My Journey from Windows to Arch Linux

Introduction

Ever since I started programming, I have been using Windows. I did not even think about any other operating systems at that time. And to this day I still use it for playing games. I felt really comfortable using Windows.

I also like to customize everything I use and I found myself customizing windows with a lot of third-party tools like Rainmeter, and several other for customizing it's taskbar and desktop. I even installed a tiling window manager on it called FancyWM.

When the window broke

After Windows 11 was released, I disliked a lot of its changes and it broke a lot of customization tools that I used. The OS was filled with a lot of bugs thanks to all the bloat I installed just to change a few pixels on my screen.

After I got better at programming, I realized that a lot of the packages are really hard to get working on Windows and easily work on Linux. Also, I gained a lot of interest in tiling window managers and really wanted to use one.

Not only that, some tools are only available on Linux and I found myself using WSL a lot and had times I would spend my entire day using only WSL.

Making the switch

It was time to switch, hence I began hunting for distros to see which one would fit my style. I realized whichever distro I was gonna pick I was gonna heavily customize it.

So... I decided to go with Arch Linux as it has almost nothing installed at first and I can install only the things that I like and waste less time removing default apps and changing default configs.

I spent that night dual-booting Windows 11 and Arch Linux and felt really happy about all the new things I will get to learn and experience. Not only that, I had now gained the ability to say the phrase "i use arch btw."

Using and customizing

After booting and starring at the terminal for around 20 seconds I realized that I needed a Window Manager. So I installed i3 as I heard a lot about it during my Windows time.

After installing i3, I tried to reduce the brightness of my laptop using the brightness key and failed successfully. I realized I have almost nothing installed and need to get basic functionality setup to make the system usable.

Even though I needed to setup everything, I felt a lot of joy customizing and ricing my OS. Also I learned a lot of things in the process.

Tools I use

• Overall Theme: dracula
• Window Manager: i3
• Compositor: picom (forked) - Link
• Top Bar: polybar
• Wallpapers: nitrogen
• Text Editor/IDE: lunarvim (with tmux)
• Terminal: kitty
• Browser: firefox
• Notes and Todos: obsidian
• Music: spotify and spotify-tui
• Screenshot tool: flameshot
• Office: libreoffice
• File Manager: ranger
• Application Launcher Menu Thingy: rofi

My configuration files: Nirlep5252/dotfiles

Final Thoughts

I wanted to share my experience with Linux because I was really scared and hesitant to switch away from Windows but once I did I felt amazing. Linux has improved my productivity a lot. If you are a developer I highly recommend you to try out Linux.

Feel free to reach out on Discord and Twitter / X