Look before you leap.
Strolling through entertaining videos on YouTube, pumping my dopamine, I stumbled upon a PewDiePie video. In that video, he shared his experience of installing Arch Linux and ricing Hyprland. I had also been thinking about switching to Linux for a long time, and that video added fuel to the fire.
Without prior research, I began to make my pendrive bootable by downloading Arch Linux and Rufus, and began installing Arch Linux WITHOUT BACKING UP my files in Windows. Yes, you read that right. After wiping my storage, I finally remembered I had not backed up my college projects, assignments, and some important photos. Cursing myself, I began to install Arch Linux, facing problem after problem, looping through tutorial hell, and finally installed Arch Linux. Now it was time to install Hyprland and search throughout YouTube. Many videos later, my dumb brain gained zero knowledge or idea on how to configure it from scratch. I looked at the clock on my phone, it was 2 AM (I had started 7 hours ago). Frustrated and blaming myself, I slept like a log.
The next morning, with a fresh mind, without any thought, I installed pre-configured dotfiles from GitHub (spent 2 hours). Finally, all my problems were solved… or were they?
A few days went smoothly, doing the same stuff in Linux as I do in Windows. College gave us about 10 WAP (Write A Program) assignments. I hadn’t installed any programs except Google Chrome and had no idea how to install programs available only on Windows. Somehow, I downloaded a crappy open-source MS Office alternative. One task done, now I had to install a code editor (probably VS Code) and copy-paste code from an LLM. I installed VS Code, following random sudo commands from a chatbot. After installing VS Code, I clicked the icon to launch it, and guess what, it took exactly 3 f***ing minutes (I could have solved one problem by copy-pasting) to launch VS Code. Somehow, I completed my assignment.
Now my monkey brain began to search for the reason why my program was launching so slowly, by typing gibberish into the chatbot. One hour of typing gibberish and getting the same types of results later, I finally tried searching on different forums. I found other users with the same problem. The problem was: **“Electron app launching slow with specific NVIDIA GPU.”** Somehow, I managed to use the CPU only while running such apps. After that, I realized we should think logically instead of hammering gibberish on the keyboard and read each and every keyword.
At last, I gained some basic knowledge about Linux and its workings. Switching to Linux also helped me understand Windows better after I reinstalled it.