I have been using Linux for about 5 years and although I don’t consider that I know much, I know enough to fix my own problems and that’s usually enough for me.
Since Plasma 6 was announced I wanted to test something other than XFCE, Gnome or Plasma (or any DE) so I give it a try with ArcoLinuxD i3wm and is increible the amount of things I learn the ‘hard way’ because there was no GUI to do the things I want to do, or maybe I was too lazy to do it with the terminal since there is always the ‘easy way’.
Things that might be very easy for a lot of people, but I never take the time to learn, like mounting drives, running programs from startup, setting environment variables, creating desktop entries, and a lot of other things I didn’t even remember. I even learned to use things that used to give me a headache just looking at it, like Vim, xdg, the Archwiki (that is super useful) and the manpages.
It’s ironic because something that started as an experiment is now my daily drive, and now that Plasma 6 has been released, I don’t want to leave i3 behind.
The problem is, in Linux once you know how things work, most things are pretty easy. In Windows, even when you know how things work, if you want to change your system at all you’re fighting the OS the whole way.
For example, in Linux it’s trivial to set up my notifications to be in the bottom middle, except when I’m coding to have them in the top right, with various hotkeys to manage them. Or to have custom window layouts. Or to do anything, every part of the stack is easy to change. On Windows you just get a blob and it assumes everybody wants it to work the same way.
