why i left windows
Sorry Microsoft 😥
Prior to the leadup to the release of Windows 8, I like many others grew accustomed to the traditional Windows desktop. Over the years, the OS went through many changes, most being cosmetic but the layout usually stayed the same. I’ll be honest, when Windows 8 first appeared, I quite liked the idea of the metro theming they adopted but I think they went about implementing it all wrong. They tried to fix that with the Windows 8.1 upgrade but by then it was too late for many people. That is about the time, I came to the realization that I wanted something more than what Microsoft was offering. Sure, Windows 8.1 was very eye catching but the UI was a disaster. For example, you could access the system settings in many different ways. In addition, each window had a settings menu. This caused confusion. Another example would be how clunky it was to be able to switch between the start screen and the desktop. Other factors that made me rethink Windows as an operating system was the intrusiveness of updates and the targeted ads.
Enter my first foray into the adventures of GNU/Linux (for some of you out there 😉). I think it was late summer early fall of 2012 when I installed Fedora 17, otherwise known as “Beefy Miracle”! You gotta love the naming conventions! Fedora 17 came with Gnome version 3.4 and I thought to myself, “I can get used to this”. Yes, when I first started with Linux I was dual booting. I would bounce back and forth between Linux and Windows, as the experience was all new to me and not an easy transition at first. I stuck with Fedora through version 19 “Schrodinger’s Cat” and then I moved on to Korora.
Korora was a pretty cool remix of Fedora as it came pretty much complete out of the box with more tools, apps, and theming. I will say that Korora was the distribution that motivated me to learn the ins and outs of Linux and the use of the command line. When Korora 24 rolled out in 2016, I felt confident enough in my learning experience that I went ahead and wiped Windows from my partition and used Korora as my only OS.
That following summer, I was removing unwanted files and directories in the terminal when I issued the infamous <rm -rf *> by mistake from the root directory 😮 nuking my entire drive. Well at least all my files were backed up to my server lol! That moment led me to try Antergos Gnome. At the time, I wasn’t ready to try vanilla Arch. Anyway, I did try other distros and desktop environments such as KDE, XFCE, Solus, and Elementary. However, I found that I just kept going back to Gnome everytime. After having run Antergos for so long, I became spoiled by Arch and the AUR, and decided to stick with it. In January of this year, I decided it was time to remove Antergos, and go for the vanilla Arch but this time, installing a tiling window manager to go with it. I chose to go with XMonad after having seen Ethan Schoonover’s YouTube video about his setup. If you are interested in the XMonad twm, then I suggest you head on over to Ethan’s Github page https://github.com/altercation/dotfiles-tilingwm. Presently, I am still running XMonad and am very satisfied with my setup, so much so, that I also have it on my Lenovo laptop! At this point, I can’t imagine going back to a traditional desktop environment. A TWM offers complete control my environment and the customization makes it really mine!
And as for Microsoft, I have no interest in returning to the Windows bandwagon. I get enough of it at work.