My painfull Linux journey so far

Why did I decide to switch to Linux

Now if I'm going to talk about my Linux journey, I have to start at the beginning. Why exactly did I decide to switch to Linux? After all during my school career I highly opposed it. Every time I saw someone using Linux they were crashing out about something that wouldn't work, or worse — they accidentally broke their whole system. Yea, I didn't want any of that. I'd prefer something more reliable.

However, throughout my school years I learned a lot, I got more comfortable with the command line. In fact, for git, I only used the command line tools. And no it's not because I wanted to be "different" — I honestly just didn't understand how the GUI tools for it worked (ᵕ—ᴗ—).

Anyway, I started using the command line more often and the problem was that many articles expected you to be using a Linux system, which I wasn't. It annoyed me a little but ultimately it wasn't that big of a deal. There were a bunch of tools to allow you to use the Linux commands despite being on Windows, like WSL. So, that's definitely not enough reason to switch.

During my final semester, however, I really started to notice my laptop slowing down. Not only that, I also just noticed how cluttered with programs it was from over the years. It just felt like a ball of chaos and my brain was not having that. I like this clean, minimal, organized. Otherwise, I just can't find anything. At this time I started watching videos about customizing your laptop. Making a clean work space etc. Of course Linux found me. It was highly customizable after all and there were just so many options to suit your specific needs.

So, I decided, when I graduate, I'd completely reset my pc. I'd make a backup of all the files I still need and all the rest just gets taken of. I'll install a fresh Linux distro and create a perfect customized working environment for me. No random extra apps that windows just puts on your pc, none of that. I would be selective and only put stuff on my pc that I needed.

I was super excited to start ricing and building a setup that just worked for me!

NOTE — ricing is the process of customizing the visual appearance of your Linux desktop environment.

Installing my first distro: EndeavourOS

Now if you ever looked into any of the distros a bit you might be like, "Why TF would you install EndeavourOS as your first distro." Well it's probably because I'm an idiot and I clearly didn't know what the hell I was doing. So I eagerly install it on my second laptop to try it out. Honestly, the installation was pretty easy, it worked well, I had no issues with it. Thank god I talked to a couple of my friends about it. One of them also had it before, didn't take enough precautions and accidentally lost all his stuff.

Okay alarm bells were going off in my had now. I thought, do I really want to deal with all those consequences. Not really, so I moved on. Although, EndeavourOS still runs on my second laptop till this day. The thing, is my second laptop is just for testing things any way so it wouldn't matter if I somehow lose everything or break the system. It's a perfect testing ground.

Moving on to my second distro: Fedora

After that first experience I tried another distro that I heard a lot about in all the videos I was watching — Fedora. Now there were a bunch of editions of fedora and me being absolutely clueless didn't know what to pick. So I did some research, looked up the difference between the fedora editions. During that time I also began seeing videos of tiling window managers, like hyperland and sway. That really interested, since I didn't like the intense animations for hyperland I thought sway would be more my thing. A desktop environment where I could do everything with just my keyboard sounded super efficient. So I decided I need to get fedora with sway. Just my luck, there was fedora sway spin.

Now this was difficult. Not the installation process or anything, just sway. It's completely different to anything I'd ever seen. So I boot up the pc with fedora sway spin and then it's just me and that screen with almost nothing on it and — I didn't know how to open an application.

Yep, I didn't know how to open an application. I thought I already broke it somehow. All the videos of sway I watched so far just explained what it was but not how it worked, so I was super confused. So back to the browser I went to google how to use sway. That was an adjustment period. You see working with keyboard shortcuts for everything does make things a lot faster — if you know the shortcuts that is, which I obviously didn't. So I took my time, I watched more videos I played around with the sway config file, I tried things out.

I was pretty happy with fedora, actually. It wasn't bad but I was still very clueless about everything Linux related, so I simply wanted to try out more distros. After fedora, I finally felt a bit more comfortable, though, so I started to decide on which distro I actually wanted to install on my laptop.

Settling in with my third distro: openSUSE

Installation went pretty easy again. I had decided openSUSE: Tumbleweed was the distro I wanted to go with. It had snapper, a tool that takes snapshots of my system so I could roll back if I broke something which gave me some piece of mind. It was easy to user. The package manager, zypper, had pretty much all the applications I needed, only a few exceptions like, obsidian, but that's still pretty good I thought. It even offered a premade sway setup you could install which I thought was super nice.

Perhaps my life would have been easier if I had just installed that premade sway setup. But no, I decided to just install sway and build from there.

I kid you not. It took me a whole month to set up a working sway system. Every day, I would wake up and all I would want to do is something tiny like watch a YouTube video. Somehow that would then turn into me trying to figure out why I don't hear any sound, then trying to get the Bluetooth to work and once I figured all of those things out I would usually stumble against a new problem. That was my life for a month. It was very painful. Everyday things that just worked on Windows weren't working on this sway setup and it took me ages to fix them.

Don't even get me started on trying to configure my other monitors. You see, I didn't have a "settings" app where I could, you just position my displays. Instead, I had to go in with:

swaymsg -t get_outputs

Just to see my monitors and then I still had to figure out how to tell my system what position they were in. Because there was no GUI app I could use (well, there probably was but I just didn't know about it back then). So, I did everything via the terminal.

It was a long and exhausting process. Now I'm not a believer but if hell exists, maybe this is what it was like.

However, after a long and painful time of customizing and just trying to get my system to work I eventually got it setup. It wasn't glamorous or anything but at least it was working and for now I was happy with that. I hadn't really gotten into the ricing yet and after the exhausting process I didn't feel like working on it anymore either. I would get back to it for sure but at this point I just wanted to let it rest before I went mad and lost my sanity.

For a few months everything went great. There were still some hiccups, like discord which didn't let me stream my screen because I was using sway. Overall, not the biggest problem in my case but it was still sort of annoying. Overall it was good, my setup worked nicely, I had gotten very comfortable editing my sway config and using the sway commands.

Everything worked nicely until, of course, it didn't. I updated the system and for some reason my external monitors weren't working anymore. What I learned the very long and painful way here was that display Link and sway are really not compatible. I tried everything, I read articles of people experiencing the same problems, I even read through articles on the arch wiki for help. But what I learned was that those two things just don't work together very well and there isn't much to help with it at the moment. I was devastated! After all that hard work of setting everything up, I couldn't use some of the most important hardware I had anymore, my two external monitors.

I think I got the display Link to work the first time out of sheer luck really so I didn't realize it would be such a pain in the ass. I decided this wasn't going to work. I don't want an update to just be able to break that setup I did. So it was time for a change — again.

Finding a more stable distro: Debian

After some recommendation from others and some more research I thought Debian might be the way to go. The reason I didn't take it in the first place was because I thought I wouldn't have access to the newest features and packages because Debian was such a long term distro. That's why I went with openSUSE tumbleweed since it's pretty stable but rolling release.

Stability was all I cared about now though so I went with Debian. Installation went smooth and I originally set it up for sway. The problem was the same of course — sway and display Link still didn't match, obviously. So I eventually gave up and decided to use gnome. Not the worst but I had gotten so accustomed to sway and it's many shortcuts it felt really slow to use. And I liked being able to customize everything on sway. With gnome this was more limiting. It would make due though. At this time I just need my laptop to be functional since I actually needed it for work reasons.

So that's where I'm at now.

What I learned

Just trying to use this distro in my daily life has to me so much about the Linux system and especially about sway so I definitely don't regret it. But it also wasn't an easy ride and it's most surely not over yet. Shit will hit the fan again eventually when I start playing around with my system again. However, I need to learn to be prepared for that and take precautions.

I also haven't given up on ricing. I still want to make a setup that works best for me and looks and feels the way I want. When I eventually get to it, I'll most definitely write an update about it and hopefully have a git repo with my dotfiles ready!