User error, you say?
Call me a rebel, but I haven’t been best satisfied with the direction Windows 11 has been heading of late. I’m not alone, of course—just ask a bunch of us here at PC Gamer. For me, it’s mainly been the change to Windows Settings (Control Panel was fine) and terribly slow Start Menu search, but there’s plenty to complain about besides, if you’re in that kind of a mood.
Perhaps coincidentally, over the last few months, I noticed more and more people talking about Linux. From Pewdiepie to big tech publications, 2025 seems to have been the year of trying your hand at one of the many Linux-based distributions. So, I figured, why not me, too? After all, I used to switch between distros like picking between jackets, once upon a time.
The problem is that ‚once upon a time‘ was back before I had, well, actual responsibilities and work to do. And just a couple of weeks ago, I learned the hard way that running into problems on Linux when I do have these responsibilities is no small matter. In fact, it almost cost me my trip to Gamescom Cologne when I found my laptop entirely unusable, leaving me unable to report on any of the exciting new products I was flown over there to report on.
That use case is far from the hobbyist uses I put Linux towards when I was growing up. Back then, it didn’t really matter if stuff messed up; the worst that would happen was I’d have to spend a while bug-fixing in my free time. Back then, bugs were sometimes even (dare I say it?) enjoyable, a chance to learn something new.
I was a strange child. Among my many short-lived hobby phases were my ‚go to the library and research from books about UFOs‘ phase, my ‚go to the library and continuously try and fail to learn from physics books‘ phase, and my ‚go to the library and learn a first chapter-worth of C programming, but no more, repeatedly‘ phase.
Once I moved away from paper-based media and got onto the internet, though, that was when the doors opened up. Now I could traverse that digital library for other pointless projects to start and become almost competent at. Case in point: Linux.
At around age 13, I must have been the world’s most proficient two-day Linux distro tester. Never Arch or anything difficult, no. But one of the easy ones? You bet. I’d boot it up, install, and primarily mess around with the desktop environments until something broke a day later, then go back to Windows. Those were the days when Wobbly Windows was a big thing, you know? I even remember making a 10 fps capture for a YouTube video explaining how to get your desktop workspaces rotating like a cube. Ah, those were the days.
Naturally, all these memories came flooding back to me when people started talking about switching over to Linux earlier in the year. And I’d been testing the Lenovo Legion Go S with SteamOS, too, so I had the gaming benefits of Linux operating systems at the forefront of my mind.
