I have been using Linux for about 5 years and although I don’t consider that I know much, I know enough to fix my own problems and that’s usually enough for me.
Since Plasma 6 was announced I wanted to test something other than XFCE, Gnome or Plasma (or any DE) so I give it a try with ArcoLinuxD i3wm and is increible the amount of things I learn the ‘hard way’ because there was no GUI to do the things I want to do, or maybe I was too lazy to do it with the terminal since there is always the ‘easy way’.
Things that might be very easy for a lot of people, but I never take the time to learn, like mounting drives, running programs from startup, setting environment variables, creating desktop entries, and a lot of other things I didn’t even remember. I even learned to use things that used to give me a headache just looking at it, like Vim, xdg, the Archwiki (that is super useful) and the manpages.
It’s ironic because something that started as an experiment is now my daily drive, and now that Plasma 6 has been released, I don’t want to leave i3 behind.
This was exactly my experience when I switched from XFCE4 to Hyprland. Now I much rather do everything in the terminal. Except for partitioning drives and auto mounting them. I switch to gnome to do that in GUI.
Using nixos I can just rebuild with gnome instead of hyprland. Do what I need. Then rebuild back to hyprland. And gnome is not installed anymore. So I get to use GUI without the bloat of having a GUI installed all the time.