never see myself going back to Windows or MacOS after switching, even though with time I saw some programs are not available or they are but with a more or less complicated set up (most were things I easily lived without, or replaced with something objectively better found with a simple search on the internet).

Something that really struck with me and I implemented a lot is using the terminal for things I never thought would be possible. A friend told me about ‘Ani-CLI’, which described very shortly, is a tool that lets you open your terminal, write the title of any anime, and watch it directly inside the terminal. Yeah, no video player, no Chrome tab/Chromium app/Electron GUI that eats up 2 or 3 GB of ram just existing. Watching a video takes like 200MB of ram, which was mind blowing to me. Since I discovered that was possible, I started doing anything really: I made a tool to look up videos on YouTube directly from terminal, having my local playlist and songs be played directly from terminal and so on. Honestly I don’t know where the limit is and I don’t see one.

The second reason for which I loved switching to Linux is that once I saw how little performance is needed to run anything, I told myself “Huh, I guess those old laptops I have around taking dust which were bought 10 years ago could see some use”, and I was so right. The level of homelabbing you can do on a Laptop with a Pentium CPU and 8GB of DDR3 ram is mindblowing with Linux. From having AdGuard to every single device connected to your home network, Forgejo to have locally all your Github repositories, Syncthing to have folders synched between different computers, locally stored and streamed anywhere music (yes, even when not connected to your own wifi, securely from anywhere on your phone). The possibilities are infinite, and as said, as long as you know what you want, do your research and understand the basics of each tool, with some help from AIs to code, all of this is a weekend away to become reality.

In conclusion, Linux has come a very far and long way from the memes of the past, where everybody would say it’s something for computer engineers only. Maybe in the future the initial joy of Linux will start faltering facing problems I don’t see now, but as of now, I don’t see myself using anything else.