At the beginning of March, I bought a laptop and decided to finally embrace Linux as my daily drive desktop. Till that day I had only used Linux, more precisely Ubuntu, on servers. So, obviously it was my first choice, but I faced a lot of issues, just to find out that the 3rd generation AMD Ryzen CPU on my laptop wasn’t yet supported by the kernel version (5.3) used on Ubuntu 19.10. I wasn’t able to use any Ubuntu based distro. At first it sucked, but now I’m glad that happen!

I then saw myself digging the Linux world to find a solution for me. I met and tried different distros and desktop environments. I saw dozens of videos, heard hours of podcasts, read a bunch of wikis, learned a lot and found a supportive community. There were moments of frustration, where I get paralyzed by indecision in the middle of so many choices. But that’s one of the beauties of Linux, right! You always have multiple choices and paths you can follow to tailor made your experience.

After almost two months of distro hopping, I finally settled with Manjaro. A rolling release, based on Arch Linux and so more up-to-date and compatible with the AUR (Arch Linux User Repository). From the ones I tried, I kept others distros in a shortlist of favorites, like Solus and Fedora, but at the end of the day I always started missing AUR!

Talking about desktop environments, I’m using Gnome. It’s not perfect and I spent some time exploring XFCE and KDE too, but I still prefer the look and feel of Gnome. Well, to be honest, so far my favorite DE is Budgie, but feels like its development is somehow on idle, limited to bugfixes. Which is understanding because the Solus’ team (who too develop Budgie) is small and have already a lot on their plate maintaining Solus.

I have yet to explore window managers like i3 and so many other things that I don’t know exists yet!

Any suggestion?