Windows elitist uses Arch Linux and enjoys it

A few months ago, I created a thread that detailed my experience with Arch Linux as someone who grew up using Windows for their entire life. I detailed things that I found frustrating and also things I really liked. After making that thread, I abandoned my installation for quite some time and went back to Windows since I was more familiar with that. However, recently I have felt that my performance has been lackluster with Windows.

So, I gave Linux another shot and began using it as my day-to-day operating system instead. In fact, I have been using it for the past few weeks, and actually really liked my experiences so far. Here's what I have been up to since then.

Gaming

One thing I really wanted to see is how Linux fared in terms of gaming. Obviously cross-platform games like Minecraft worked just fine, but I wanted to see how games only for Windows would behave on Linux through the use of Wine and Steam's Proton. To my pleasant surprise, it ran pretty much every game I threw at it flawlessly, with some exceptions. Valve has really carried Linux gaming with Proton and made it easy to use. Here's a table of the games I tried under Linux and how they behaved:

Customization

Linux is a tinkerer's operating system. Both the operating system and the software you can get for it are extremely customizable. A lot of Windows software (especially from Microsoft) just doesn't even come close. You can change pretty much every aspect of how your computer's user interface looks. I mean every aspect, too.

Want to change the layout of everything? Go ahead, you can move panels around and add your own stuff to them. Don't like the boring default themes that come with XFCE or KDE? There's nothing stopping you from downloading a custom theme and applying it. Hell, you can even modify the themes yourself if you want to. Want to spice up your computer's icons to have a particular style? There are dozens literal icon packs available online for you to choose. You can even make them yourself if you want. Want to use a completely different desktop environment? Go ahead, nothing's stopping you from installing another one alongside your current one.

As a power user, I've really wanted an operating system like this for a very long time. Windows just isn't as customizable as it was in the XP days, and that fucking sucks.

Utilities

Linux seems to offer a lot of powerhouse tools, which despite being a bit annoying to figure out, seem to be impressively flexible.

When it comes to ripping disks to ISO format or even just making an image of a hard disk, DD is stupidly powerful. Unlike Windows, I didn't need to install anything to be able to rip software CDs in the ISO format or install Macrium Reflect to make a copy of my drives. It just works without any bullshit. The only downside is that this is not a graphical tool. You have to do your work with a command line tool, and that's the downside that gives software like ImgBurn and Macrium Reflect the upper hand: those tools are more graphical, which makes them significantly more user-friendly.

Want to get the SHA-1 or SHA-256 hash of a particular file? Under Windows you need to use Get-FileHash and then specify a bunch of arguments. With Linux, it's significantly more efficient. Just feed the sha1sum or sha256sum commands the file name and it will give you the end result without a hitch.

videogamesm12@riften /run/media/videogamesm12/Vault/Miscellaneous » sha1sum granite-castle_jun2022-to-jan2023.html
1ba845605ab682d8211abbba4656081e2d018af4  granite-castle_jun2022-to-jan2023.html
videogamesm12@riften /run/media/videogamesm12/Vault/Miscellaneous » sha256sum granite-castle_jun2022-to-jan2023.html
c6662f3190c47b38a51d08662e4a884afed46790296ad2c4b18322a96ca337a7  granite-castle_jun2022-to-jan2023.html

Want to see each instance of you being mentioned in a group chat full of people who, despite being banned from your server for a year now, still haven't gotten over your existance, allow you to live rent free in their heads, and refuse to evict you? Just use the command grep "your name goes here" -Hnr <file name goes here>, and it'll spit back the results in nearly seconds (even for files that are nearly 120 MB large).

If you want, you can even send this data to another command by using what's called a pipe. For example, to automatically count the amount of times you were mentioned with the aforementioned command (instead of you having to do all the work manually), just append | wc -l at the end of the command and it'll give you the exact number.

Unofficial LogMeIn Hamachi applications are also available which don't require you to create a LogMeIn account to join a network. This is really fucking handy, because Alco and I use Hamachi to securely share large files or (until it was patched) crash eachother's clients remotely using WNT's Fantasia.

Issues

Despite the fact that my experience with Linux has been mostly positive, I have still encountered several issues with it that range from annoying to nearly making it a dealbreaker.

Screenshot tools under Linux are problematic at best

I take a shitton of screenshots every day, so this one is pretty important for me. I tried multiple different applications that took screenshots with XFCE or KDE, but each one had their own quirks that were varying levels of unacceptable.

• XFCE's own screenshot tool (xfce4-screenshooter) was rock solid and stable, but it had no option to take screenshots of one specific monitor in a multi-monitor setup. This was a deal-breaker because I tend to screenshot my entire desktop on my main monitor to post on Discord or even on this very forum, but I simply cannot do that without having to manually crop out my other monitors.
• Spectacle (an option offered by the folks behind KDE) had pretty much every feature I wanted (window-specific capture, singular monitor capture, etc), but for whatever fucking reason it sometimes stopped working properly. Screenshots that were supposed to be copied to the clipboard just... didn't. I have no idea why it does this, because it doesn't spit any errors anywhere that I can see. This was what made it a deal-breaker, because I copied a lot of shit to my clipboard.
• Flameshot had a lot of promising features (single-monitor screenshots, ability to draw over parts of a screenshot like ShareX), but it had a lot of problems. For one, I am convinced that the application is either retarded or downright hateful of my very existence. Single-monitor screenshots would either capture two halves of my right monitor and my middle monitor or catastrophically fail in such a way that I'm still scratching my head trying to figure out what the fuck went so wrong.
• ShareX v15.0.0 under Wine installed fine, but to say it was unstable when I wanted to use it as a screenshot application would be an understatement of the century. It rivaled azadoazide azide with its instability. Left clicked on the status bar icon? Crash. Attempt to take a screenshot? Crash. Literally open the "Capture" menu (not even click on anything)? Crash. This sucked because everything else seemed to work fine, but actually taking screenshots clearly did not.
• ShareX v12.0 under Wine was actually closer, albeit marginally. When I clicked the tray icon, the application would very briefly work and then show a black screen with the regular tools, but then it would crash. Unfortunately nothing changed when it came to opening the Capture menu, because it still crashed.
• ShareX v10.0 under Wine was the closest I got. Despite the fact that the Capture menu still instantly crashed the application and the fact that the actual tray icon didn't do anything when left-clicked, I was able to take a proper screenshot using a custom keybind while the application was the active window. After this point, I promptly gave up. This was the best experience I was going to get, and it still wasn't enough.

There exists no Media Player application for Linux that is both feature-packed and good-looking

When listening to music, I often download the tracks I like so that I can listen to them even when my internet is on the fritz or when the actual track isn't available on it anymore. In fact, I refuse to use streaming services like Spotify because you never truly "own" the music when you're paying for those services. However, from my experience I have noticed that there's basically no good media player for Linux that both looks good and has a good amount of features. From my observations...

• VLC was stable, but it looked awfully outdated and navigating your library is clunky.
• VLC 4.0 (which is a complete graphical overhaul of VLC to make it more modern) looked great and was feature-packed, but I couldn't get it to work with media libraries (you know, the whole point of installing and running it) and I had to install it with Snapd, which is, to put it lightly, a fucking piece of shit.
• Clementine was feature-packed, but it looked terrible and didn't have a good selection of themes.
• Winamp (running through Wine) looked good and was pretty easy to navigate, but for whatever reason it frequently stuttered very briefly every few seconds when I was playing music.
• Amberol looked great and did the job well, but it both lacked features and combined everything in my music folder into one big playlist. This is not intuitive and makes finding the album you like annoying. You could be listening to heavy metal and then the next track would be lofi, which would kill the mood.

Conclusion

Overall, I'm happy with how this turned out. Some programs don't work properly under Linux still and the lack of certain applications that meet my perfectionist criteria is a bit annoying, but what is working and available is quite powerful. Definitely not recommended for beginner users though, because I had a fuckton of help from others to make this possible.