You likely need to be some kind of nerd to ever ask "am I using the best operating system for me?" - and I am that kind of nerd. What follows is the series of realizations that led me to eliminate different operating systems from consideration as the best fit for me, and to now be writing this on Fedora Linux (KDE Plasma Desktop Edition).
We had some good times, Windows and me. Hours spent as a youth imagining what it would be like to actually use all the programs referenced in moricons.dll, and many more hours as an adult getting paid to run database queries and make PowerPoint slides and Excel spreadsheets out of the results. Of course, over those years the annoyances grew...but the straw that broke the camel's back was opening Calculator.
In my mind, the power of the Start menu in the Windows 10/11 era was that you can just press the Windows key, start typing what you want, and it'll be very quick to access. In reality, on a less-than-two-year-old laptop, pressing the Windows key, typing "calc", and waiting for Calculator to appear as the top result so I could press Enter took 11 seconds. When a system's overall design feels less and less oriented toward your efficiency or joy, and more and more toward getting you to use Bing (now Copilot, later whatever comes next) - and when you're the right kind of nerd - you start thinking that there must be a better way.
A few years back, I tried to go all-in on the combination of an iPad and iPhone for my computing - using iCloud Drive for storage, gaming on Apple Arcade, pretending that Numbers was an intelligible spreadsheet program, etc. The Apple interface design hadn't really grabbed me since the skeuomorphism days, but I told myself that having everything "just work" would be worth it.
Nothing "just worked". Files from one device...sometimes appeared on the other, and sometimes didn't. Sometimes I could correctly guess what the flat, minimalistic icons meant...sometimes my documents ended up FUBAR, and I couldn't even explain what I had tapped on. Thematically, everything felt opaque (ironic considering the current Liquid Glass abomination) - front-end interfaces and back-end sync mechanisms offered no window into their logic, status, or composition. Perhaps, instead, there could be a system whose construction and function were completely open?
Yes, those statements were about the "mobile" OSes - but I assumed that if the experiences on Apple's leading, flagship devices were this frustrating, the Mac was unlikely to be much better.
Operating systems built with full visibility into their code, and designed for great flexibility in their usage, seemed like the perfect antidote to the issues I had run into with the Microsoft and Apple worlds. However, the importance of the distribution quickly came into focus - a Linux-based operating system is a construct assembled from thousands of independently-developed components. Choosing and integrating those components well could make a massive difference in the ease, security, and durability of the resulting system.
My exploration of different distributions led me through:
And so I landed on Fedora Linux - it's not so bleeding-edge that you're in danger of spontaneous system collapse, but folks in the project prefer alignment with upstream projects over frozen versions and downstream patching, and it's an intentionally-crafted operating system rather than a DIY toolkit.
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