Introduction

Last week, I finally made the decision to dual-boot Linux with Windows. This had been on my mind for a while, but it wasn’t because Linux was better or because I cared about privacy or anything novel like that. I did it purely for fun. Let me tell you all about it!

Motivation

One of my good friends, Ronnie, is really into Linux. We share a class together, and sometimes he would show me all the cool things he could do on his laptop, like terminal multiplexing and scrollable windows. “So what?” I thought. Windows was all I knew, and WSL worked fine for my needs. Yeah it was a kinda slow, and network issues always happen in WSL, but at least I didn’t have to do anything from scratch… Wait, why is that a bad thing?

What really pushed me to try Linux was doing it myself. I had never flashed a USB before, never booted from a USB drive before, never seen what a fresh Linux installation even looks like. On top of that, what I hear is that Linux offers a fresh, unopinionated system for you to customise as you please. Of course this means you have to do all the work, but by the end of it you create something so unique, only you know it to its utmost. Kind of like painting a canvas! That sounded interesting enough, so when I had free time (procrastinating), I borrowed a USB drive from Ronnie and got to work.

Process

I won’t lie and say that going from nothing to a working distro is as easy as 1-2-3. I had to pull up a step-by-step YouTube tutorial, teaching me everything from flashing the USB to connecting to the internet via iwctl. I don’t know how people do it, but the Arch wiki’s installation steps are way too confusing.

P.S. i use arch, btw

I decided to use all of the settings shown in the video tutorial, which was mainly the KDE Plasma desktop environment. Finally after a very tiring hour, I selected the Arch Linux boot entry, and loaded it up for the first time.

Hmm, seems a lot like Windows. And it really was. I wasn’t expecting anything too special, but I was practically using the desktop as per normal. Applications might be named differently but they functioned the same, perhaps by intention.

As I configured my setup, I started to realise the similarities between my original workflow and the Linux environment. I recognised familiar package names (curl, wget, git) and I didn’t have to switch between Windows and Linux shell scripting anymore. I like living in the terminal, so it was nice to have all my files in my home directory instead of sprawled out everywhere. If I was always doing work in WSL anyway, why didn’t I just boot into Linux?

Of course that is easier said than done. If I wanted to game on Windows and do work on Linux at the same time, WSL would still work better. Perhaps with more time, I will switch completely to Linux or forgo it entirely and return to Windows. In the end, this was a fun experiment for me to see what dual-booting was like!

End

Although my system is working great now, there is still so much to learn. Until two weeks ago, I didn’t know that Linux was the kernel, not the operating system. As I continue my Linux journey, I am sure I will find many more programs that I never knew existed. I just installed zoxide and I already think this is the best package ever. The community is just so amazing and I hope to be able to contribute something of my own one day.

In the future, I hope to revisit all the times I thought Linux would be great, such as hosting Minecraft servers and adopting more terminal/keyboard-centric workflows. In the meantime, I’ll be spending the next few hours customising my setup. Bye!