Windows 11 was slowing me down. I'm sick of it being sluggish, unstable, and just a frustrating overall experience. A few weeks ago, I made the decision to ditch it and switch fully over to Arch Linux. I haven't regretted it one bit.

Setting up Arch was actually pretty straightforward. I made a few mistakes installing it, like completely forgetting to install network management before leaving the live USB session, but nothing I couldn't fix. For my desktop environment, I went with Plasma. I wanted an interface that was well-supported and easy to use right out of the box. I do want to try Hyprland eventually, but tiling window management isn't really my thing yet, and building a whole environment from scratch feels incredibly overwhelming at the moment.

It hasn't been a completely flawless paradise, though. One huge downside since the switch has been the remarkably lackluster support for passkeys.

I use my iPhone for almost every passkey I need, simply because Apple has made it incredibly seamless on their devices without needing a true alternative. (I do keep a backup YubiKey for services that absolutely demand a hardware key). However, on Linux, using my iPhone for passkeys just does not work. Firefox flat-out refuses to prompt me for the hybrid passkey option, and Chromium only works once when the application first starts before completely fizzling out. I know I could just use regular Chrome, but I’d rather not touch that hot garbage.

Despite that one major issue, the switch overall has been absolutely worth it. My gaming experience has drastically improved. Valve prioritizing Proton in recent years has been nothing short of incredible. When I used Ubuntu years ago, things were hit-or-miss, and only a few games were truly supported on Proton. Now, ever since the Steam Deck changed the landscape, gaming on Linux has been an absolutely fruitful. Proton just handles everything so well.

Beyond gaming, my productivity has also seen a massive boost. Since I spend most of my time building applications for the web, being natively on the exact same architecture that my web server is running on has made my workflow so much easier. Everything feels smoother, more robust, and ultimately much better than Windows 11 ever was.

To be honest, I haven't nuked my Microsoft setup entirely. I do still have a drive set up with Windows, mainly kept around for a few stubborn games that absolutely require it and a handful of applications I haven't found good Linux alternatives for yet.

I truly do not see myself switching back to Windows full-time anytime soon. Microsoft would have to do some major house cleaning before I'd even consider it. It does look like they might finally be heading in that direction, though. Their recent "Our commitment to Windows quality" post from March shows they are at least acknowledging the mess by scaling back the bloat and returning basic features. But until those promises are actually fulfilled and the dust settles, Arch will be my home.

NixOS soon? Probably not. Have any fixes for my passkey issue? Let me know!