My first time using Linux was back in college, and then briefly in grad school. I was mostly using Ubuntu and tried some other distros like Fedora, Debian, Linux Mint, and SUSE, plus others I don’t really remember.

My impression back then was that it had all the necessary components for work, but it wasn’t really good for “life.” Things like taking screenshots, video calls, and gaming all sucked. I ended up sticking with Ubuntu mostly to run Emacs for my stats class homework. Honestly, it worked well for that, and even today, I still like using those tools on and off. There are a lot of good things there.

It feels like out of nowhere, all of a sudden I wanted to try to use Linux again. Over the years, I have kept a dual-boot Windows laptop running Ubuntu, and a Mac for work. So this time, I wanted to use something I liked 10 years ago. Funny enough, it’s mostly because of the color and aesthetics.

It took me only a few hours on a Saturday morning, and I feel I got everything I needed - a stark contrast to the troubleshooting marathons of 2015.

I decided to go with Fedora 43 (KDE Spin). Unlike the GNOME desktop I used back in college, KDE feels snappy and gives me that granular control over colors and window rules that I missed on macOS. The biggest surprise was the “life” stuff: I connected my Bluetooth headphones and hopped on a video call without a single driver error. Even taking the screenshots for this post using Spectacle felt faster than my workflow on a Mac.

Setting up my dev environment was surprisingly boring (in a good way). I installed VS Code, Neovim, and my Python data stack, and everything just worked - no compilation errors or weird dependency hell. It all feels so natural and connected with my style. I’m curious to see if I’ll hit any walls in a month, but for now, it’s good to be back.