Keep Calm & Switch Back to Windows

I was, for a long time, what people call a Linux Geek, a die-hard Arch Linux fan; Pacman-Yay was child’s play for me, the terminal was my living room; ranger, nnn, vifm has served me as mighty file managers for a long time, Vim and later NeoVim was my on-the-go text editor where I would open and create every single file possible; I was using a barebone window manager configured from the ground, writing shell scripts for torrenting, emails showing in the terminal, downloading Youtube Playlist, scraping images from webpages, for showing battery status, and what’s not. Trust me, apart from the growing discomfort, this was fun. As time goes on, this fun, added by more fun was turning me into a Free Software Terrorist. I started arguing with people who were not like me, I’d argue about why they should ditch Windows or macOS and start using some half-boiled buggy Linux distro or why people using half-boiled buggy Linux distro should try some do-the-boiling-yourself distro, building bit to bit by himself. Truth to be told, very soon, a realisation happened, a realisation that the alternatives I was putting against Commercial Propreity Windows Programs as if it were a game, were not very promising for my win, so less promising so that I had to dual boot to Windows 10. But I still loved some part of the Linux, I didn’t want my all Python & Shell scripts to go waste and was living a life fighting with NTFS & EXT4, FAT32 and exFAT, and wasting extra space in identical programs, destroying nights modifying broken ODT files broken in MS Word and then, and then I discovered WSL or Windows Subsystem For Linux and…

There are two kinds of people in the world, people who do something because that’s what feels logical to them to do, and people who do something because there’s something cool about this, a cool aura. And there’s something called Linux Elitism, defining the second types of people, who like Linux Memes on Facebook (Well, if they do use Facebook), Telegram or in other Forums with a profound satisfaction about how very few will understand those memes, living with the pride of “I use Arch BTW”, making comments about other people who are not like them. And there are some people namely Free Software Activists (as I was), who think every problem in this world is some kind of a consequence of capitalism, in some way or another. Using Free (Free as in Freedom), GNU programs will make this world a better place by not feeding money, information and sins to these capitalists tech giants, and thus making the Capitalist Commercial Minded Software Developers pay for their sins. And that’s it. They were like that, I was like them, they are the same now, and I am different. By putting a big question mark after my ideology I have switched over to Hackintosh first, fighting over Apple’s restrictions on using their OS on my ThinkPad T440P, I have switched over to Windows 10 Pro. I have formatted my whole Linux Home Partition to NTFS, changed Legacy BIOS to UEFI, installed Brave, installed First Party Microsoft Propreity Softwares, installed third party Bloated Commercial Propreity Softwares such as IOBT, wTorrent, and installed Vim, Vim extensions on them, memorised Windows Shortcuts (Goodbye i3 and all my scripts, configuration files and GNU utilities), installed WSL, fueled the capitalists’ capitalistic sins and here I am, All OK, Happy; writing a blog about how happy I am that I switched over to Windows from an All Minimalist All Free Pro Geeky GNU Linux Distribution.

So I confessed in the very beginning, apart from Tableau Desktop, MS Office Suite, IBM SPSS and all those capitalist proprietary software what has brought me here were the WSL and the Windows Terminal. WSL, as Microsoft describes it, “A new Windows 10 feature that enables you to run native Linux command-line tools directly on Windows, alongside your traditional Windows desktop and modern store apps”. The amazing second-to-none Linux Command line, but without sacrificing the Consistent, and Stable Graphical UI, and functional commercial programs unavailable in Linux. You can do pretty much everything you do in a Linux CLI, with a better experience improving as time goes. Tools like git, youtube-dl, transmission-remote-cli, Pandoc, sc-im, ranger work as you’d expect. A window opening the best spreadsheet program developed ever, and a window running Advanced Package Manager updating your tiny Linux Distribution are some awesome experiences, I have always dreamt of.

Yes, there is something you will miss always. The better memory management, memory segregation, task preference resulting in better resource management in Linux. The lean, and custom-built OS was more under my palm in a way that a closed Windows System will ever be. But, the better permission management, with better driver support and all things mentioned above will be more than enough to pay off the cost.

So, this is how a Linux Fanboy has turned into a more rational “Don’t give much thought in your ideology and use what suits you better” geeky boy.