How do I use Linux as a college student as a CNSM major? First, allow me to introduce myself. I am a computer network system management major and a freshman in my second semester. I have used Windows all my (short) life. So why switch to Linux, especially during this time in my life? I’m already busy with the other classes, and learning Linux on top of that sounds like a challenge. Well, the reason I did it, and the reason why I’m making the blog post, is to show that Linux isn’t as scary as people make it out to be. I also know that I’ll be dealing with linux in my field. The way I see it is if a college freshman can learn to use Arch Linux, then so can anyone else! Now I want to start off by saying yes, I indeed use Arch as my distro of choice. The reason for this is because of the Arch AUR and the community that surrounds Arch as a whole. The documentation is great, and any problems I’m ever going to run into, someone probably already knows the solution. There’s also the fact that I wanted to try the bleeding edge of what people consider the Linux desktop. Now this isn’t to say I went and installed Arch from scratch; I used a shortcut and used EndeavourOS. I know you know, shame on me, but at the start I really just wanted to get using Linux. I did not, in fact, want to spend 2 days trying to set everything up by hand and have problems mid-lecture on why I couldn’t connect to the internet or this problem or that problem. So for my sake, I went with the more simple approach (if you can even call it that). This did mean, however, that I was given KDE as my DE (desktop environment).

Coming from Windows, the idea of a desktop environment doesn’t make a lot of sense. When you use Windows, you’re using Windows; there’s not much else to it. But with Linux, you have way more options. You may think this felt familiar to me and that I had no reason to change. Well, the thing is, I also customized my Windows machine to use a window tiling manager called Komorebi. I found I preferred the workflow of a window tiling manager better than having windows loosely everywhere and on top of each other. It felt crowded and un orderly so I immediately in the first 2 days I switched to hyprand. Also, I know DE and WM are different things, but in my case I treat them as the same. Again, simplicity is king when learning things as a beginner.

I did look around for other WMs like i3, bspwm, and qtile, but I wanted to use Wayland, as it will be the future of Linux. Desktop. There are other Wayland options for tiling window managers, like Sway, but at the time I thought throwing myself in the deep end was the best option. There was also customization, and looking at r/unixporn, I learned you can make Linux look like anything you want. I decided on Hyprland, and if I didn’t like it, I could just switch. Know this meant I needed to set up Hyprland, as it didn’t come preconfigured, so I used a script made by Jakoolit. It comes with some healthy defaults, and it got me up and running.

The everyday Use

When it comes to actually using Linux, it wasn’t much different than Windows. All the applications I needed to be seemed to work on Linux. As a student, that comes down to mostly using a web browser. Because of my major, there is another program that I need to be able to work. That would be Cisco’s Packet Tracer. It’s used throughout my curriculum, and if I couldn’t get it to work on Linux, then what would be the point of switching? Lucky for me, the Arch Wiki has me covered! It goes through the process needed to get it installed, and I was up and running with no problem. And from then on I didn’t have many problems my first year using Linux. The only upkeep I had to do was updating Arch frequently because it’s a rolling release distro. But this means that from time to time things did break. It would mostly be Hyprland because it’s so new and worked on heavily; things can easily break, and since I didn’t set it up myself, it was hard to troubleshoot the issues. This did become cumbersome, and I told myself I’d look for something else to use in my new year. And spoiler alert, I chose to use Niri!

Final Thoughts & Recomendation’s

With how Windows has become spyware, I’m glad I decided it was time to take control over my system. I constantly hear people struggle with the idea of learning Linux, but I tell them just to try to run it daily. You learn a lot about the difference between Windows and macOS. Now would I recommend what I did… maybe not. Go with another distribution like Fedora and Ubuntu. You’ll have a more stable experience and might feel more like Windows and Linux. If you’re coming from Windows, KDE Plasma is your best bet. If you’re coming from macOS, Gnome will be your friend. Start there and just try and do what you would normally do on a computer. You’d be surprised by just how much can be done in the browser. This is where my being privacy-conscious came from and how I learned the importance of control. And with browsers, well, let’s not open that can of worms just yet.