I switched back to Linux after 18 years… and it finally sold me on AI

I was 16 the last time I tried to daily drive Linux. My friend, who’s now a pretty successful Ruby on Rails programmer, raved about Arch, so I decided to try it. I quickly realized why “I use Arch, btw” would become the meme it is now. Because installing and using Arch was hard, but extremely satisfying.

Arch wasn’t my first Linux adventure. Prior to using it, I also used Ubuntu for a few months before deciding I was tired of dual-booting to play games, edit videos or do whatever else. In the end, 16-year-old me didn’t take kindly to using Arch either. After a few months of being “the Linux dude”, I formatted my Linux partition and went back to Windows.

So, when I switched my graphics card to AMD a few months back, I was surprised when the idea to come back to using Linux entered my brain. Linux was always something I admired – from a distance. An ideological wonder that I could never force myself to stick with. A system dedicated to programmers and extremely technical people. I was “too much of a noob” to use Linux, I told people. Or I found one or two things that stopped me from switching.

After all, I used Photoshop, Premiere, played games. A whole bunch of that didn’t work on Linux. But since getting laid off, I decided to switch to Affinity (which works on Linux via Wine), Canva, and DaVinci Resolve to cut down on spending, and the idea crept in.

“Now is the time,” I thought to myself, when Windows did something annoying to me again.

I don’t remember what it was. Something wasn’t working, the boot was slow, one of my million programs crashed, whatever. I felt like I needed a change.

A normal person might install Linux on a secondary partition to just test the waters. I decided to go off the deep end, backed up my documents and work, and nuked my Windows install to replace it with Linux. It turns out, I didn’t just get a new operating system. I also got a new perspective on how I can use AI in my day-to-day life.

It wasn’t easy…

The first challenge I came across was picking which Linux to install. You see, unlike Windows and macOS, Linux doesn’t just come with a version number and an install now button. Instead, it’s a tangled web of various editions, called distros (short for distributions). Picking the right distro can be the difference between having a good experience and being stuck installing everything from scratch from your Arch Linux command line. And boy, I was not about to spend hours doing that again.

To help the less-Linux-inclined of you understand what’s going on, I’ll have to explain some Linux basics. Most beginner-friendly distros come from one of three main branches. Here’s a quick overview of what each offers.

• Debian is slow and steady, releasing every 2 years. Like a reliable old bicycle that won’t go too fast, but the parts are easily replaceable, and you can always find a mechanic that will fix it. It’s not exactly cutting edge, though. This is what Ubuntu is based on.
• Fedora is slightly more dynamic. It’s like an e-bike that gets regular software updates and keeps getting better, but if something breaks, you might need a bit of a more specialized approach. Nobara is a popular distribution based on Fedora.
• Arch is like building your own bike. You can customize everything to your liking, get the latest parts, but if something screws up, you’re kinda on your own. Also, it won’t ride out of the box. That’s why Omarchy and CachyOS, two popular Arch-based distributions, exist: someone else already built the bike for you.

Since one of my friends swears by Fedora, and I wanted a gaming-centric distro, I picked Nobara. It’s built by GloriousEggroll, who also maintains Proton-GE, one of the most popular forks of Proton. Proton is the compatibility layer Steam uses to run Windows games on Linux, and Proton-GE is often useful when dealing with games that don’t quite work with Steam’s own Proton build.

Nobara is really excellent, even out of the box. I got all the drivers, codecs, and most of the software that I needed packaged in it, like OBS, Lutris, and Steam. It’s also pretty beginner-friendly, which helped me settle back into the Linux ecosystem quickly. Nobara also visually looks like Windows, which makes it even easier to get into.

Despite the relative ease of moving to Nobara, I also made a few mistakes during my transition. The biggest one was sticking with Gemini, which gave me some hints that broke my desktop environment, making me unable to log in, and forcing me to mess around with the dreaded terminal. I switched to Claude, and installed it in my command line after that one.

Even after solving that initial screw-up, I still had some nagging issues. One of the biggest ones related to something really simple: Discord push-to-talk.

You see, for whatever reason, the way the Discord app is built on Linux, it just won’t accept hotkeys when its window is out of focus. As you can imagine, this can be pretty frustrating. I play a lot of Star Citizen (which works great on Linux, by the way, even if it’s not officially supported), and push-to-talk is a must when doing bigger fleet operations with my organization. As is push-to-mute, for obvious reasons.

This may seem like a small issue, but it was one of those things that in the past would send me running back to Windows.

Luckily, I stumbled on a Discord plugin for OpenDeck (software I use to control my Elgato Stream Deck) which found a way to work around this limitation by using Discord’s developer mode. Of course, I’m not a programmer, so I asked Claude to build a solution based on it.

It worked like a charm.

From then on, I knew Linux would change more than my workflow.

… But I started vibing…

You may know that I’m not too fond of AI. Particularly on the ethical front. However, I also always believed using it the right way could really make life easier. In this case, integrating Claude Code into my command line was like installing a trainer for a game I was playing. If I need something, I ask Claude. Claude solves my issue, and my Linux works the way I want. The customizability combined with AI made it easy for me to integrate Linux into my routine.

Of course, this is also possible on Windows, but even using Claude Code or Antigravity, I often found that for whatever reason, things just wouldn’t work the way I wanted.

Setting up the right processor cores for Star Citizen? On Windows, you need Process Lasso. On Linux, you just need to add a few lines to a config file.

Dividing sound through pipelines? On Windows, you need something like Voicemeeter Banana. On Linux, it’s built into your audio-handling software, and far easier to integrate into a workflow.

In the past month, I managed to build a few pieces of software that help me day-to-day. From a brain-dumping app that lets me note tasks and dates and pipe them into ClickUp and Google Calendar, to a stream highlight suite that lets me quickly render both shorts and longer highlight videos based on longer videos I appear in. These legitimately save me a few hours every time I use them, and they just work.

And work well at that.

2 days after wiping Windows off my desktop, I decided I also wanted to use Linux on my laptop, an Asus TUF A15. Here, the results were even better. I created a power profile that almost doubled my battery life, from around 2 hours to 4. My fans don’t blare like crazy under the tiniest load, and, most importantly, my touchpad’s multitouch works properly, which just didn’t want to happen on Windows. Over a month in, I can’t even fathom coming back to daily driving Windows for anything beyond basic browsing. In a way, it’s the reverse of what made me step back from Linux years ago – I feel like Windows makes things way harder than they should be.

The way my workflow is set up, I feel like Captain Picard ordering around the Enterprise’s computer, although I don’t think he had to worry about hallucinations. Then again, I don’t have to worry about my computer being invaded by an imaginary Professor Moriarty if I screw up a prompt, so you win some, you lose some.

…And you should switch too

Two months ago, you’d probably find me saying that I don’t have time to deal with Linux, or that it’s just not for me. Now, I feel like I’m telling everyone: this is the moment to switch. You essentially get 99% of the functionality you get on Windows, without the bloatware or issues that come with Windows. Of course, the 1% can be pretty big for your particular niche. It includes the Adobe suite, games like Fortnite, Valorant or League of Legends, and kernel-level anti-cheats like FACEIT. However, if that’s not something you need 24/7, you can live with a dual-boot.

With Linux, you get an operating system that’s yours to change. In a way, when you start working on your Linux, you start building your very own distribution.

One tailored to your needs, preferences and style. One that can be set up to be a glorified browser launcher, or a power user’s dream, especially with the help of LLMs. I believe that more people will be switching to Linux – especially given Microsoft’s many blunders in terms of usability. This means that you’ll be able to become one of the hipsters who used Linux before it was cool for the even cooler price of zero dollars.

And if you want any tips, tricks, or even the code my trusty clanker put out – feel free to message me. I promise to try to help as much as a vibecoding noob can.