Several months ago, I was starting to feel an itch. Every nudge towards a new application I didn’t want to use, update to a system-level program with a feature that didn’t add value to me (but was an attempt at adding value to the share price), news stories and notifications baked into almost every system window possible, and more just drove more and more distraction and irritation.
I remember a long-lost day where I sat down at my computer and just did something. There wasn’t a sea of advertisements, my actions being tracked, and the updates when they were prompted were full of meaningful additions. “My Computer” felt like my computer.
Lately, it’s just felt like every step from entering my password at the lock screen to checking my email is riddled with crud, slop, and junk that takes away from the experience of using a computer.
Maybe this is just too many ways to write out that after a long while of observing this and seeing others make some dramatic changes to their computing habits that I too I am ready for a change of my own. That change for me starts with CachyOS and the decision to give Linux a shot as my daily PC operating system.
The Guiding Light and Deciding Factors
As I mentioned, the thoughts to make this decision are not all that recent. In fact, they’ve been brewing for quite a while.
In late August 2025 a podcast called “Dual Boot Diaries” was launched by Will Smith and Adam Patrick Murray to trial Linux themselves to see if it too could become their daily driver. What started as a fun experiment to follow along with actually became a seed that was planted that really started to make this sound like something I could do too.
While I did not follow along their journey at the same time, as they wrapped their journey (and podcast) a few weeks ago it only feels natural for the way my brain works to want to join along on this experiment as well.
My decision to use CachyOS comes partially from this podcast. It is the OS that Will went with for a majority of the show, thus my knowledge and association with it grew. Additionally, after my own research CachyOS already feels close enough to a Linux distro that I have grown semi-accustomed to through my Lenovo Legion Go: Bazzite.
I’ll admit that the research behind my decision does not go much further than some combination of osmosis from a podcast and loose visual familiarity, but it’s a better starting point than nothing. What gives me confidence though is that Cachy seems to have a solid community behind it and plenty of tips & help threads that pop up through web search.
The Road Bumps of Day 0
Honestly, I am genuinely surprised that for moving over to Linux I did not have more problems and issues arise in my first 12 hours or so.
The hardest part of installation was finding a flash drive buried at the bottom of a bin of USB devices and making sure I selected the correct file system when formatting one of my drives. (I went with BTRFS if only because after 10 minutes of reading the documentation, it pretty much just recommended this one).
I originally was going to throw this on a spare 256gb drive I had lying around, but I did splurge for a 4TB NVME drive I already had installed in my desktop. While I did need to organize a few files, I think that this will end up being a good choice long term:
- I didn’t have to do any funky partitioning on my boot drive and make any arbitrarily hard decisions on how much space I give Windows vs Linux.
- It really gives a strong virtual commitment to this whole experience. 4TB is a lot of space to work with, have little fear of ever hitting a limit of, and in this economy a bold decision considering how much that kind of storage costs nowadays.
- I also was considering going out to buy a new dedicated 1TB or 2TB drive just for this as well, but those prices were just about the same as I paid for my already installed and partially used 4TB drive, so why not just use what I already have and not spend $300-$500.
Once installed, everything I typically do on a computer just seems to work. I installed a non-Google / non-Microsoft browser (currently using Brave, although up for debate if it stays), clicked a button that said “Install Gaming Packages” then shrugged as to what it really did (but I assumed it installed some NVIDIA drivers, and honestly a few hours later when I went to install Steam went “oh, it’s already here, nice!” so I am sure there’s more to discover), and finding a few of my common apps (Obsidian, Discord, and Signal) appeared in the various package managers.
What really threw me for a loop was getting my network drives mounted, but after some searching and trial, I managed to get it to work just fine. That begin said, this entire part did come with a huge moment of “oh shit, did I really fuck this up 3 hours in?” as I rebooted to see if my changes worked and was prompted with “CachyOS Emergency Mode” and a blinking terminal. This is where the frantic web searches really helped out.
Otherwise, the rest of my experience has been generally quite painless? Maybe it is because I am not entirely a Linux noob? I do have a NAS that runs ubuntu under the hood, some light Bazzite desktop mode experience, and I once put Linux Mint on an old laptop back in 2007 after all. But also, maybe it’s because open source technology and software has finally started to catch up to where the user needs it as adoption grows?
Additionally, as a side note, I’ve just found everything to be snappier. Applications both open up and get out of my way as I do and don’t need them, and nothing feels like it’s creeping in the background waiting to steal my attention away or distract me with a pop-up or notification.
It really just feels like a “so far, so good!” kind of moment.
Where We’re At, Where We’re Going
As I just noted, I am very much in basic mode. My main uses and applications I have setup are:
- Writing: Obsidian
- Gaming: Steam (and the one game I tested so far, Balatro, just works!)
- Communication: Discord and Signal
- Web Browsing: Brave + Kagi (for search)
And really, I feel like this is a place to sit and stay at for a few days until a new use case arises. I really do not want to get too far ahead of myself just yet.
It’s also fascinating looking at that list above and noticing that it really is all I want to use my desktop for. It doesn’t need to be complex, even if it is powerful!
Future uses I do have in mind to get setup do include some Docker-type deployment and development (I like to tinker and test out containers locally before deploying to my NAS, for instance). I have read briefly that there’s some alternatives to Docker to look at though, so I want to research that. Additionally, I do think there’s some tweaking I can do with the OS itself but just haven’t researched it all that much.
Really, that is the next step before I dive any deeper: Learn about CachyOS, all the pros and cons, and come up with a plan of how I intentionally want to use my computer. For instance, while navigating the terminal is something I don’t mind doing at all, it’s something I’m not well versed in nor very confident in what I am doing. It’s just another “language” that is going to take some time to adapt to.
Rationing My Usage of Windows
Even though the plan is to daily drive CachyOS until I either really need to switch back or am fully comfortable on Linux, I don’t think Windows is out of my life just yet.
That being said, I will be aiming to make sure that any use of Windows from today onwards will be deliberate and intentional. I’ve gone as far as swapping the boot order in the BIOS and put CachyOS at the top so I don’t even have to think about booting into Linux. To get into Windows, I’ll need to press some combination of buttons and deliberately try to log back in. The main things I anticipate having to use Windows for at this point are:
- Play video games like Destiny 2 and Marathon. These are the only games that I am aware of that aren’t working so far on CachyOS. We’ll see as we experiment more and if more games need to get added to this list.
- Some Docker development and deployment. Again, I am not 100% setup nor ready to move that over to Linux just yet, but I do know I’ll be crossing this reason off at some point in the future.
- Work. This really isn’t an option, but also isn’t even on my own computer. My job has provided me a work desktop that is setup as a completely different option on my KVM. This isn’t something I can even use Linux on (hi, IT team!), but I am I’m fine with that limitation.
While I am sure I am missing something from the list above, it is quite clear that my actual use cases for Windows are very small. Just writing it out and reflecting on it now, it just feels like I don’t even have a whole lot of reasons to be locked into Windows (or any one specific operating system for whatever that observation is worth).
So, is it an experiment, or is this to stay?
The one thing I haven’t fully decided with is if this is truly a “trial” as the subject of this post frames it as, where just like Will and Adam in 40-some-odd weeks I’ll be making a decision if I delete Windows completely or not.
The thing that I do feel is that I am going to just sit with the decision I made this morning to install CachyOS and see where it takes me. Maybe in a week’s time I’ll be using Windows again out of instinct or habit, or maybe 44 weeks from now I’ll be so far down the Linux rabbit hole that I’ll have forgotten how to open Task Manager.
As I do go on this journey, however, I do hope to document it along the way: problems & solutions, pains & joys, and general observations are all things I plan on keeping in my digital and physical journals as well as here on my blog.
Only time will tell if this all ends up being a great choice or just a silly little experiment.
Some version of an editor’s note, I wrote this on 7/19/2026, but there’s a chance that by the time I am done editing this it is out a little while after that. All the framing is done as of that day, not the day this is posted or shared! 🙂
