Reinstalling Linux, again...

Last updated on 17/06/2026

Why Linux

I was a Windows user for most of my life, but it got more and more annoying over the last few years. I find myself constantly having to hide, disable, or remove the useless features added that week. No, I do not want to see a fun fact or candy crush ad every time I open the start menu. It always felt like I didn’t own the computer I paid for, Microsoft did. Linux is the complete opposite, it does exactly what you tell it to, when you tell it to.

The only barrier to switching to Linux is compatibility, but that is improving. Most games, except some with anti-cheat, are now playable thanks to Proton. For other apps unavailable on Linux, I am okay with using the web versions or open-source alternatives. Now, I daily drive Linux on all my computers, but I kept a Windows partition on my desktop for unsupported games.

Distro hopping to CachyOS

When I first switched to Linux, I started with batteries-included distros like PopOS, Mint, and Ubuntu. Once I got used to Linux, I just had to try Arch (btw) because of the reputation it had. I enjoyed the feeling of starting completely from scratch and designing my system exactly how I liked it. It also made me think more about my workflow rather than just doing it the “typical” way. Pacman together with the AUR is also the best package manager I tried, I can find almost anything on it.

I also tried out NixOS as I really liked the philosophy of having a declarative system and being able to easily recreate my setup on other machines. However, it is just such a slow way of doing things that made it impractical for daily use. There are workarounds but I just didn’t see enough benefits to justify switching to such a different workflow from Arch.

Eventually, it got tiring having to set up literally every part of the system and having to fix it when something breaks. This is when I decided to switch to CachyOS, which has recently overtook Arch as the most popular gaming distro. It felt so simple to set up everything compared to Arch since CachyOS provides packages that come with everything configured. Since CachyOS is still based on Arch, I get the stability, performance improvements, and ease of use without losing the package manager and control over the system.

Snapshots

BTRFS is the file system that should be used on most modern devices. It comes with compression, subvolumes and snapshots by default. I don’t notice any difference in speed or reliability compared to ext4. CachyOS automatically creates snapshots after every package installation. The snapshots are integrated with the Limine bootloader, so I can easily boot into an old snapshot if a new package bricks the system.

Security

I enable full disk encryption to prevent attackers who gained physical access from accessing my data. This is especially important for computers that I bring out of my house such as my laptop as they have the risk of being stolen. There isn’t any practical downsides other than potential data loss if the passphrase is lost or headers are corrupted. This can be avoided by using a password manager and having proper backups.

Since I already enter the encryption passphrase when my computer boots up, I enable autologin with SDDM and unlock GNOME keyring with the passphrase so I don’t have to type multiple passwords in a row.

Secure boot is another thing that can be enabled without downsides. It is easy to setup on CachyOS and prevents the system from booting into an unknown OS. Do set a BIOS admin password otherwise an attacker can just disable secure boot.

Window managers

My current setup uses Niri, a scrolling window manager. I previously tried full desktop environments like KDE Plasma and tiling window managers like Hyprland, and I found scrolling windows to be a good compromise between them. You can manage your windows to navigate between them quickly but there is more leeway than tiling window managers since you have an infinite amount of horizontal space in each workspace.

I use Noctalia shell so that I don’t have to manually configure every single element on my desktop (bar, application launcher, power menu). I also tried Dank Material Shell, but I think it overwrites the Niri config too much and I prefer to configure them separately.