It has been almost a year since I daily drive my EndeavourOS, ever since my current job requires me to use their laptop which is exclusively Windows. And in the meantime, my interest towards sysadminning (a verb now) my server has dwindled down to almost nothing, even though it has been a good part of my journey since the beginning of 2022.
Has it become boring? The fact that breakdown occurs like once a few months (and only when it impacts my daily life, such as when the DNS resolver broke down) might make it seems so. It has reached a point where I can left it for a few months and so, maybe I just lost interest in it?
Or maybe we can blame Windows on this?
I have noticed that when I use Windows I have become less technical, in a sense it just works (and when it doesn't you can't do much). Compared to when using EndeavourOS where using Terminal is a daily ritual, updating the OS (yay -Syu), troubleshooting networks, playing with TUI apps, and such. So much that ssh-ing into my server has become a second-nature as well, even as I am working on something else, that Terminal windows is opened everytime.
Compared on Windows, I just opened Firefox and that's it, not much else. And certainly that second-nature of opening Terminal and ssh-ing into my server is lost as well.
And this shown very much when it took me two months to migrate my server to a new one (Contabo, but that's a beast for another article). And not because of anything, but I have no push for migrating until I saw two expenses in my card.
Nowadays, I'm opening Terminal on Windows to update and install app using chocolatey, just to give me a (fraction of) feeling I got when I still daily-drive Linux. And of course, ssh-ing to my server as well.
All-in-all, the not-for-one-who-are-afraids-of-tinkering EndeavourOS (and Arch Linux by extension), does provoke me to tinker and explore more of my laptop and server in a way that I didn't know was there, compared to the dead-simple Windows. It also gives me an insight to those who prefers Windows, which hides all the complexity behinds several layers of UI. Again, it is a preference, but personally I know which to choose, if I ever have the choice again.