Publicado em: 2026-10-19
If you were a Portuguese kid born in the 2000s, your first experience with Linux wasn’t trying to be a hacker. It was a bulky, plastic, government-issued laptop called the Magalhães.
I was seven years old, in the second grade. This little machine came with a dual-boot setup: Windows XP and Caixa Mágica 12. Caixa Mágica was a Portuguese distro created for schools and public administration. It started on SUSE, moved to Mandriva, and eventually shifted to an Ubuntu base. But let’s be honest—as kids, we didn’t care about distro bases. We only booted into Caixa Mágica for one reason: to play SuperTux.
Fast forward to 2012. My PC was absolute garbage and running Windows 7 felt like a death sentence for it. Out of desperation and curiosity, I installed Ubuntu 12.04.
This was my first real experience installing and troubleshooting Linux. I mostly just used it for web browsing, but honestly? It worked perfectly.
For the next few years, I became a tourist. I’d install Linux whenever an Ubuntu LTS dropped or a cool new distro came out—I still remember being blown away by how good elementary OS 0.2 Luna looked.
But I always went crawling back to Windows. Why? Because my friends and I were convinced we were going to be the next big Minecraft YouTubers, and Linux severely lacked good recording and editing software at the time.
My first long-term commitment to Linux happened in 2018. I wasn’t playing as many games, and the ones I did play, like Euro Truck Simulator 2, had native Linux ports. I chose Linux Mint and daily-drove it for almost a year. But the cycle repeated: I finally got a hardware upgrade, wanted to livestream and play games with my friends on Discord, and went right back to Windows.
Then came 2021. I started a course in OS and Networking, and suddenly, Linux was my main operating system. I was spinning up VMs left and right. The only software that gave me a headache was Cisco Packet Tracer.
This was my peak distro-hopping phase. My favorites were Fedora right when GNOME 40 dropped, Pop_OS! before they started the COSMIC desktop, and EndeavourOS. The landscape had completely changed: Flatpaks were everywhere, Wayland was becoming the default display server on several distros, and Proton was getting incredibly stable, paving the way for the Steam Deck.
It was the first time I felt I didn’t need Windows… until I bought an MSI gaming laptop with an NVIDIA GPU.
The Linux experience on that specific hardware had constant minor problems. I still have that laptop, and to be fair, if I use it without an external monitor, it runs great. But at the time, the external monitor issues pushed me back to Windows.
Which brings us to today. I recently built a desktop with an AMD GPU, and I installed CachyOS specifically for gaming.
My setup right now is heavily segmented:
The experience with KDE, Wayland, and AMD is absolutely wonderful. Every game that doesn’t use kernel-level anti-cheat just works. Even live-service games like eFootball, plus single-player titles like Onimusha, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Shape of Dreams. No extra tinkering. It just runs.
The only app that struggles is Omnissa Horizon for my corporate virtual desktop, but since this is my personal rig, it doesn’t matter.
I’ve always loved Linux for being open-source and community-driven, but for years, I never stuck with it unless it fit my exact needs. Seeing the evolution throughout the years, and watching those Linux user charts slowly climb, is incredible.