I picked up a new gaming laptop for my wife this year, so her old gaming laptop has been sitting round waiting on me to throw a Linux install on it. I decided to use it for a test bed of some different distributions that I haven’t played with yet. My main gaming desktop uses Endeavor OS, which is an Arch-based distro, I have vanilla Arch installed on an old Surface laptop, and I have a VM running Ubuntu Server. I’ve used Ubuntu for at least a decade, and I’ve been using the Arch-based distros for about a year and a half now. I decided to try something different on the laptop.

The switch to Linux

I’ve been using Linux as my primary OS at home now for well over a year. It’s been 452 days to be more precise. What caused me to ditch Windows? It wasn’t because of some deep-seated hatred of Microsoft or Windows. I still use Windows in my work life. I’m a .NET developer, so I have a lot of exposure to Microsoft technologies.

The short answer is that it started as an experiment. I’ve always been a fan of Linux, but have mostly stuck to Windows as my main operating system simply because it ran the games I played and the software I used. But then things started to shift. Valve came out with the Steam Deck and was helping to advance gaming in Linux through Proton. Microsoft even started having a friendlier stance towards Linux. Some of my favorite tools now worked in Linux. I could even use dotnet to develop C# apps in Linux. All of the anchors that kept me tied to Windows were gradually being cut loose. I felt like I might finally be able to use the OS that I really wanted to be using for my everyday usage.