- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
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.
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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.
It’s his dick, obviously
Alright, I’m lost in the analogy now. What’s the dick in Linux?
Cool desktop customisations, obviously.
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
Maybe they meant the Linux mascot, the duck named Dux right?
My dick; I fuck Linux so hard
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.
Steam has reported record number of linux users in their os survey! I made the switch this year too!
I’ve had discussions with my friends about using Linux full time. I got one of them to move their mom’s old All-in-one to Mint since it couldnt move to Win11. Most of them worry about anti-cheat and such, but I tell them consistently “the games we play all work, how do you think I play with y’all?”
I’ve started moving everything I do to FOSS, or at least respectful, alternatives. My whole world has become more intentional and free the more detached from the “convenience” of big tech solutions.
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.
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.
You know you can change the hotkeys and window decorations right? That’s the great thing about KDE. You have choices.
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 use chezmoi and chezmoi_modify_manager to keep my dotfiles (including some KDE configs) in a Git repo, and it works well enough.
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.
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.”
And yet you use & support systemd…
Omg shut up. Nobody controls Systemd, it’s open source.
You can also replace individual components. It’s basically a bunch of binaries using an API.
Uh, the systemd devs do.
The “systemd devs” are anyone with the cashe to contribute to it. Yes, you need to be competent dev for your merges to be accepted, unlike in the virus-infested AUR.
But systemd can be forked if you don’t trust said devs. You’d be in the minority though because the majority of distros out there chose to adopt systemd, because it is that good.
The “systemd devs” are anyone with the cashe to contribute to it.
Not really, unless you’re employed by one of the big tech companies contributing to it, your pull requests are piped directly to the shredder, same with xorg, gnome, etc.
You can fork them, but why bother when it’s a mess designed to ensure the employment of its contributors, ‘WallyWare’ if you will.
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)
Huh…? Unstructured…? Please explaln or are you just a troll or a lenfart puttering lover…?
Yes, unstructured. Every script is its own special snowflake that does things a bit differently.
There’s no guarantee of the verbs that the script implements. start, stop and restart are common, but the implementation is up to each individual script. I’m most familiar with Debian where some service (but not all) implemented it with
start-stop-daemon, but other distros and OSes handled it differently.Basic, commonly needed functionality, like restarting a crashed service after waiting for some delay, need to be implemented per app.
When sysvinit was widespread, there was a reason a lot of people used systems line supervisord to deploy services, rather than dealing with sysvinit scripts. It was a pain.
Systemd units were a logical progression from supervisord services.
Personally, my problem with systemd is that it’s slowly trying to take over everything it possibly can, and be as hard to remove as possible.
It’s not “so you just think it’s all a single binary!”. No, I’m 100% aware it’s multiple binaries. The problem is that it’s a single project, and that’s too much power to give to one single project.
“oh but you can swap out the individual parts!” Sure. For SOME of them. Until you swap out the systemd init and suddenly have to relearn a shitton of completely random other stuff because systemd was doing a boatload of other things. Might as well get that out of the way early and use normal other projects for the other stuff, and also ditching the init system can’t hurt just to reduce their stranglehold.
Also OpenRC might be worth looking into. “systemd or Old™ Nasty™ sysv scripts” is a false dichotomy, openrc’s init scripts are declarative like systemd units (and it also supports sysv scripts). There are also totally different init systems (but we don’t know much about them, we started with systemd and then jumped to openrc recently).
– Frost
