This may surprise you, (with me being an 8th grader who can barely tie his shoes), but I use Linux as my daily driver.

I love Linux, the openness, open-source utilities, libraries taking 10 seconds to install instead of manually moving DLLs. God, it’s so nice to have literally everything in my computer available with a couple key presses.

Wanna install an entire new desktop environment?

$ sudo dnf install @kde-desktop-environment

Wanna make a cow say the first lines of The Bee Movie script?

$ cowsay "According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground."

Want to destroy THE ENTIRETY OF YOUR LINUX INSTALL?

Easy, just 14 presses of a key.

$ sudo rm -rf /

The point I’m trying to make is that Linux trusts you. Linux is the most powerful software most people use, without even knowing it. Android, is just Linux with a fancy-schmancy SDK and utilities.

Here’s the issue. Linux as a desktop operating system sucks.

The problem with Linux⌗

If you don’t know, Linux has multiple distros. A distro is a version of Linux with extra utilities, a desktop environment, and maybe more depending on the distro.

The problem is half of Linux Distro’s are funkier than the ’80s.

Let’s take… Manjaro for example.

Manjaro… look, no offense to the maintainers of Manjaro. Making and maintaining a distro is hard. Especially one with its own software instead of copy-pasting GNOME utilities. Genuinely, I mean no offense to them personally.

But that doesn’t mean Manjaro still isn’t bad.

Manjaro, hands down, is the worst distro I’ve ever used. I installed it on my Ryzen machine and every hour or two, it unexplainably froze, then shut down 2 minutes later. It is so distant from Arch that it makes the advanced fixes on the Arch User Forms unusable. Manjaro could just be, a set-up arch, with some great utilities or a good package manager.

But no! Let’s make an entirely different, worse kernel, that ignores the main philosophies of “Keep it simple”, and “Always bleeding edge”. Also, after all of that, let’s say that Manjaro is a beginner-friendly distro.

Manjaro may be worse than your thumb being cut off, but the last part is a big problem with most distros. Most distros like to say that they are beginner-friendly. When Linux at all is not beginner-friendly. The only distro I can think of that comes even remotely close to being beginner-friendly, is Ubuntu. Even that is an overstatement.

Oh boy, the fanboys. Look, I want Linux to be successful in the mainstream. But, if you’re forcing your grandma to use Linux because “It’s the better operating system," stop.

Most people, use their computers for taxes, and social media. That’s it. I recommend Linux for any programmer or techie. Not some guy who just wants to pay his taxes.

While I do sound like I want to kick Linux into the shadow realm. I actually really like it.

The good with Linux⌗

Let me get this out of the way. I am a programmer and a computer nerd. So this doesn’t apply to the average person. Also, it’s my opinion, so gut me from the intestine to the throat if you want.

God, I love package managers. Installing libraries used to be terrible. Moving files to Mingw’s weird folder system is no longer an issue ever since I moved to Linux. Also, downloads for weird or obscure pieces of software aren’t really an issue anymore.

Also, the stability is nice. While some distros are terribly unstable. Cough Cough… Manjaro.

Some are really nice and stable. For example: Fedora, It’s been my daily driver for about 4 months. And it hasn’t crashed once. The only major issue I’ve had is Nvidia drivers, and those aren’t Fedora’s fault.

Linux is… cool⌗

Overall my experience with Linux is great. I started with Linux with my Raspberry Pi 3 with Kano OS and Noobs when I was 11. I ran Manjaro for 3 months transitioning from Windows. Never running Manjaro, again. After that, I’ve been running Fedora ever since.

So yeah. Linux is… cool, I guess.