My kids were using Zorin OS 17 on their very old Pentium laptop with 4GB of memory.

I understand that it is already an older version of Zorin. But it had started to feel very sluggish.

Kids use it mainly for browsing, but opening the browser itself takes really long.

But that is after they already wait - what feels like a long time - to see the login prompt ¹ after powering up the machine.

It has been almost two months since I was meaning to try omarchy I could not “move” to it, since I was in the middle of a project.

Since then, I have moved to Macbook Pro for development.

I was testing the waters, lurking on reddit etc.

Recently, Omarchy made huge progress. When I first came across it, it was already 2.x Now it is 3.1.x

One of the “features” of 3.x was better support for (Intel) Macbooks.

I have been almost exclusively using Ubuntu and its derivatives as long as I remember ¹

Benefit of using such mainstream distro was that for the most part, all the software was available in deb format.

But recently things are changing.

More and more software is being made available via snaps, flatpak or appimages

Much can be said about pros and cons of each of these. But that is not the point of this post. 😄

Yesterday, before I installed Hyprland on Mint I was researching Hyprland, and someone/somewhere mentioned pikaOS

PikaOS is a gaming/optimization-focused Linux distribution that emphasizes ease of use and high compatibility. Built on a Debian base but with cherry picked and custom compiled packages ensures that Pika is stable whilst being bang up to date!

I had mentioned in my post about Omarchy that I would have liked if it had Live ISO

I like to “try before buy install”.

Ever since I read (and watched videos) about Omarchy I so wanted to try it. As I mentioned, the ISO directly wants to install it on the machine. There is no live - try before you install - option. So I didn’t.

I wanted the next best thing.

Try Hyprland with disturbing the cart too much.

Why not try setting it with Linux Mint that I’m already using ?

Reddit forums were discouraging.

I had tried Omakub a while ago. While it is nice, it is Ubuntu under the hood, and Gnome and I did not like the aesthetics of it.

I then used KDE for long time via Tuxedo OS, and then settled on Linux Mint Cinnamon flavour.

Recently I came across Omarchy via the Reowrk podcast

It is next incarnation of DHH’s (dare I say infactuation?) move to linux.

As is the natural progression, one enters Linux world via safe Ubuntu (or derivatives) before venturing into distros like Arch Linux, Gentoo (or NixOS)

I was told by AnduinOS by one of my friend. I was told that it looks like Windows 11

I was intrigued.

Spoiler Alert : It does not 😄

I’ve been using Linux Mint for a while now.

I started using linux because my machine stopped getting macOS updates.

But I always wanted something as stable as macOS

Initially I tried Tuxedo OS.

While it looked nice, there were tiny issues that I couldn’t ignore.

I’ve been using Linux on my old MBP since November of last year.

I started with OpenSUSE

After using it for a month or so, I switched to Tuxedo OS 4 It is based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS but ships with latest KDE Plasma 6.

I meant to write about it, but didn’t ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I used it for 3+ months.

It was more mainstream than OpenSUSE (because of its Ubuntu base)

But there were paper cuts. Things that are not show stoppers, but minor incoviniences that add up over time. (I’ll write about it separately, maybe)

After using Apple laptop for nearly 10 years, I have gotten used to Apple’s shortcuts where most places use Cmd instead of Ctrl

After switching to Linux, initially I fumbled.

Then I had to be alert, which I did most of the times, but when in the zone, I would still do Cmd+c to copy, and when pasted would be disappaointed that it did not work 😄

Then I came across kinto