Why Linux is Superiour.

Despite what literally everyone else around me thinks (and says to my face), I don’t just choose what I do to hate myself. Crazy! I know for a fact that’s a part of it, but it’s not the whole story. I genuinely enjoy using the Penguin operating system over anything else offered on the table, but why exactly is a mystery, even to myself - but that’s why I decided I wanted to write this. I wanted to pick at my own brain and KNOW why I choose it.

One of the big ones is Windows being the most annoying thing ever, with so much extra crap that I just don’t need. Do you genuinely know someone who uses the built in phone dialer in the modern age? Didn’t think so. The fact that you need like three different applications just to remove some of the garbage it has and make it usable. And even then, you can never remove Edge (unless you live in the EU, apparently. Lucky bastards.), you can’t chuck the windows store into HELL where it belongs, you still have to manually disable as much telemetry as possible (and it still won’t stop anyway), it’s just a whole shit-show.

Linux also felt inviting - it’s not nearly as ubiquitous as Windows, not as expensive and preppy as Mac, and people really, REALLY rally behind it - have you ever seen someone proud of using Windows over Linux? Nope, but I have vice-versa. It’s also significantly more techy, which got me to pick up some mild coding skills, and learn problem-solving. While I personally can’t make a whole program from scratch or anything, I’m able to write simple bash scripts to make tasks that I do often into an extremely simple affair, and I can make my way around the computer using the Terminal without much issue (I do it for this site’s VPS, even. Although I do still personally prefer GUIs I can manipulate with the mouse on my main PC. I’m a bit stuck in my ways, I suppose).

If Windows does something you don’t like or doesn’t fit your workflow, you either have to work around it with software that already exists, make your OWN software that does it, fiddle around with registry entries to maybe get it to do what you want, or give up. However, since Linux is so modular, you can just uninstall something that you don’t fw and install a replacement with one command in the terminal. Frankly, it’s nuts. And awesome. You can replace your whole DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT if you really want, and that’s just really cool to me in a way I can’t describe with words.

Also, Open-Source. If I’d like, I can stare at the code that I’m currently running on my computer, and know exactly what it’s doing, why it’s doing it, and how it’s doing it - unlike Windows, where everything is this black box that we just kinda have to trust (unless you build a copy of XP from the leaked source code… Yeah, no thanks).

Finally, there are just so many versions to choose from! That might seem like a downside for some, but I’d like to think of it as many ways to acomplish the same task. If you don’t like where Canonical is going as a company, you don’t need to use Ubuntu. You can use an offshoot of Ubuntu that removes all the crap people don’t like (a la, Mint, or KDE Neon), use what Ubuntu is based on (Debian, and all of it’s offshoots), or go with something unrelated entirely from it (Arch, btw). They all have different sets of application suites, different Desktop Environments, different package managers, but at the end of the day, Linux is Linux, and it’ll all be the same under the hood.

Now, which distribution did I end up going with? I was a bit on edge about Ubuntu from day one, especially with everything people said about Canonical. But I did wish to go with something fairly popular, so something based on it was definitely going to be up on the priority list. After doing the good ol’ YouTube deep-dive (i.e, searching “Linux for Beginners” and figuring out what people were talking about as I went), I went with the DARING Linux Mint. Yeah, but hey, it got me on their forums, learning more about how the system worked, slowly learning more FOSS software as time went on, replacing stuff like VSCode with Codium (and nowadays, almost exclusively Kate).

This was back in 2020, and I was still in High School, so I looked like the most nerdy idiot bringing in my “gaming” laptop with Linux on it versus everyone else who used the Chromebooks that every school seemed to have around that time. I always disliked them, but the fact that, y’know, they ran exclusively Chrome and very little else, REALLY pissed me off back then. I was a Firefox user, even on Windows.

As I’ve gotten used to Linux being a part of my daily life, with very little Windows usage since 2020 (although I had a minor replase in 2022, I corrected myself quickly), I wanted to get something a bit more stable. Cinnamon was nice and friendly, but a bit limiting. It would crash on occasion, as well as sometimes kill applications I was actively using when it did, and that’s when I drew the line in the sand and went back into the hunt for a new flavour of Linux.

At this point, I had my site already set up and ready to go, so I had been using Debian for a bit. I knew that Debian was what Ubuntu (and therefore Mint) was based on, and I had heard that it quite stable (the reason I chose it for my VPS), so it really made me consider it as an option. I even tried it on my laptop for a short bit as my testing ground before I committed to installing it on my battle-station. The main thing that stopped me from actually using it was that the packages were quite old, and I like getting the latest versions of applications when they release. Not really for any particular reason, I just like to have the new features as they roll in (eh? See what I did there?). So, a stable operating system, but as a rolling release? There’s no way that exists-

Oh, it does.

I ended up choosing Siduction as my OS of choice. I’ve had nearly no problems with it, other than NVidia Drivers, but those are a sore spot on any Linux system (frankly, they’re a sore spot on everything, even windows), so I’ll chalk that up to an “Nvidia, fuck you” moment. And since I had tried Debian on that laptop, I learned that I really enjoy using KDE over anything else. The built-in suite of tools mixes really well with the DE itself, and I’ve had zero problems with stability. It even has a chunk of features I didn’t even know I wanted (clipboard history, mic mute button on the task bar, stuff like that), but now that I have them, I never want to use my machine without them.

So, thinking about my choices, are they any good? I mean, anything is better than Windows at this point, even Apple devices, but I wouldn’t be caught dead with the Fisher Price of computing on my desk, so I’d say that although things have been pretty bumpy, this has overall been a net-positive experience for me. I am surrounded by people much older and wiser than I, but I guess that means that someone did something right to push me in the direction of freedom, rather than being one of those Instagram reels scrollers or Tik Tok Gen-Z skibidis or whatever the fuck the term is nowadays that makes me seem hip with the kids.

To be honest, I’ve always felt more at home with the generation after me rather than the one I was actually born into, so that might be another reason for my switch to Linux, but I dunno. That’s a whole ’nother discussion for another long-winded typefest.