What do I like about Linux and what it thought me?

Introduction

I changed to Linux some years ago, and I do not find any reason to come back to Windows. Here I will share some reasons why I did and what I learned doing it.

Resources

I do not like to spend very much money upgrading hardware. And to be honest at the time I decided to move to Linux I did not have a lot. My old laptop at that time was in its last. It used to take about one hour to start up, programs used to take a long time to launch, I almost did not have space to install programs and in general the computer was too slow. Then I heard that Linux was generous with your resources, so I tried... And there was a huge difference. Windows is what some people call derogatory a bloatware. It has a massive amount of programs that runs in parallel to any other task you are doing. They are for telemetrics that Windows use to get information about your computer, in theory to improve their software. But all those programs wastes your RAM memory, letting almost not space for the programs your actually using. Memory access are the slower type of operation a CPU can do, and when RAM is full then your computer needs to use ROM memory, which is a secondary memory much slower than RAM, to keep data you need for your programs, in consequence computer becomes slower. While Windows used to take about 5 GB of my RAM, Linux distributions like UBUNTU takes about 1~2 GB and ARCH Linux about 700 MB. A very big difference.

Customization

I am in love of how customizable Linux environments are, so that you can not only make it visually appeal to your tastes, but also make it more suitable for your needs. The fact it allows you to change everything from Windows environment, key functionality, drivers, even modify it so that it can boot custom hardware, and the amount of CLI tools there are that boost your proficiency is amazing.

I do specially like CLI tooling, so that I tried to change most of my daily live software needs into terminal based software: code edition in Neovim, file explorer in Yazi, tmux for multiple terminal sessions, z for faster movement to a directory, zsh for autocompletion, suggestion, fuzzy finder, among other features, kitty for image display in terminal feature and lot more. These pieces of software boosted my productivity and allow me to keep focus and what I am doing.

Even more, I hardly could live without Hyprland. Hyprland is tiling window manager. It manages your windows as tiles. It allows me move very easy and fast through windows, add tags, pin them, resize, make them in a group for staking them and many other features, and it also allows you to assign commands to every single key of your computer. This allows to launch apps and execute set of commands with just a combination of keys. I do not even need a mouse to use my computer and that is much more comfortable.

Free and open source

Linux is also free and open source, and its community also intents to develop software solutions for free and open source. This does not only make technological advances accessible for all people, but also allow for safer and easier to integrate software for peoples needs. Why? Since it is open source, even when it is not easy at all, people can see what the code is running and be sure that the code is not malicious. This make it safer, at least if you only install open source code. There are still online software shops with closed code that could be malicious, but it is the less. Also, if someone finds a vulnerability, lot of people can find a solution faster, before it becomes a big problem. In the other open source libraries allow deploying complex software in less time and easier which result in faster development of technological advances.