Recently I’ve been looking at operating systems to use on my Laptop. It has an Intel processor and NVIDIA graphics coprocessor, just like the majority of gaming laptops out there.

The operating system it came installed with, and the one the most people are familiar with, is Windows. To be honest, Windows is a mess of an operating system. The kernel is full of hacks and workarounds to accommodate for legacy code, the whole registry concept is ginormous and unnavigable, and good luck trying to cleanly uninstall everything. History shows that Microsoft ensured their OS’s dominance through guerrila corporate tactics of allowing MS-DOS to be licensed for multiple hardware vendors, gaining followers in the business realm through those vendors and some killer apps, then forcing those same vendors to ship Windows when it released, furthering the cycle. Simply by virtue of being the most prominent OS early in the business realm, (not the first OS created, mind you), it became the self-perpetuating standard.

Another operating system I’ve had a lot of experience with is Linux. My favorite distro used to be Lubuntu (Ubuntu shipped with LXDE), but while I was a Sysadmin that chnged to Arch Linux. Arch Linux is the bleeding-est edgeing-est distro out there, lagging maybe a week behind upstream releases at most. The maintainers put a lot of work into making sure everything works together even when it shouldn’t (Python 3.7 + CUDA 10 + Tensorflow 1.14 not even close to officially supported, at yet it worked (not flawlessly but it did do stuff most of the time)). I had Arch Linux dual-booting with Windows on my old laptop and enjoyed it a bunch.

I’ll get into the reasons why I am OS shopping in the next post, as well as what I like and don’t like about the OSes.