Looking back, my path to Linux was less of a conscious decision and more of a slow drift, one small moment leading to the next, until one day I realised Windows isn't really my gig anymore. At least it hasn't been since Windows 7.
So, this is my story on how I ended up using Linux.
The Disc I Didn't Install
I was a teenager when I first saw a disc of Ubuntu at one of my school teacher's places. I asked him what it was, and he said it was an operating system, like Windows is.
Didn't really understand anything, but the name stuck with me. I came home and searched it up on the internet with my Android tablet (tablets were popular back then) using 3G internet, but got even more confused.
That was the day, however, I first got introduced to the name Linux.
The First Go
It took years before curiosity turned into action. Around six to seven years ago, I finally decided to try Linux out for real, and I installed Zorin OS.
It made sense as a starting point, built specifically to feel familiar to Windows users making the jump. It was genuinely great. Clean, functional, easy to use.
But it didn't strike a chord with me yet, mostly because I only used my PC at the time for playing cracked games (don't call the police on me, I know you're guilty as well), and gaming wasn't really a thing on Linux at the time. To be more modest, it wasn't a practical choice for gaming, to say the least.
I used Zorin, appreciated it, and moved back to Windows. Sometimes the timing just isn't right.
Where It Actually Proved Itself
The moment Linux earned my respect had nothing to do with me.
It was my sister's laptop, an old, underpowered machine that struggled to run Windows 10 (which it shipped with out of the box) without lagging on the simplest tasks. She mostly used it for light browsing and watching videos, so I installed Zorin on it, added VLC and Chrome, and that's it.
A laptop that used to choke on Windows was suddenly usable, actually more than usable, again. It was snappy and it got the job done. Funny thing is, she didn't even notice a difference in usability.
This was the moment Linux truly made its place in my heart.
Living Two Lives
Not long after, I set up Zorin alongside Windows 11 in a dual boot on my own PC. At first, it was just something I'd boot into out of curiosity every once in a while.
But slowly, without ever really deciding to, I noticed I was reaching for the Zorin side more and more. My PC wasn't powerful enough for serious gaming at the time anyway, so I was still playing the occasional casual title, strictly on Windows.
Gaming on Linux wasn't even on my radar yet. Linux was quietly becoming the OS for everything else, while Windows stayed the place I went to play.
The Reset
Then life got in the way, as it tends to (by now I know, that's just how life is).
I got busy with things that didn't really need my PC, took what was basically a sabbatical from casual gaming, and at one point barely touched the machine at all.
Then my CPU broke. I brought it home from servicing and found my primary SSD wiped clean, freshly loaded with Windows 11.
Since I wasn't using the PC much anyway, I didn't even bother dual booting Linux back onto it. For a while, that chapter just quietly closed, without any real goodbye.
Round Two, For a Familiar Reason
They say history repeats itself. Apparently, so does my history with Linux.
My wife's laptop was showing its age and struggling under the heavy load (and bloat) of Windows 11. So I did what I did with my sister's laptop years prior: installing Linux.
And once again, Linux did its magic and replenished an almost dying device. Apps opened and closed faster than ever, the barely audible speakers on the laptop became audible again (thanks Pipewire), and even the battery life was noticeably better. The OS was Arch Linux (BTW) and the desktop environment was KDE Plasma with this one.
My wife was happy, so I was happy, and life was happy.
Down the Ricing Rabbit Hole
Around the same time, a friend who had been deep into Linux for a while got me interested in something new: window managers, tiling windows, and the never ending spiral of Linux ricing.
That sent me straight down the rabbit hole of customising every graphical component of your desktop until it truly became your own. I used my wife's laptop as my testing ground, still running Arch through the whole phase (hands down the best distro for doing whatever-you-want stuff).
I broke that installation more times than I'd like to admit, re-installing and re-configuring over and over. But every time I rebuilt it, I understood a little more about how the system actually worked underneath the surface.
That understanding is what turned Linux from something I merely used into something I genuinely enjoyed using.
By the end of this stretch, I wasn't dual booting out of necessity anymore, and I wasn't fixing someone else's slow laptop. I was choosing Linux because I wanted to be there.
Gaming was still firmly a Windows thing in my mind. That was about to change too, but not just yet.
All That Shines Ain't No Gold
The ricing phase taught me a lot about Linux, but it also taught me something about myself. As you mature, stability, though it may be boring, matters more than the latest and greatest.
Constantly rebuilding a broken Arch install is fun for a while, and I don't regret a single hour of it (or maybe a few, but whatever). But eventually I wanted a system I could just use and rely on.
A system I knew wouldn't break on me while I'm focusing on my work, doing important stuff that earns the bread. A machine with a heart, one that I know will open up my workspace without any hiccups, every single time I press the power button.
That's what led me to settle on Fedora, specifically the KDE Plasma Spin.
I know what some of you are already thinking. Fedora is still pretty bleeding edge in the grand scheme of distros. That's fair.
But it's backed by a large, active community and a genuinely massive corporation behind the scenes. I'll be upfront about it, I don't fully trust corporations either.
But in the world of open source, having that kind of infrastructure and a dedicated team keeping things running matters more than you realise. It gives me confidence and a sense of credibility in what I choose to run every single day, something a smaller, less resourced project just cannot match.
The KDE of It All
KDE itself has always been my desktop environment of choice, over GNOME and everything else I've tried along the way.
I don't love every single thing about it, no desktop environment is perfect. But there's so much I genuinely appreciate about how it works and how much control it hands back to you.
That's honestly a whole article on its own, and I'll get to it eventually.
Bringing It Into the Workplace
When I started my new job, the very first thing I did on my office PC was replicate the exact Fedora KDE setup I'd already built on my wife's laptop. No hesitation, no second guessing which OS to pick.
For the kind of work I do day-to-day, document processing, web browsing, communication, and everything in between, Fedora has been a stable, reliable, and genuinely functional tool. That's also a topic I'll get into properly in a dedicated article some day in the future.
By now, Linux wasn't just something I used at home as a hobby. It had become the operating system I trusted for actual work, every single day.
Gaming was still the last piece of the puzzle to put the whole picture together. And in 2026, thanks to Valve, Proton, and all the hobbyists and professionals behind them, gaming on Linux ain't so puzzling no more as it was a few years ago.
Finally, the Gaming Machine
Today, I'm running Fedora Kinoite (it's the atomic desktop version of Fedora KDE) on a new PC I built specifically for gaming and development work. As it genuinely deserves its own space, I'll go deep into what atomic desktops are, and why I made the switch, in the article I'll write about my choice of distro, Fedora.
Throughout this whole journey, LLMs like Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, and ChatGPT were a constant part of my troubleshooting process, and for the most part, they worked.
Linux troubleshooting often involves spending substantial time in the terminal (if the issue is substantial as well), and in the world of intuitive GUIs, it takes a while to get used to. You must accept the terminal for what it is, work through it, and let yourself learn its way from the mistakes you'll inevitably make.
You can go nuts with Linux, if you want, and don't be afraid to do so either. You can also have a rock-solid daily driver on Linux, if that's what you want instead. The choice is yours.
And having that choice is what I think is the most beautiful thing about Linux and the open source world.
Where That Leaves Me
Linux has matured to a point where it can genuinely serve as a reliable daily driver, even for people who have zero interest in tinkering under the hood.
As I'm using an immutable distro, I barely touch the terminal. Maybe for installing a few apps that I need for some particular workflow.
For example, for typing in Bangla, I needed an input method (OpenBangla Keyboard, to be specific), and there isn't really a GUI way of getting it on my system. However, in the age of generative AI, it was as easy as asking Claude what I wanted and pasting a few commands into the terminal. A couple of minutes later, boom, I was typing in Bangla.
That kind of usability and reliability has largely belonged to macOS and Windows for decades. Linux has finally caught up, and in more ways than one, I'd say it's overtaken them.
With the right tools and the right choices, Linux can be truly yours, a piece of software you actually admire and enjoy using every day.
A tool you can trust and rely on. A tool that doesn't spy on you, a tool that respects your decisions, and a tool that genuinely does what it says on the box.
The Toolkit That Made It Stick
Finally, to end this article, here are a few apps I've daily driven since day one of going all in on Linux.
And not just for me. Below is a list of apps that I genuinely believe will help everyone switching to Linux feel right at home:
- KDE Connect: Keeps your phone and PC connected at all times. It syncs notifications and clipboard, and you can even browse your phone's internal storage from your desktop.
- Flatseal: Simple and intuitive. Flatpak apps run sandboxed in a containerized environment for security reasons, which comes with some restrictions by design. Flatseal gives you an easy way to manage those permissions without a fight. I'll write about Flatpaks and Linux app packaging in a later article.
- Okular: A simple yet fully featured PDF viewer.
- LocalSend: Transfers files instantly to any device on the same WiFi network. Works flawlessly across everything I own, and it's cross platform too.
- OnlyOffice: I primarily live in Google Workspace for work, but for opening files locally and getting the best compatibility with Microsoft Office formats, which are still dominant everywhere, OnlyOffice is the way to go. The UI is clean, familiar, and intuitive.
- qBittorrent: My default torrent client since my Windows days. It just works, and that's really all I need from it.
- Thunderbird: My email client. I don't really need it (I mostly use Gmail on my browser), but it's there and it's solid.
- VLC: The undisputed GOAT of media players. The automatic subtitle loading feature they recently added through a plugin is genuinely all it took to fully sell me on it, all over again.
- Web App Hub: You can technically turn any webpage into a web app straight from Chrome, but you can't really blend it into your system with native window decorations. This app solves that. It also isolates each web app so the system doesn't lump them all together as just another Chrome window, so that's another plus.
That's the journey then: from a disc I never even got around to installing, all the way to a Kinoite gaming rig I now trust completely.
The gaming part itself, Proton, Steam Play, and everything I had to figure out along the way, deserves its own telling. That one's coming next.
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