Technology

I love the task manager and it‘s UI. It‘s just much easier to keep track of your connected devices, running programs and media playing in the background. The UI allows you to quickly adjust sound volume of programs without having to navigate through arbitrary menus. Or to navigate through a song or podcast running in the background. You can do that on a mini player from the Task manager (the equivalent to the task bar on Windows). External storage devices have a simple dismount button. No right clicks and searching for the right option necessary. There are many more little UI decisions that KDE did right. The dolphin browser and general file search functions are blazing fast. No comparison to Windows built in file browser. I also love how I can update almost all programs and drivers at the same time with one click.

There are of course some caveats but that‘s not really the OS‘ fault most of the time. For example my Discord didn‘t want to start until I update but the package wasn‘t ready yet for CachyOS. I looked for a solution online and found several options to deal with this problem. And that‘s honestly fantastic because everyone has different preferences and can use the solution that best suits them. I ended up disabling automatic updates for Discord in one file and then told Discord it‘s already on the new update by changing one digit in another file to resemble the current update. Now Discord will leave me alone with random updates and I can just update it whenever I want in Octopi (the app manager).

So what was a hiccup at first ended up being a learning experience. Now I understand my computer a little better and Discord won‘t annoy me as much anymore long term. This should be possible on Windows too but I would’ve never knew that without Linux. I‘m starting to understand what they mean by „finally owning my computer“. It takes time but it‘s very rewarding.