Hello World

What's a better way to start a blog than complaining?

One of many problems with Windows

I decided to kick things off with a rant about how bad Windows is. I reckon it's a pretty good way to start in this specific case because this site is mainly built on ContentLayer. Coming from Native Android Development, Working with React is completely new to me. So when I stumbled upon this template when browsing Vercel, I decided to give it a go, instead of building something from ground up and running head-first into the ground.

When running the project for the first time, the console rightfully shows this:

Warning: Contentlayer might not work as expected on Windows

As an experienced software engineer, I rightfully ignored that warning and continued. As long as it's not a sea of red, we're good to go.

Or so I thought.

Further down the console, there's a bunch of warnings saying there are unexpected characters in the mdx documents. I then navigate to the said files, and see nothing. I cleared the file and pasted the stuff as plain text, and it's still the same. When I finally looked it up after poking around blindly for a while, turns out the unique, one-of-a-kind, beautiful, invisible \r\n line separators of Windows is causing the issue. So as any sane person, I set the line separator to \n of Linux, one mdx file at a time, for 20 of them. I'll just have to commit and it's all good.

"It's okay, it's just one time, it's fine."

Those were my famous last words before I had to do it over and over again when I opened the project sometime later, for god-knows-how-many times.

After all the information on my projects were published, I pulled the code into MacBook and started implementing the Blog feature, this one right here. And had zero issues with the line separators. Compile times were also better with the same amount of RAM and the same version of WebStorm. Still when I pulled the changes back to Windows, the issue is back.

So why am I complaining about Windows instead of ditching it and moving to Linux?

My toxic relationship with Windows

1. Theming

I've actually tried several Linux distros by now; Mint, Manjaro, Garuda, Pop, Zorin among them. As you might notice, I prefer looks over anything else. With any software, OS or Android app I use, UI comes first. While Windows itself has been consistently inconsistent with UI design (like Windows 11 still having Windows XP UI elements!), Linux isn't the best either. Yes, you can polish it however you'd want but still, it's still a bit clunky IMO. But ricing is so much easier with Windows. I just have to slap-on a theme found from DeviantArt, and put a Rainmeter skin over it, also from DeviantArt. However, this is not much of a deal-breaker for me.

2. Gaming

When it comes to gaming, I only play like 2 games on my mid-range potato gaming laptop. And for like an hour per day max. BUT, I do wanna play those without any hassle. While Linux has been getting better for gaming, it's still not good for multiplayer games with Anti-cheat software. The Finals is the game I'm referring to btw. And the other game is No Man's Sky but it has no problems on Linux as far as I know. So, if at some point when Linux starts supporting, and I mean when, not if, I'm saying goodbye to Windows.

3. Dual-booting

I just can't juggle 4 OS's. That's it. I already use Windows, Mac and Android, and if I started to use Linux as well, I'm gonna spend a significant portion of my lifetime customizing all the shit and finding good-looking software for my every need.

I'm not good with blogs so I don't know how to end this. See you, the 436,000 people reading this, in the next post. There's no view counter or comments so who knows?

Maybe I'll implement that next.

PS: I just found out that you can just change the line separator of all files on WebStorm with 1 click.

File -> File Properties -> Line separators -> Select