Way better than expected. Even if I was already using Linux on servers since decades, on desktop I preferred Windows. But my laptop was with 8gb soldered RAM and Windows 11 is basically unusable with that amount. I wanted to switch.

But my past experience was bad, too often stuff was broken. Used Ubuntu in 2016, couldn’t stand it => revert to win10, tried Manjaro in 2019, one day I fucked with some AUR and it could not boot => revert to win10. I left thinking that Linux on the desktop is not ready.

Then last summer the constant updates on my windows laptop made it unusable. It simply doesn’t leave enough memory to use a web browser with more than a couple tabs.

At the same time at work a windows 11 update introduced a very annoying bug: after standby, windows would switch the resolution of displayport monitors to 800*600 and destroy my window layout, with everything moved to the top left corner. I had to use a tiling window manager like glazewm as a temporary fix until Microsoft fixed the bug (still annoying waiting for a couple seconds to have the windows rearranged when the monitor went to standby) and I fell into the rabbit hole of tiling managers. I watched videos where some YouTubers showed how l33t is cachyos with hyprland with their magic dotfiles and I fell for the meme.

For the first few weeks it was awesome, then of course hyprland deprecates syntax without warnings and I started to get errors after the first update. Also the concept of using someone else’s dotfiles is wrong as they’re highly opinionated. They should do videos about how to make your Linux experience similar to theirs, not “clone this configuration as a black box”, because then you would have no idea how to fix problems when the updates come. But it seems like their priority is getting stars on their GitHub, rather than actually helping people. “Just blindly run this script as sudo” is a wrong concept, IMHO.

Then when hyprland changed syntax AGAIN without warning, I was fed up, didn’t want to spend hours to debug the problem so I spent hours to reinstall another distro. I read that Linus is using fedora with plain gnome and some frippery extensions because “it just works” and… OMG. It just works! I’m shocked how good vanilla GNOME has become since the last time I tried it in 2019! It’s now fully usable even for a noob! And I like those extensions too. Modern but classic. Easy but powerful. And the apps in the GNOME circle are so polished. I was shocked to see pika backup, user friendly but not dumbed down.