I too recently made the switch from Windows to Linux. I wonder what people mean by a “new user”? My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20, followed by a C64 and later an Amiga 500. The OS on the Amiga was somewhat like Linux (at least from memory). I tried Linux a few times in the past 30 years or so. Once because I was curious I ordered a CD (do not remember which distro that was), then 20 years ago because of work (I think that was Ubuntu) and a few years ago (maybe 4-5) because I had an old laptop that couldn’t run Windows any more. Since it was just an old laptop I only used to watch movies/series on, I distro-hopped a bit on it. Of all the ones I tried, Manjaro was the fastest and the one that gave me no problems with hardware working out-of-the-box. Mind you, none of these experiences with Linux were very intensive. And while I am a programmer and I learned at school how computers work (this was in the 80s), I consider myself a noob when it comes to Linux. Does that make me a “new user”?

Recently I was planning on building a new PC and contemplated going from Windows 10 to 11, but the whole software market has been irking me for a while now. Everything (not just software and OS mind you) seems to be switching more and more to a subscription model, which just feels wrong to me. Not to mention the ever-increasing breach of privacy by the big companies. As such, before building my new computer, I tried a few distros on my old PC. First I tried all the flavours of Ubuntu and decided fairly quickly that KDE is my desktop environment. Gnome is just too restrictive for my taste and the others feel too much like Windows (just a personal opinion, obviously). In terms of actual distro, I noticed all the Ubuntu flavours gave me problems after using them a few days, so that one was crossed off the list. While doing my “research” I quickly came to the conclusion I prefer a rolling release over a regular release cycle. Partly because some of my (new) hardware is/was not part of the kernel yet, but also because I do not want to do a major update every (x) year. But rolling does come with a higher chance of breaking things. This is why I went with Manjaro. The 2 weeks (or so) of holding back updates -which others seem to see as a problem- I see as an advantage.

I have only been using it for a month now, so far so good. Still learning and getting lost a lot in how it all works. So far I am happy with my choice, we will see how I feel in a year ;) I already made some silly mistakes, like I wanted my /home directory on a separate drive and stupidly thought I needed a 1TB drive for Root as well… lol. Now got this big empty space on one of my drives not sure what to use for. The choice between X11 and Wayland is a touch one, but I stay with X for now. I do have one question though: What is pipewire and should I switch to that?