Desktop

My neighbour is 70 years old. He’s been using Windows his entire life. Last month he asked me: “Tom, I keep hearing about Linux. Is that something for me too?” He’s not the first. Over the past year, friends, family and colleagues have asked me the same thing in different shapes. “I want to get off Windows, but I don’t know where to start.” “Is Linux hard?” “Can I still use my normal programs?” To me these questions seem obvious. I’ve been running Linux since SuSE 6.0, back when you had to specifically pick hardware components that actually had Linux drivers. To someone who’s never seen a terminal, they feel genuinely daunting. ...

I run VMs constantly. Testing Kubernetes deployments, trying out a distro I read about, running Windows for that one stubborn application, isolating an experiment so I don’t wreck my actual machine. KVM/QEMU is the right tool for all of it. Near-native performance, completely open source, baked straight into the Linux kernel. Nothing to phone home, nothing to license, no vendor deciding what I’m allowed to do with my own hardware. ...

The first time it bit me I was halfway through a database migration over SSH. Train hit a tunnel, WiFi blinked, connection gone. The process running on the other end went with it. I sat there staring at a dead prompt wondering how much of the migration had actually committed. A terminal multiplexer would have saved me. The process keeps running on the server whether I’m attached or not, so a dropped connection becomes a non-event. I reconnect, reattach, and the work is exactly where I left it. That property alone is worth the setup cost, and it’s why I treat a multiplexer as part of the base layer on every machine I touch. ...

I keep getting asked which distro someone should run on their daily driver: Arch or NixOS. Usually by people who already run Linux and want a workstation they actually understand, not a black box that updates itself on someone else’s schedule. I’ve run both as my real machine. Not in VMs, not as a weekend experiment. As the laptop where I do professional DevOps and platform engineering work, and as the desktop where I do everything else. So let me state my bias up front, because this framework only works if I’m honest about it: I run Arch on both my desktops today, and I run NixOS on my servers. That tells you where I landed. But I landed there for specific reasons, and I want to walk through them rather than hand you a verdict. ...

Here is how a lot of us work in 2026: a dotfiles repo with years of commits, a vim config that pulls in thirty plugins, a tmux prefix remapped to something more comfortable, a shell prompt that took a weekend to get right. The setup is yours, down to the last keybinding. On your laptop, you are fast. Muscle memory does the work and you barely think about the tools at all. That is the dream we sell ourselves, and most of the time it holds up fine. ...