Elementary OS

I wanted to use this before I switched because the locked down-ness appealed to me, I thought I would break things if I was given free range. This was short lived because once I installed it I realized I hated the theme and it’s skeumorphic style.

Ubuntu

While frantically scrambling for something safe and accessible for me I jumped straight to ubuntu, I didn’t like it’s theming as much either but I was able to easily change it to a simple arc theme, also I was introduced to the gnome addon store which was insane to me, (I remember telling my friends how cool it was to be able to install widgets and functionality from a website) I loved the customization. after about a week I was getting along nicely but I still missed windows a decent amount, but I didn’t care that much because im on freaking linux .

I started learning about different desktop environment (looking back I didn’t know much at all but I thought I knew what they were back then) and I decided to try out KDE so I (you might want to take a seat for this because it was genius) installed KDE on top of gnome on ubuntu, pressing y to any prompt that came up. Obviously this went catastrophically, but for a good hour or two I didn’t notice and I was super into it. then I realized everything was funky so I tried to undo it, which took ages and a lot of tears. I felt safe back at gnome but I was left wanting after that taste of pure (easy) customization and the feeling of bloat (from not uninstalling things right) leading me to switch to:

Kubuntu

I was super excited to switch to this, and I was surprised to see all the things I missed out on when I did the janky install on ubuntu. Dolphin, KDE connect, kvantum, transparent blur, it was all so beautiful. I used Kubuntu for a while before hearing about

Manjaro

I had heard the praises of arch and the AUR and seeing a distro turn that into something simple enough for me to use was nearly an instant sell. The installation took me a long time because I didn’t know how my BIOS worked but after 3 days (lol) I got it working and it was amazing. I went straight into customizing it to be mine again and used it for the longest I’ve used a distro ever, only recently I started getting into the idea of trying out other desktop environments and even cooler, window managers. I wanted to try Deepin and xfce, i3 and openbox, but I didn’t want to dual boot and after the disaster on ubuntu I wasn’t going to try installing another desktop environment on manjaro so I just kind of ignored it and moved on with my life. At least until I heard of

Arco linux

I head about this from a youtuber old tech bloke, the moment I saw it I knew I had to have it, I wrote the usb and went to sleep, the next day I installed it, starting a long 3 weeks of troubleshooting and learning. I had never used such a “raw” distro, having to install the things I need and not having it done for me was a learning experience. I also routinely broke the os having to reinstall around 7/8 times, the last time I broke pacman and it’s signatures making it basically useless. After all this I got flustered and gave up going back to

Manjaro (again)

this was short lived however because for some reason there were a bunch of issues the most prominent being the wallpaper on my main monitor not loading right on restart while it did on my secondary, there was definitely a way to fix it I’m sure but I also missed learning awesome and i3 and messing around with UKUI and DeepinDE so I decided to jump back to

Arco Linux (again)

I returned to arco linux again and decided to be very careful about just throwing myself around on here and instead be calm and methodical and that’s where I am today, still learning more every day and still loving linux every damn day.