The old times

When I was a boy, I spent so many days playing Commander Keen, Earthworm Jim, Doom 2 and Boogerman on my second-hand 486. I still remember that crackling, beige behemoth of a monitor. I remember how magical it felt to enter the commands I was given. You might imagine that this was in the 90s, but no -- Serbia was not a well-off country, and we were not a well-off family. I didn't know that my PC and my games were a decade old, and it didn't matter. I loved them all the same.

Then there was the day when I got my first modern PC. It must have been winter, because I still remember that almost painful restlessness as I waited for the machine to warm up before it was safe to turn it on. I remember the elation as it powered on. The whirring of the hard drive, the hum of the CPU fan -- those noises would stay with me for over a decade, well into adulthood.

It was a solid Windows XP machine that could run almost anything at the time. I fell in love with the OS, so much so that I kept using it until 2013 or so. Stubborn as I was to upgrade, I eventually grew to love Windows 7 just as much, though I did miss the old Luna and Silver themes.

My opinion started changing, as is usual in such stories, when Windows 10 released. I was quite intrigued at first, having attended an early presentation about Windows 10 that revealed it to be the final version of Windows. But when the reports about its out of control telemetry came in and when I saw just how sterile and uninspired the interface was, I was deeply disappointed. It felt like an office, not the digital sanctuary I'd grown to love. Every bit of warmth and personal touch was stripped away. For years, I refused to downgrade, but eventually I had no choice. My OS no longer felt like something I controlled or even trusted, but something I was coerced into. I felt uneasy storing my personal data on a system that felt intrusive at best and hostile at worst.

Microsoft was right about one thing, though. For me, Windows 10 was the final version of Windows.

Why Linux?

It was mid December 2025 and the annual leave I had been anticipating for so long finally arrived. It wasn't just the prospect of rest that excited me, though.

No, what truly excited me was the hard drive that was on its way to my home. The Windows 10 end-of-life had come months prior, and I knew that I was on borrowed time until programs too dropped Windows 10 support. But with Microsoft's blunders getting exponentially worse worse, my algorithmic overlords have, ironically, started serving me content promoting Linux, and as much as I hate to give the clankers a win, they couldn't have picked a better topic. Ravenously, I devoured videos from large YouTube creators switching to Linux, comparing Linux and Windows performance in games, and showing off the best and newest utilities. In disbelief, I researched whether Linux gaming could possibly rival Windows gaming, and was surprised at the near parity between the two.

I fondly recalled my time trying out Ubuntu and Linux Mint in the mid 2010s. It was a great experience overall, but games were my primary use case at the time. I tried to dual boot, but the HDD boot times were brutal, and I got tired of switching between operating systems. Years have come and gone, though, and Linux has slowly and steadily improved, while Microsoft continued to strip mine every bit of customer good-will they had left.

The hard drive finally arrived, and I could barely get any sleep as I lay in bed listening to the subtle clicks and whirrs of my new drive, working in its enclosure. As exaggerated as it may sound, I was overtaken by absolute euphoria. Through my mind raced vivid images of how it would feel to use my chosen distro. How I would customise it, and theme it around the setting of my cyberpunk novel.

I woke up way too early, but it didn't matter. As soon as I remembered what my plans for the day were, I jumped out of bed and immediately got started. I really don't think I ate anything until the evening, until CachyOS was fully installed on my machine.

From the very beginning, it was a learning experience. The wiki advised users to manually partition, and I wasn't about to half-ass it. I was in it for the long haul. Within the hour, I understood the ins and outs of how my PC boots -- something I found cryptic and even terrifying in the past. No longer did the idea of an unbootable system scare me as it used to. I fell in love with the prospect of learning how my system works. For the first time since the 2010s, I felt that rush of knowing exactly what my computer is doing and why.

The day went by in a blur. By the evening, most of my favourite programs were installed and set up and the hunger pangs grew severe enough to be felt through the emotional high.

On the second day, I started setting up my games and game development tools, and the struggle began. I spent the whole day looking for solutions to arcane problems. Downloading DLL files linked by shady, obscure YouTube videos (don't do this unless you make sure it's a legitimate, signed file) to get ReShade to work, digging up obscure environmental variables that would make the Unity Editor usable with my high-resolution monitor, and trying (and, at first, failing) to understand how Wine/Proton work under the hood.

I was able to get Unity to look half-way decent, but when I couldn't solve any of the other issues, I had to seek help. A user responded to me, asking if I would like to join voice chat so he could explain to me how Wine works and figure everything out. The man spent several hours of his time going through what Wine prefixes are and how they work. Though he said that he didn't mind and that he found it fun, the experience still left me with a deep gratitude for the spirit of open-source, and a desire to pay it forward many times over. It's one of the reasons I have created my (MAKE A PAGE AND PUT LINK HERE) Linux journal, where I will be posting solutions to problems I encounter and the little personal projects I intend to take on.

CachyOS

Around three months have flown by, at the time of writing this, since I installed CachyOS on my computer. I decided to keep my shrunken Windows 10 partition at the outskirts of my SSD, just to be safe--but so far, I have only booted into it to do some minor tests, or to play Doom: The Dark Ages (damn DX12). That game runs fine on Linux, but it's heavy enough that I could really use a few extra frames, as Windows still handles DX12 better, at least for a few more months.

Arch Linux

Arch Linux has intrigued me ever since I learned of its existence. As someone whose identity is deeply tied to mastery over things I care about, I feel a strong pull towards a distribution that expects you to know what you're doing, yet also provides you with powerful learning resources like the (LINK HERE) Arch Wiki. So, when I read the experiences of people who said how much they learned about their system by manually installing Arch Linux, I knew that I had to find the time to do it.

I dusted off my old laptop from the mid 2010s and plugged in the live USB. Though I barely got any sleep that night, I didn't care. It was one of the most intense flow states I experienced in months. I was hooked. I understood so much more about systemd, about grub, about what initramfs is, and so much more. I loved and understood KDE Plasma at that point, but having seen people ricing their Hyprland and Niri setups, I needed to try it, to see what the fuss was all about. Unfortunately, a few days of trying out Niri later, the workflow just wasn't for me. I realised I was a floating window kind of person through and through, and as much as I appreciate Niri's infinite scrollable desktops, I just can't help but get irritated whenever a window tiles or gets scrolled.

So I will just have to find a way to make KDE Plasma my own instead.