POST -01 My Experience with Linux

I am not that new to Linux. My college PCs always had them. Most probably because it is free and I was in an IT engineering program. Quite honestly, Linux always seemed kinda cool to me. The free part is very appealing and using it kinda makes me feel cool. I tried installing and using Linux a lot of times. Which means I uninstalled it or stopped using it a lot of times as well.

So what happened? I thought, idk why, that using Ubuntu or Linux Mint is kinda beneath me and I should only use Arch (Ik Wild!!). This led me to try Arch. Maybe I just wanted to say –

“I use Arch BTW!!”

I went straight to Arch Wiki, which is like the holy grail for Arch installs. Also there is this easy command to install Arch on your PC:

archinstall

Yeah, that’s it! It’s like a helper to install Arch Linux. I went into some false confidence that I wouldn’t need any help at all — I’m an IT engineer after all. I completely forgot the part where I was in my 2nd year and knew almost nothing!

Trying to be different, I used Rufus instead of balena Etcher and then got the latest Arch ISO on it.

Then proceeded to royally mess up my system and bricked my home PC!! Luckily it was an old system and I didn’t have a lot of data on it. After that failed attempt, I gave up on it for almost 3 years.

Then suddenly out of nowhere I just thought: why am I so fixated on Arch when I can use a lot of different distros? Then came a roulette of different distros which I tried and successfully installed on my PC without bricking it. I went through:

- Arch (again!) This time I copied some things from r/unixporn
        - Pop!OS. It was nice but I immediately did not like it for some reason
        - Fedora. I liked it and used it for a while till I didn’t. I fell out of love very quick
        - Elementary. This didn’t click with me at all. I have never used any MacOS which it is made to look like
        - Ubuntu. I used it in my college PCs so that was an immediate no for my home PC as well.

Finally I arrived at Linux Mint. It just worked for me. The old school aesthetic of Cinnamon plus a new theme I found called Chicago95 made this the perfect one for me. I was so into nostalgia. Although I have never used Windows 9x, I have a weird sense of nostalgia for it. Apparently this phenomenon is called anemoia — nostalgia for things you have never experienced. The PC I have is very old and potato, so using any heavy-duty distro is a no, but Linux Mint is lightweight and easy to use. I have configured it to look like old Windows 98. Very retro!

This was fun. If I do anything else with my Linux then I will update here. Thanks for reading!