For as long as I can recall, video games and computers have fascinated me. When I was about 8 years old my family purchased our first computer, a Pentium (1) running at 133 MHz with 8MB of RAM - and Windows 95.

For much of my childhood, there was no concept of another operating system - Windows 95 was replaced with Windows 98, a friend at a LAN party got me to install Windows 2000 on my own computer. A neighbour’s dad tinkered around with Linux variants like Red Hat, but that only ever seemed like some abstract adventure and never a practical option - especially to a teenager who loved playing games on their computer.

As the years passed, so did the versions of Windows I’d used - Windows 2000 was replaced with Windows XP, which was surrendered to Windows Vista, then 7, 8.1, and 10.

Expanding World Views

I was pretty content with Windows 10, touted as “The Last Version of Windows”. It did what I needed it to, and I had no real reason to look elsewhere. Over the years, I had tried a few Debian/Ubuntu distros, but had usually given up after various issues with window managers and incompatibility with games.

I have had some variant of an Ubuntu server running, first as a VPS and later as a home server. But this has been entirely through terminal / SSH.

My job for the last 15 years has focused on building products targeting Windows, using mainly C#, so both at work and at home I’ve been a consistent Windows user. But with Windows 11, I’ve been continuously less impressed with Windows (and Microsoft at large). At work, I had a week of not being able to open the start menu as it crashed, due to some incompatible Group Policy combined with a Windows update, and many similar small issues.

I also switched teams/products at work and was issued a MacBook (but I still need my Windows laptop for certain product work), which has somewhat triggered a re-evaluation of Windows in my eyes. I will say that while the MacBook Pro (M4) hardware is very impressive - I’m having a hard time getting into the software side of the Apple world.

The Big Shift

As Microsoft moved deeper into its LLM/Copilot frenzy, I finally had enough and took a serious look around - and found that gaming under Linux really has shifted over the last few years. I found myself looking at either Bazzite or CachyOS, and ended up choosing CachyOS for my first serious foray into the Linux desktop in many years.

I went with a dual-boot setup to be able to return to Windows 11 if it turned out the Linux experience left me unable to do something - but nearly two months in I’ve not booted into Windows once. I’m very close to making a clean install of CachyOS on my bigger SSD (where Windows currently lies, waiting and nearly forgotten).

I’ve now played through Resident Evil 9 and am halfway through Death Stranding 2 on CachyOS, and I’ve had very few issues (some nVidia driver issues with RE9, and I had to find some custom launch arguments for DS2) - but they’ve been very minor IMHO.

Due to my work, I’ll still be touching Windows almost daily - but it’s a strangely freeing feeling to know that I’m in no way bound to Windows anymore.