I’ve been using Linux for years, but as the proprietary alternatives get more aggressive with telemetry and adverts, I wanted to document the choices that actually keep my desktop predictable.
This isn’t a manual, but a practical overview of my setup. From why I’ve settled on CachyOS and KDE Plasma for my main rig, to the reality of dealing with proprietary software and app compatibility in 2026. It’s just an honest look at the transition and why I’m done with the corporate defaults.
Just had a conversation at work about using Linux full time. Coworkers asking me what issues I have and what games I can play.
I mean it’s not all sunshine and rainbows…but I told them my Start Menu opens every time I need it. I don’t have explorer.exe randomly crashing. I can search in my Start Menu for things and they actually come up properly. Oh and with btrfs snapshots I can update whenever and if it breaks I just rollback and wait for a fix. Which has happened…once in the last 5 months of using Cachy+Plasma.
I feel like I can actually use my computer now. With Windows I dreaded doing updates. With Linux I update whenever I want and it doesn’t fucking bother me at all.
Why ‘still’? Linux is only getting better and other options are getting worse.
Maybe a “Youtube-like title” for the fun (or dare I say, habit) of it?
I would explain why I still use my butt to poop in 2026, butt I assume you already know the most likely explanation …
The linked blog has a normal title.
This just in: Why I’m staying with my husband that doesn’t beat me, doesn’t gaslight me, doesn’t rape children or explain daily why rapists should run our country. He helps with chores too. The reason will shock you.
That sense of superiority for using Linux? The ‘btw’ those arch folks use?
btw I use arch is what you say when you show your partner your ikea shark and stripey socks
What surprises me more is that someone feels the need to justify staying on Linux at all. That’s a conversation that shouldn’t even exist.
The question has almost always been the other way around: why use anything else?
Yes. I have used Linux for 26 years. Never have I ever considered leaving.
I mean, I bet that cute lil’ daemon mascot makes it worth it. :D
I’ve said some negative things about KDE Plasma feeling like three desktop oses taped together, but the latest version the fixed all that and it’s pretty good.
I still want to destroy all the hotksys and window decorations, but it just works, and it works well, and it works for edge cases where Gnome and Cosmic crash or fail silently.
KDE is pretty good, and I say that about a very small amount of software.
Also: I just switched to Nixos and now I can actually setup systemd units without wanting to shoot myself in the face. So that’s nice.
I’m a huge fan of tiling window managers, and i3 is still the king of getting the hell out of my way and letting me work/play. That’s the beauty of Linux systems, everyone gets to set things up how they want.
You know you can change the hotkeys and window decorations right? That’s the great thing about KDE. You have choices.
Sure, but being good out of the box is very important for normal users. Power users love the crazy customization. Normal people don’t really care.
I know but I don’t really care whether my OS is good for normal users. In fact the more it is the less I’ll like it.
Normal users love someone taking control and all their data and telling them what’s what. A “Linux for the masses” will be inevitably pure trash, something akin to ChromeOS now (which is kinda already linux for the masses). They literally want all the things we hate. For a company to know everything about them, to take all their data, to tell them what they can do and they can’t so they feel ‘safe’.
As soon as Linux becomes a masses thing, it means lots of money can be made off it, and companies will jump on it to enshittify it as much as they can. So I’m really hoping that “the year of Linux on the desktop” will never happen.
Fair point, but out of the box KDE has pretty sane defaults these days. It’s a very inoffensive desktop.
I have just a couple customizations that I do immediately on a fresh install, but it certainly wouldn’t kill me to use it as it comes.
Better still, in the Nix world there’s https://github.com/nix-community/plasma-manager which allows you to set up all the settings exactly once, and then auto-apply them on all the machines!
I tend to just copy my dotfiles over between machines. I’m not a fan of declarative management and even less of immutable OS’es.
I use chezmoi and chezmoi_modify_manager to keep my dotfiles (including some KDE configs) in a Git repo, and it works well enough.
Steam has reported record number of linux users in their os survey! I made the switch this year too!
Why I still drive a Ferrari instead of the poop smelling ice cream truck.
Windows 11 is less of a poop smelling ice cream truck and more of a Kaiser’s Coffee Shop van. And you ain’t in the driver’s seat.
“coffee, black”
“Apologies, all our coffee come with creamer loaded with corn syrup. We’ve got matcha though! Also with corn syrup.”
Do you have any actual problems with systemd, or do you just want SysV init scripts to stick around forever?
Maybe systemd isn’t the best, but it’s way better than a bunch of mostly unstructured shell scripts, and more secure (it’s pretty easy to reduce privileges, sandbox the filesystem, restrict syscalls, etc per service just by editing the unit file)
You can also replace individual components. It’s basically a bunch of binaries using an API.
