Ubuntu, the distro I first discovered in my search to move away from Winblows. Beginning of my time with the distro was pleasant, less bloatware, better performance and stability compared to my previous experience of a desktop OS. I decided to dig deep into the Linux world and ventured across Solus in March 2019, largely thanks to its simple install and great out of the box theme with the Budgie DE (great for newcomers) which was vital for me to adapt to the new way of doing tasks in Linux - being terminal inept. I was satisfied, no need to use any other distro; however beginning to feel limited by the relatively small official repositories I was forced to look elsewhere. Still intimidated by the manual install of Arch, Fedora was on my list of distros to try out with many members of the community directing me towards the distro. Hearing good things Fedora was installed straight onto my desktop. Great first impressions with a clean stock GNOME implementation as its flagship variant; a month passed, still enjoying the likes of Plymouth I didn`t have any intentions of moving away from the distro.

That was until I had a day free - Arch here I come! A fresh ISO flashed onto my USB, booted in UEFI mode and being greeted with TTY. Many attempts later e.g. a couple of hours, also with the help of this tutorial created by Ufoludek, I had accomplished my goal! A minimal manual install of Arch Linux. This was not to follow the trend and meme. I was able to customise what packages I had installed which enabled me to create my perfect Linux install, just how I liked it without any unnecessary "bloat" with my bootloader of choice being systemd-boot due to its speed. The AUR (Arch User Repository) was also a significant pull factor drawing me towards the distro - in many cases this saved me as someone being technologically thick in the head, compiling from source isn`t always the easiest when the package isn`t in the repository; namely Spotify and Google Chrome (I like Netflix).

Once everything was booted to TTY, I continued to install my DE of choice along with its DM (GNOME + GDM). If you pronounce it guh-nome, it is a sin - it is a word in the dictionary, look it up. The default GNOME terminal is also relatively tasteful but I find myself drifting towards Deepin`s terminal because of its style and transparency as default. Left untouched the flow of GNOME isn`t my taste but due to the creation of dash-to-dock I was satisfied with how I was able to interact with the desktop (not even worth debating getting me to switch DE). A lesser-known extension which I like to use is Coverflow Alt-Tab, this is purely for aesthetics to view a preview of what you were doing in your currently open applications.

My desktop