Free as in freedom not as in free beer. This post is going to be about free software.
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I always wanted to use free system instead of windows but it is a system not just a program so it is not that easy.
Now when it comes to me I tend to make it even harder for myself, trying to find best option which is usually most difficult. Same happened this time, instead of trisquel which is ubuntu based I chose parabola which is arch based. To those who don't know arch is about installing only the software you want so installation happens in command line without GUI that windows users are used to.
Parabola actually has command line as well as GUI installation unlike arch which has only command line installation but I thought that command line will teach me more than GUI.
So is it hard to install parabola from command line as regular user? Not at all if you are mindlessly copy paste commands from guides. However if you actually want to understand what you are doing well then prepare to read allot.
With windows we have "install windows" but with Linux distributions we have kernels desktop environments boot loaders window managers and allot more. And the problem is not that you need to know what it does but you need to know which one you need across multiple alternatives. But in the end you get what you want.
There is always a wiki page and it helps a lot. However sometimes it doesn't help when you run into rare problem.
Currently I have random freezes at first I thought it was caused by wayland which is protocol for window manager so I changed it to xorg, that did not help. Then I thought it was caused by icecat browser so I switched to standard web browser, that did not help either. Now I think it is caused by gnome desktop environment so I switched to xfce.
Since I am new to this system I have no idea how such problems are fixed.
Aside from that problem all the rest is great: I have only the software I want, I can update everything with single command, finally free system, gnome actually looked great, and I learned some new stuff.
In the end - should you try free system? Of course, you don't have to choose most difficult one there are easy choices here is a list. And it is possible to install alongside windows if you want to test it first.
Source: http://zeronumbers.com/node/37
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