I’ve been playing around with Hyprland for a couple weeks now. I was just going to experiment with it on my NixOS laptop, but decided I really needed to immerse myself in it more than that so I installed it on my main desktop as well. It has been a huge mental shift going from a typical stacking window manager to a tiling window manager. There is something about being able to quickly arrange and navigate your windows with just the keyboard that is exhilarating. It also had me looking up key bindings for some of my more used apps like VS Code so that I could avoid having to use the mouse.

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.