With the growing number of users jumping from Windows to Linux, I decided to fully take the plunge and dive deep into the Open Source ocean. A few months and several headaches later, it has proved to be the best computer-related decision I've made in over a decade (and perhaps in my entire life).

There. That’s out of the way. I recently installed Linux on my main desktop computer and work laptop, overwriting the Windows partition completely. Essentially, I deleted the primary operating system from the two computers I use the most, day in and day out, instead trusting all of my personal and work computing needs to the Open Source community. This has been a growing trend, and I hopped on the bandwagon, but for good reasons. Some of those reasons might pertain to you and convince you to finally make the jump as well. Here’s my experience.

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  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    8 days ago

    Gotta love Linux newbies talking about their first experiences and they’ve already tried 3 distros that I have barely on my radar. A few months in, I hardly knew what SystemD was and this guy’s already on a distro that explicitly removes it.

    • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
      0·
      8 days ago

      While I just land a recent Debian stable on my laptop, install cargo for new Rust apps, and Guix package manager, and call it a day.

      Well, after 25 years the pursuit of agressive distro-overoptimization becomes a bit boring. But who am I to criticize what other people spend their free time with?

      • Emily@lemmygrad.ml
        0·
        8 days ago

        I started with Debian and the spiciest thing I’ve done in almost two years of exclusive Linux usage was changing my desktop environment from Cinnamon to KDE while updating to Debian 13. I haven’t seen a need to hop around to other distros, it’s nice to search for the few problems and almost always find answers.

      • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        6 days ago

        At its core, SystemD coordinates and launches all the services in your operating system. So, it is essential for the boot process, but also does scheduling, meaning you could run a backup script every night with it, for example.

        That’s the simple answer. But in truth, SystemD is often criticized for doing too much, so it’s hard to describe what it really does. For example, you can also manage network interfaces via SystemD.

        Kind of the goal of SystemD is to provide common plumbing which works the same across distros, so that when you configure your services or network interfaces etc. on Ubuntu, it works the same as on openSUSE or Arch or whatever.