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Linux Is Still Fun

· 3 min read
Dale Emasiri
Dale Emasiri

It has been about 1.5 years since I first started dabbling with Linux, and about a year since I wrote about it last, and I'm happy to say that this is still the best OS move I've made.

What Am I Using Now?​

While everything is mostly the same, I actually moved away from Omarchy pretty quickly when I was more confident with what I was doing and had decided that running Hyprland was my forever(ish) way of working.

Not to say that Omarchy is bad. It's really good, and I still recommend folks who are wanting to dabble with Hyprland for the first time to go with that. It gives you a complete experience without having to build it piece-by-piece. I just always knew that if I chose Hyrpland for my system, it would be something I customized heavily to my needs.

What I'm using now:

  • Arch Linux (btw)
  • Hyprland
  • Dank Material Shell
  • Catppuccin color schemes (this is my forever color scheme across everything)
  • ...and a whole lot of custom configs

How It's Going​

Obviously, with the declaration that this is my forever-ish system, it's going well. So the thing with Hyprland now is that over the past year, it switched the configuration format and structure over to Lua (a language I'm familiar with from my time with neovim) and that opens up a cornucopia of things I can do with it. Admittedly, things that I've yet to really do because TIME.

I've slowly worked through a built my configs out across most of my everyday tools, refining not just the Hyprland experience, but even down to how my workspaces exist and live to make my keystrokes to switch to apps or workspaces consistent regardless of what time of day or the task.

What About Video Games!?​

Linux users have been scraping by for a long time, building their support through WINE and other compatibility layers like Proton; however, Steam has changed the game completely (for the better). With the Steam Machine's launch, and subsequently the Steam OS, we are looking at a time where "compatibility" isn't your first thought when opening a game.

Most games will function without even so much as a hitch on Steam, and I would say that where I was tweaking 60% of games' compatibility settings before, I've done it with only one game in the past 5 months---and this was due to a UI issue with the default version of Proton.

The age of Linux gaming is no longer fighting for your life trying to make the game think you're on Windows. It's all handled by Steam's compat. layer and the community of developers who are making this space so smooth. Kudos to them.

Share your configs?​

Maybe... I have a repo that's heinously outdated (and docs on here) for how I use my system. I also still have the Godot x neovim code editing workflow, but really that all needs to be updated to my current setup. So it'll be on the backburner.

What's Next?​

Who knows. I've got a ton of things still to do on the system. Configs to tidy, different TUIs and apps to review for my workflows, and a couple of tools to build. I think I'm still going to spend a lot of time playing with Linux, but next I want to start doing something either on the professional side (writing, speaking, building resources) or a side project.