My Year of Linux
My experience using Linux for the past year for programming.
Years of using Windows make every one of us curious about trying Linux or straight up switching to macOS. Although I did eventually switch to macOS, I have a year of Linux under my belt, and I'd like to share my experience here.
The frustration of dealing with Windows terminals and their commands, the lack of proper support, and the general lack of usability made me want to switch to Linux - but it was the release of Omakub that finally pushed me over the edge.
Using Omakub
Omakub was the final piece of the puzzle. It was made by DHH, who coincidentally had grown tired of Apple and wanted to switch to Linux himself. It's a simple, opinionated setup of Ubuntu, preinstalled with all the tools you need.
Using Omakub was a breath of fresh air. It provided a clean, modern terminal experience with a familiar Unix-like environment, paired with a beautifully set up window manager. I really enjoyed my time with it, combined with dual boot to still have Windows available.
It was also a great learning experience, I got to properly learn Linux and its tools.
Omarchy
After a while I got curious about even better customizability. Scrolling through Reddit, most of the Linux setups you see are Hyprland-based, and that's what I wanted to try. And just in time, DHH released Omarchy, an Arch-based Linux distribution built on the principles of Omakub, and I was excited to try it out.
It really builds on the foundation of Omakub, but takes over the whole system with Hyprland and the tools around it. The customizability and the first-party support for themes make it really fun to use. The terminal works beautifully and the window manager is a joy to use. The only thing I missed from Omakub is separate workspaces per monitor, not a big deal, but I prefer the way Omakub handles it.
The bigger issue, though, was the random crashes: the lock screen crashing, the window manager crashing. One Omarchy update even broke the system badly enough that I had to reinstall the whole thing.
All in all, it was a great experience, but in the end I just wanted a simple, stable desktop environment that lets me get work done without the fear of crashes and constantly fixing little issues.
So I finally made the switch to macOS and it's bliss. If you're curious how I set my Mac up for programming, I wrote about that here.