Just wanted to share my experience with Linux over the years.

It started many years ago. My father got a free computer from a friend of his that seen better days. It came in a Compaq case with a 40gb HHD and Windows 2000. Mind you, this was back when Windows XP was on the market. It did work and with a PCI WiFi card, an antenna extender and some aluminum foil, we were able to pick up the unlocked wifi from the Church down the street on days when the weather was good or at night. It was great being able to log into MySpace or play Runescape from home instead at a friend’s or library. Then, one day, it started to act weird. Wasn’t loading pages or opening the browser or really anything. We soon discovered we had a virus. Not sure at the time how we got it, but it was a problem.

My father spoke to his “tech” friend that he got the computer from and he gave us a copy of Windows XP Home and a few other parts computers. My father and I spent the next few days hodge podging a computer together and installing XP. It ran well for a few weeks until the same thing happened. It began to run slow and do the same things as Windows 2000. We hit a wall again. Did a reinstall of XP and about the same amount of time later, got another virus. It was frustrating.

While I was at school, a teacher told me about Ubuntu and how it was free and nearly virus proof. Told my father about it and we went to Canonical’s site to order a free copy of Ubuntu 7.04 and let me tell you, it was a change. It did just work with our hardware and ran so much faster than Windows ever did. Took a week or so to adapt to the new ecosystem. We stayed with Ubuntu for years after that. I however, eventually got my own laptop and wanted to game. Windows just ran my games so well and didn’t give me much trouble. Ubuntu using Wine just would not cut it for nearly any of the games I wanted to play. I drifted from Tux’s warm embrace.

Fast forward to May of 2024. I read about Windows 10 inching towards EOL and having tried 11 on several different machines and not liking it, I decided to see if Linux got any better. After hearing about Proton and the Steam Deck I had high hopes. Asked around online and I was suggested to give Linux Mint a try. Slapped in a new M.2 in my rig and gave a clean install to Mint. Setup was easier than I remembered it being and nearly all my games ran without a hitch. Before long, I didn’t even think about Windows. I did get the itch to try out other distros and tried out Debian next. Ran as well as you would expect. Perfectly stable but I was missing some of the touches that the Mint team did. Asked around and was told to try Fedora, Arch and a few others. Took on the challenge and did Arch next. Read the wiki and installed it within an hour or so. Used it for a month and realized it wasn’t for me. Aside from updates breaking things here and there, most problems I faced, someone else already has and solved and posted on the Arch fourms or it was on the wiki. Wasn’t as hard as others made it out to be. Couldn’t figure out why people gloat about using it other than the meme. Grew bored of it and tried out Fedora next. This system was a bit more unique than I expected. Seemed very limited with features and Gnome was annoying to use. If I was on a laptop, I might enjoy it but on a desktop, not so much. Gave the KDE spin a try and found it to be a lot better. Fedora updates seem to break the system far more often than Arch. Well, rather the fixes for the problems took longer to rollout. I went a different direction and gave Ubuntu a try since I knew my parents used it still and found it to be like Mint but with mistake known as Snaps and Gnome. Went back to Mint for another few months when I heard about Linux From Scratch. Was told that was what Arch users pretend they did when they installed Arch. So, I looked into it, did a ton of research and went head first into it. Failed closes to thirty times before I managed to make it happen. I was running an LTS kernel with x11 to make sure things worked. Used the Cinnamon desktop since I liked how basic, yet feature rich it was. I did it, I achieved something that I never thought I would. Problem was it took a lot to upkeep my distro. I was pretty much alone when it came to bugs and issues. Grew tied of it so I defaulted back to Linux Mint. Where it just works and can do anything any other distro can.

As a note, my father definitely was the source of the viruses we got on our home computer. He admitted it to me years later.

Also, to get ahead of any “Wayland is better than x11” comments, I know x11 is old and Wayland will replace it eventually. I just had way more trouble out of Wayland than I ever have out of x11. Not saying x11 is better, just wanted to have something work more so than to have to fix or configure to do basic functions that x11 already supports and has for years.

Im open to other suggestions to other distros if you all have any. I’m down to clown on that distro-hop train.