What makes Linux so special? My Linux journey and what I take from it
I have been using Linux for over a year now, and I can safely say it is my favorite OS for daily use. I like the speed and power it gives the user, and these are things you simply can’t get in Windows land.
My Linux journey, like others before me, started with System76’s amazing Pop!OS. For those of you who don’t already know, Pop!OS is an Ubuntu-based distro using the Gnome desktop environment. It is widely named the best Linux distro for beginners, and so I started with it. The first time I booted it off a live USB was magical. Everything was so different, yet so inviting and fun to use. I spent a few weeks using Pop before I moved on to my next distro…
KDE Neon was my first time using the KDE desktop, and I felt right at home. The customization options meant I had stuff to mess around with and they allowed me to make my desktop look and feel just how I wanted it. I loved it, and so I used it for a few months and it worked great for me on my old gaming laptop. But then in the summer, I got a new PC, which made me think about switching to a different distro, and since I had some Linux experience I decided to go for something a little more exotic — the great Arch Linux.
My time in Arch was quite interesting. My PC had Nvidia graphics because at the time, the new 6,000 series by AMD didn’t exist. And Nvidia being Nvidia, I was bound to have issues. When updating, I would get errors and Issues and I ended up reinstalling Arch 4 times in 3 months. I recognize the issue isn’t necessarily caused by Arch, but the issues still drove me off Arch. I did love lots of things about it though — Pacman is still the best Package Manager I have ever used, and the AUR is still wonderful. but I felt like it was time to move on.. but what would I move to? I liked the fact that Arch was rolling release because newer kernels meant better performance, and since my PC is mainly used for gaming (On Linux, I know, radical) I could use any bit of performance I could squeeze out of my machine. I also knew I didn’t want anything Debian-based because I’m not fond of APT. So from my knowledge, these things left me with only one option…
OpenSuse Tumbleweed. I’ve been using it for a little over a month now, and it truly is my perfect distro. It is rolling release, but still more stable than Arch since they take some time to test packages thoroughly before pushing them. It is its own thing, not Debian-based — fits all my criteria! but in all this, I also found things I loved that I didn’t think of. For example — YaST. YaST is Suse’s answer to Microsoft’s control center — it is a do-all end-all solution for anything from package management to hardware configuration to even virtualization. I’ve also grown fond of Zypper, the package manager used by OpenSuse. It feels like a middle ground between APT and Pacman, which is good for me. It is quite fast and has all the applications I need, and if it doesn’t, community repositories are almost always there. Something about OpenSuse feels.. at home. It’s the distro I choose to daily drive because it combines everything I love about Linux into one quick, easy, and stable package that just works.
I think that the most important thing to take away from my journey, is that everyone has that distro they choose to use, because it fits their niche perfectly, and that’s the beauty of Linux, and Opensource too — because anyone can modify the code, someone must’ve made something that is right for you, and if they haven’t, you are always free to make it yourself. Linux is all about freedom for me. It’s that feeling where you know that if you don’t like something, you can change it, or remove it all together that makes me love Linux.
