I Used Linux for 8 Years: Here's What They Don't Tell You

how I use Linux over the past eight years. It might be shocking to many people. A lot of people have trouble switching from Windows to Linux. And as a person that's been in Windows for like 20 plus years, as a power user, I have more than 10 different professional certifications in Windows, switching to Linux has been hard. But I will say over the past 8 years of using Linux as my primary driver, there's been some really cool things that I learned. And this might help you switch to Linux, especially if you're an advanced Windows user. So the big thing here is you're going to run into some problems. A lot of people in Linux say, "Hey, Linux installs on everything." It does, but sometimes you're just not going to have a great experience. So, let's break down some of the challenges I've had over the past eight years. So, maybe it helps you not uh beat your head against the wall. And if you actually want to see the full-blown as it happened eight years ago, I documented this entire experience. So, I did Arch Linux for 10 days. I did Ubuntu for 30 days. I think there's a Fedora challenge in there. I did Mangaro. I distro hopped pretty much every week. People watching my channel are like, "What dro is he on now?" They're like, "Wait a second. He wasn't on this yesterday." I'd be like, "I know. I'm trying on everything." So, I literally did it all. But the things that I learned during that experience was distributions really didn't matter because I needed to figure out what I liked and what I didn't like. And what ended up happening was when I was looking at distributions, many of those distributions like Gnome, KDE, uh, XFCE, these were not distributions, but desktop environments. And many people, especially when you're new to Linux, choose your Linux distribution based on the look. And this is normal. And they were like, oh, this is just new functionality. Well, it really doesn't matter. you can literally switch out these on the fly without having to reinstall everything. And that's kind of a big deal. So that's that's one of the big things with it in like picking just the file manager. Like when I'm here and I launch my file manager, this right here is Thunar and I really like Thunar. I I figured out that's that's my file manager. This is actually from XFCE, but I don't really use XFCE. I just liked their file manager. So you can actually mix and match different sections of uh these utilities based on your preference and I think that's really cool. So that's the other thing. Pick out what you like about it. And then the other downfall I had my first honestly the first 60 days I kept trying to use Windows programs that were Windows only like Adobe products. Uh yeah had so much in like wine and and other things that I was trying to emulate inside of Linux because Linux folks were like everything just works over here. God skill issue man just get good scrub. But really the biggest thing there is not everything works great. If you need Microsoft Office, if you are a professional and if you used Adobe products for 10 plus years, you're going to be better served on Mac and Windows. And that's just a hard truth that you need to swallow. And that means either dual booting or possibly virtual machines, which I will get into here in a second because spoiler, most people that watch me watch me for my Windows utility, and a lot of times they're like, "Oh yeah, Titus is a Windows user. He doesn't use Linux." Oh yeah, this is what they see. But guess what? Jokes's on them. We're actually in Linux. They just don't know it. [laughter] So that's that's what where I come from. That's my my thing. And and trying to use Windows programs on Linux. It's just not worth it. If it is one of those programs, I will use it, but I will dual boot and then use it or I'll use it in my virtual machine like I just showed. The other thing is gaming. Now, when I first got here in 2018, gaming was just really starting to take off. Uh, Steam was just doing like Proton and other stuff, and it was really cool. But the thing about gaming that you just don't understand is it may work, but a lot of times you might need extra modifications. And there's things that happen because almost every game is made for Windows that it's installed a little differently in Linux. So mod support doesn't necessarily work out of the gate, especially not how you know it in Windows. You kind of need a Linux counterpart. Now, that's coming along and it's really seeing massive strides with all the stuff Valve's doing, but it's still not quite as good as it is in Windows and it's really important to know. But if you're using mostly older games, I would even say in 2026, it's a better experience in Linux. So it can be good, but not everything plays in Linux. And if you're really heavy with mods, like let's say you're a Skyrim freak that have just thrown money at Bethesda for the past what, 12 years or something, [laughter] 15 years. How long Skyrim been out? Oh my gosh. And so many mods, you know, you're doing all kinds of shenanigans with those mods, you're probably not going to have a great experience in Linux. So, you should kind of know that. But for me, I want to show you my Steam replay real fast, just so you can see kind of the evolution of my Linux to Windows. And even though I have Windows and Linux both kind of installed here, I primarily use Linux these days. So, here are the last three Steam replays from the past three years, just so you can kind of just see the evolution in the past couple years. Now, a lot of Linux YouTubers might even hide this from you, but I'm going to show you my actual Steam profile. Don't judge me for the games I play. By the way, Age of Empires 4 masterpiece. You're wrong if you think it's not. I love my my RTS. Anyways, I digress. So, this is just kind of going through, but the big uh thing I wanted to show you here is what I'm using in Playtime. 65% of Playtime in 2023 was Windows. 32% was the Steam Deck and 2% was on Linux at this time. I I my Linux install I was kind of doing it, but a lot of that 2% was me just kind of showing off on stream or something like that where I was like, "Oh, check me out. I'm I'm a Linux gamer." But a lot of it was more Steam Deck and casual. And then the Windows side of things, I was doing heavy mods at the time. Age of Empires 4 kind of had a desync issue in Linux. So, I didn't want a chance doing a multiplayer match and getting desynced. So, I was like, uh, uh-uh, uhuh. I'm not messing with that. And the other game I was playing at the time was Final Fantasy 11 online, and I was doing heavy modifications, especially with the Cheetah project and other things that were kind of injecting into the binary. And there's a whole different setup there. If you ever familiar with 20-year-old plus MMOs, there's a lot of modifications to make to make it usable. So, most of my 23 gameplay, I would say, was Windows. Now, the next year, 2024, well, let's look at what happened again. Oh my god, this one, I was playing a lot of Fallout 76. All right, you can judge me for that one. I accept. I deserve a couple hate comments for the Fallout 76. Totally get it. Um, so play time on this one, 78% Windows, 12% on the Steam Deck, and 9% Linux. Well, that's even worse. So, what's going on here? Well, a lot of my play time I was kind of just going back and forth. And at this time, again, I was still kind of using Final Fantasy 11. It was already booted up inside. And when recreation time came to be, even though I was mainlining Linux, a lot of my gaming still was being done on Windows. Intel. This past year in 2025, you're going to see a big difference and a big change here. One, I only played Final Fantasy 11. I finally quit it this year. Swear I was I'm addicted to that stupid old MMO. Brain damaged. Anyways, uh most of this year, you'll see it's it's it's kind of gone full circle here and almost 80% of everything's Linux. uh 12% still steam deck. I still use my steam deck for like casual and only about 10% Windows playtime and I'm not sure that was probably when I was developing wind util. I might have been dual booted inside and I didn't want to reboot into Linux. So I just launched Steam from there. Uh but there was nothing really I was playing that had to use Windows um at this time because I pretty much quit Final Fantasy 11. I was like all right there's all the other games now. They pretty much all play in Linux and I'm not playing any like Colonel anti-che games or anything like that. So almost everything this year so far has been Linux and honestly it's actually I think this discounts December which was even more Linux gameplay and I even did some tests between Windows Linux and Steam Deck. You can kind of see the pie chart over here. This just numbers gameplay but really what the the true tale of the tape is actual play time. So, past that first year and now that you've seen how good Linux gaming has gotten, you could always check like Proton DB to see where you might fit into this equation if you need it for anything or if you're not heavily modifying games and you're just wanting to play. Linux now is pretty much plugandplay with a lot of Steam stuff, which is great. But the second year and beyond, I was trying to get the perfect install. And I think this is just like an inherent Linux thing. I always like to tinker a bit, but I pretty much stop distro hopping at this point in time and I just stick to the big three. Fedora, Arch, Debian, or a variant of that. I don't really do much past that desktop environments. I was doing some KDE and other things, but at this time I moved to just window managers, which is what I'm on right now. and I have a long history of IT development and almost everything I like to do now I just configure it in the terminal. So I don't need anything extra with my desktop environment. I just go ahead and program in the terminal. And then for my window management like everything you see here, if I launch multiple windows, you've you've seen this type of thing. You'll notice in my DWM, which I use for window management, the only thing here that's compiled and used in this system is this binary. So about 116K, not even a meg, and that's what runs my entire guey. So, I stripped all that out because often I would install too much stuff or I would update my desktop environment and then there'd be something that conflicted and then all of a sudden my system wouldn't work all that well or I'd have some bug and I didn't like that. So now I've kind of removed all that extra crap and now I just literally update my system anytime. like I could be here and just update all willy-nilly and for the most part I haven't run into any issues anytime I do a massive update. So live on stream, I'm just like, "Yeah, let's update." Uh just any other day, I can just update because I don't have to worry about something being incompatible with my 100KB file essentially. I don't have this massive desktop environment. I don't have all this other stuff. So I just do window management. Now, this isn't for everybody, but it's a big difference of why it's so stable for me. I think a lot of people try Linux, they install anything and everything and then they do a big update like this and then they have some dependency issue and then something breaks and then they're like, "Damn it, I'm going back to Windows. I have no idea what happened." And there's just so much that goes into their system that they they don't know where it broke. Where where mine if something breaks on this update, I only have one spot to go and I'm like, "Okay, what happened here? Why isn't this launching? Oh, okay. Let me fix that." and then off and off off I go. If if that ever happens. I mean, I think the last many many updates I've done, I haven't really run into anything. Uh speaking of which, uh you'll notice if you look right here, the uptime for this OS is 628 days. And Arch Linux isn't considered to be a stable version of Linux, but for me, it's incredibly stable. And I think that just speaks to having less as a full-blown environment because with Windows and Mac, it's well done, but with Linux, I think less is more where if you have less stuff to go wrong, you really don't have to worry about big updates or anything like that. Now, we do have some errors here. Let's uh let's let this update finish and we'll see what happened. So, here we go. We have finished our update. Everything's good. We probably do a reboot and do it, but I I do this about once a week. Sometimes I forget. It goes, you know, couple weeks, even a month. Uh Arch these days, I actually in in one of my in insight systems, I hadn't updated Arch in many months. And normally that would break, you know, five years ago, but in 2026, Arch team has done a phenomenal job. And I would say it's pretty darn stable. I haven't actually had any issues. I did use like Cachios's kernel which is optimized for desktop and some of their binary packages which is a little bit faster because they they do something where it runs a little bit quicker but you don't have to. stable arch is just fine. Past that really once I I learned, hey, let's not, you know, less is more. Let's just figure out what I want to use and I just have my file manager, my window manager, and then I just configure everything through terminal. There's not much to break and everything works fantastic. It's really fast. I don't have to worry about some big update or some big corporation saying, "You're going to install this crap on my system." It it it's wonderful. and I love the terminal. So, understanding how Linux differs from Windows is actually quite nice. Like in Windows, when you go to install a program, it could get installed in program files. Program files 32-bit program data. It could get an appex package that gets thrown through a Microsoft store. It could go into local data. It could go into roaming data. It could get installed a variety of different ways. Even old school programs get registry entries and get launched outside of your user folder. Windows is kind of crazy on how it installs things. And pretty much everything in Linux, if it's a user configuration, it's going to be in homeuser.config. If it's a system configuration, it's going to be in for/etc. So, they're they're kind of standardized. Now, there are some exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, 90 plus% of all stuff falls into these two golden rules of Linux. And I love it. It's nice. I don't have to sit here and worry about what the hell's going on with packages. So, very nice. And then for the things I do need, dual booting and virtual machines is great. Like I dual boot all the time. I would say Windows sometimes does update and it might break your bootloader. So, I highly recommend if you dual boot two hard drives is almost a must. install Windows first and then install Linux second and have them install their own boot partitions on each one of their drives. If you don't know how to do that or you're worried about it, disconnect one drive when you go to install the other operating system if you really want to make sure. But, uh, it'll work great. And if like you only need a couple things from Windows every now and again, honestly, virtual machine it. Like this is a virtual machine right here. Highly optimized. So most people don't even know it's a virtual machine and it runs directly. I pass through a bunch of stuff, but you can make the virtual machines very performant on Linux, much more so than you can on Windows. And it integrates in very, very well. So I could even play games on that, and I don't even have to worry about it. Now, the other thing that I kind of talked about in the very beginning of this video was Linux hardware matters. Nvidia verse AMD, which is better? Well, it just depends. Like if you're doing mostly productivity work, I would say Nvidia can be better for like resolve people, Nvidia is going to usually give better performance than your AMD counterpart. But if you're just a gamer and you want a highly compatible system that doesn't require any extra modules, which you notice how I didn't say drivers, it's because Linux uses modules that tack on to the Linux kernel. Believe it or not, Linux already has all the drivers for almost every system baked into its kernel. So when it boots up, there are no extra drivers to download. It either works or it doesn't. So hardware compatibility does matter. And AMD's is just baked in. Don't have to worry about it. Nvidia does require some uh install and you have to worry a little bit about those updates because that kernel module does break during an update. your system won't boot or it'll boot but you won't have a video output which you know there's ways to fix but I'm not going to go into that right now just know that is a thing sometimes that does happen and it just depends on where you reside on what your needs are and what system you have both do work though and then certain other things you [clears throat] know variable refresh rate 4K support tearing you've probably heard of these things well Linux like 5 years ago almost everything used exorg well It doesn't have VRR. It doesn't have 4K support. And you have to modify or well, you have to configure Xorg to not have tearing or be tearfree by default. You can do all these things. And that's what I do. I still use Xorg, but most people these days use Whand. And just know like almost every desktop environment, most people are huge into like Hyperland and other things you've heard about, those are all Wayand. It's like the new blood coming into the space and they do have support for that. So that's just something to know. And then also understanding bleeding edge hardware has worse support than both Mac and Windows. Almost everything built out on the market right now builds for Windows and Mac first and then Linux is a second or an afterthought in a lot of ways. So, if you buy a graphics card or a CPU on the day it's released, if you're using Arch, it'll probably work, but you might have, you know, poor performance because it might not be well optimized on that first day. But after 6 months or a year, usually you're good to go. So, it just depends. So, it's just important to know and to know these things and research them beforehand. When it comes to Linux, if you have good hardware support, you have everything built for it, and you understand the limitations of what you're doing, it can be the best experience ever, the most stable. That's why Linux people are like, "My system, I haven't even rebooted it in a year, and it's it's perfectly stable." Yeah, it is for them, but for you, it might be a different story. It just depends on where you're at in your journey. So, I would just wanted to share mine today. Let me know your thoughts down in the comments and I'll see you in the next

After 20+ years as a Windows power user with 10+ professional certifications, I made the switch to Linux. This video breaks down everything I learned over 8 years of daily driving Linux—the good, the bad, and the ugly truths no one talks about. 🔥 **Key Takeaways:** - Why distributions don't matter as much as you think - The hard truth about Windows programs and Adobe on Linux - How Linux gaming evolved from 2018 to 2025 - My Steam stats reveal the real story (65% Windows → 80% Linux) - Why I ditched desktop environments for a 116KB window manager - 628 days of uptime on "unstable" Arch Linux - Dual booting vs virtual machines: what actually works **Perfect for:** Windows users curious about Linux, new Linux users struggling with the transition, or anyone tired of distro-hopping who wants real talk about what works. I documented my entire journey—Arch for 10 days, Ubuntu for 30 days, endless distro hopping—so you don't have to make the same mistakes. Whether you're a gamer, professional user, or just Linux-curious, this video will give you realistic expectations and practical advice. ⚠️ **Spoiler:** Most people think I'm a Windows user because of my utilities, but joke's on them—I'm actually running Linux. Find out how at 03:37. 💬 Drop a comment with your Linux journey or questions about switching! #Linux #WindowsToLinux #ArchLinux #LinuxGaming #SteamDeck #opensource Key Moments: 00:00 - 20+ years Windows user switches 00:21 - Linux install challenges over years 00:45 - Hardware compatibility issues exist 01:18 - Distributions don't really matter much 01:52 - Desktop environments are interchangeable 02:20 - Mix and match components freely 02:51 - Windows programs don't work well 03:37 - Virtual machines for Windows programs 04:01 - Gaming in 2018 04:28 - Mods don't work like Windows 04:56 - Older games better on Linux 05:46 - Steam replay shows Windows dominance 06:36 - Multiplayer desync issues on Linux 08:08 - 2025: 80% gaming on Linux 09:41 - Stopped distro hopping eventually 09:57 - Switched to window managers only 10:25 - 116KB binary runs entire GUI 11:35 - Less software means more stability 12:37 - 628 days uptime on Arch 13:36 - CachyOS kernel for better performance 14:15 - Linux file structure is simpler 15:12 - Dual boot with two drives 15:55 - Virtual machines highly optimized 16:22 - NVIDIA vs AMD compatibility 17:35 - X.org vs Wayland display servers 18:31 - Bleeding edge hardware has issues . ►► Digital Downloads ➜ https://www.cttstore.com ►► Patreon ➜ https://www.patreon.com/christitustech ►► Twitch ➜ https://www.twitch.tv/christitustech ►► Website and Guides ➜ https://christitus.com