A little blog introduction

25 Sep 2021

Okay, so this is going to be a quick little check-in and introduction to my personal blog, I’m going to cover what I’m going to be doing with it. I started this blog recently, a bit more than a month ago now, the first blog post was sort of a trial run, to see how potentially I was going to structure and set up my blog posts, and what I was going to cover. I really liked how the first post turned out, so I want to keep doing more of them.

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Finally maining Linux over Windows

15 Aug 2021

It’s been a long time coming, but I finally made the big switch, more than a decade maining Windows since I first started using a computer when I was around 5 years old or maybe even younger. What led me to this change was trying setting up Neovim in Windows recently and saw that it was a huge hassle to install every little thing. I ended up making it work fairly easily but everything just took more that it would’ve in Linux and it finally snapped in my brain that all of the things I’ve been hearing about Linux over the years was exactly what I wanted. Moving around in the terminal and writing code on it didn’t seem so bad, so I figured why not make Linux my main environment that’ll make everything easier and nicer, from day-to-day casual browsing to working on my personal projects. I’ve also had trouble focusing on my work lately and thought that having a more specialized/streamlined approach to my workspace would help a bit too.

I’ve had a couple of previous experiences using Linux, like everyone mostly has in the past, I’ve used Ubuntu on a super old laptop years ago and my experience wasn’t great. More recently though, I used Manjaro while I was taking CS1 during spring of 2020, my experience with Manjaro wasn’t that great either, I think it had to do mostly with the desktop environment that I was using during that time, but it just didn’t click very well, I tried fiddlin’ with the theme but found it to be a bit of a hassle, I also had some other random issues, so I just used it to briefly work on my projects for the class and never touched it again.

This past week, as I mentioned earlier, I sought to make a more permanent switch and started researching a lot of different Linux distros. I ended up on the same two that I had last spring, Manjaro and Pop!_OS, but this time with the addition of Fedora. Upon further research I found that everyone wasn’t as high with Manjaro as the last time I researched it and then the battle of the distros went quickly to Pop!_OS and Fedora. As I saw it, they were both similar, but Fedora was a bit more of a vanilla experience with Pop!_OS having a bit of more bling built in to it, so I went with Pop!_OS since I’ve previously had a bad experience working with ricing my Linux up, and I also randomly find myself on the System76 website looking at their products.

I am also just coming off a Security in Computing course that I took in the summer and recently DistroTube, a Linux youtube channel that I’ve followed for a good time, posted this great video about comparing Linux to Windows, and while of course there’s a bit of bias (that’s maybe warranted), the security concerns and a lot of other points brought up in the video were just insane to think about. Which of course is kind of dumb because I hear all of these blatant privacy issues basically daily but up until I took this course I never understood the magnitude of the issue.

So far I’m a couple of days into Pop!_OS and loving everything about it, setting up everything was quick and I love the way it looks. I feel a lot more in touch with my PC than ever than with any Windows version or even Manjaro. My first project since setting Pop!_OS up was working on this blog and installing everything has just been such a breeze; installing Ruby, Jekyll and every program I’ve needed in between has just been great. Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve always heard devs and programmers talking about Linux and I’ve just shrugged it off because of my past experiences and thought it wasn’t a big deal, so now, for the time being I’m all in Linux.