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    My Linux Journey

    Originally written . Last edited .

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    A screenshot of a terminal window showing the output of Neofetch, a program which shows basic information about the system it's running on, along with an ASCII rendering of the logo of the distro it's running on; in this case, Linux Mint.

    A few months back, around , it finally happened. I decided to migrate to Linux. This was the result of several things converging. I had some life events happen that freed up some time for me, and Microsoft kept falling down the hole of stuffing Windows with features nobody wants, and not really fixing old problems either, but rather introducing new ones. So it was about time.

    Part number the First - Microshaft Winblows.

    Before I decided to migrate, I was running Windows 10, but not exactly stock. I was running Open-Shell to get the older start menu back. I had disabled all the telemetry, disabled the news, search and Teams bullshit that clutters up the taskbar (who willingly uses Teams?). I had changed a bunch of default settings, like how Microsoft now defaults to merging window titles into a single app icon in the taskbar. I was not having that, and wanted the full program titles. Onedrive also had to go, being a constant nuisance, and not going willingly. So obviously Onedrive has to be killed, shot, killed again, and finally have the earth whence it came salted and burned so that nothing may ever grow there again. I also like having the clock in my taskbar also show seconds, which of course requires you to dick about in the registry. Fun stuff. All in all, a new proper Windows install for me would take a whole day or two of dicking about with settings and post-install tweaking to get to a somewhat usable state. But once that was all done, things were mostly ok. There are things I would point back to now that I've been on Linux for a while that would have been nice to have, but all in all, it could have been a lot worse.

    Then Windows 11 happened.

    First of all, I really didn't like the aesthetic. That's just my taste, but things weren't off to a good start. Then I heard about not being able to have the launch icons anything other than centered. Then it was the new right click context menu. To be fair, the old one was pretty cluttered, even on bone stock Windows, and annoyingly, putting more stuff in that context menu is done by just adding a key to the registry, so all sorts of dumb programs can add to that menu without you, the user, really having any control over it. If the offending program doesn't allow you to change or remove that menu item, then it's gonna stay there, because fuck you, that's why. Now you could go into the registry manually and remove them, but this doesn't really solve the issue, since an update will just bring them back. Having Windows be more in control of one of the system's most common menus, is probably a good idea. But not only does that menu have built-in delay (actually, most OS actions in Windows 11 have that half-second delay built-in), it shuffles things around compared to the old one. An OS is a tool, and if the tool changes overnight, it better be for the better, or for a damn good reason, and preferably with a way to permanently go back to the old way of doing things. Windows 11 misses the key point here in several ways. It also doesn't help that it's another layer on-top of the shit cake that is the current Windows UI. Some settings still aren't accessible beyond going into the old control panel (no-no, the old old control panel), or if they are, they're now 5 layers deep instead of 2.

    But all of this was, in my eyes, at-least somewhat excusable. Windows has a bit of a cadence of being either shit or being pretty good, and maybe this was just a bad start. Maybe after a few service packs (or I guess feature updates or whatever they're called now), or whatever Windows 12 would be, they'd have ironed out the kinks. I could just skip Windows 11 (I wasn't using any of the new features anyway), and wait for it to be good.

    Then Recall happened.

    I don't need to tell you why Recall is a fantastically bad idea. It is known. With this, and a video by Level1Techs and Steve from Gamersnexus called Microsoft Is KILLING Windows, things started to come into focus. Recall is just the latest (for now) in a trend of misfeatures and enshittification since, honestly, probably Windows 7? Or maybe just 8 and some things back-ported to 7. The Metro UI was awful for anyone not on a tablet, and Microsoft pushing that to you, me and your Grandma was ridiculous, and we all know it. Then telemetry started to become more and more of a thing (even 7 has it to some extent I've been told). Now telemetry in and of itself is not a bad thing. I can't remember if it was Gnome or KDE or some Linux distro that, when people wanted to increase the default window size, used their telemetry stats which then told them that loads of people were still running resolutions like 800x600 or 1024x768. A lot of that is probably VMs and things using the defaults for whatever reason, but the argument holds water in my eyes. Still, you have to be careful with telemetry, since your power users probably disable it, so power user features will probably report under-utilisation (not that under-utilisation is a good reason to remove features. Just think accessibility).

    Anyway, while telemetry in and of itself isn't bad, it seeps into everything in Windows. I read this anecdote on Hacker News a while back about someone on a machine with a flaky network adapter, who opened cmd.exe via the run prompt, and nothing happened, then did that again a few more times, and as soon as the machine actually got going on the network, 10 command prompts pop into existence. Lovely that telemetry is holding other parts of my system as a hostage before it gets to do its thing. Now, even if this specific anecdote is just false, I doubt the 1000s of others online all are. And even beyond that, there's even just how Windows somehow has gotten over the years. Go boot up Windows XP in a VM, and press CTRL+E. An explorer window will pop up, completely drawn, in a single frame. Do the same on a (any?) later version of Windows, and you'll see it slowly drawing in one feature of the window at a time. May God have mercy upon you if you didn't buy an AMD 6900X3DXTX, or at-least a decent i5 or i7. I wouldn't want to know how the grandmas on Celerons deal with it. If I, with a decently powerful computer, and at this point, decades of experience using Windows based machines, get sick of using Windows, something is very wrong.

    Just Windows Update alone goes to show this development. In XP, automatic updates were recommended (and on by default?), but could easily be turned off in the update menu. In 7, the option to turn it off is one more layer deep, and very important updates will be force-pushed, because screw you. In 8 and 10, the option is gone, beyond postponing it, and important updates may even be pushed to systems which have that disabled via Group Policy, because fuck your local sysadmin. To the registry with you, and even that might not save you. Automatic updates are a good thing in general, but there are often very good reasons to be able to turn it off, or heck, at-least be able to disable specific updates. People aren't turning off automatic updates because fuck Microsoft (although to be fair, fuck Microsoft), but because they've been burned by it, and they want to be in control so they don't get burned again (or at-least, have it be their fault rather than it being Microsoft forcing them to).

    I've had enough of bullshit changes. Change fatigue is real, and anyone who tells me that not wanting my user experience to change significantly every 5-ish years is unreasonable, are wrong and should be shot. The fact that the UI and UX keeps changing is proof that Microsoft (and the industry as a whole; few are without sin) are straight up abusing their customers by keeping them off-balance and reducing their agency. No wonder tech literacy is declining. The experience is universally garbage and getting worse. Why invest yourself in something that fights back? Every single person who is holding on to their Windows 7 install isn't doing so out of spite (ok, probably at-least a little bit of spite at this point, but that spite didn't come out of nowhere), but rather from a very understandable set of premises:

    No wonder people are gonna say 'screw it' and not want to take the abuse anymore.

    It feels to me that the designers and bean-counters are in full control over at the Windows department at Microsoft, with little to no empathy to the users being on offer from them. And from what I've heard, this is basically true. Heck, VS Code, representing the Engineer™ and Programmer™ side of Microsoft, is apparently doing quite well, with the users really liking it and not feeling alienated, so maybe the rest of Microsoft should take a page out of their book. Microsoft is very clearly capable of making good products, and even good software, but in its current state, it chooses not to. I read an anecdote a while back that the designers on the Windows UX team or whatever were all using Macbooks. Now, Macbooks are pretty good in a lot of respects, but don't you think it would make a lot of sense to have your designers actually use the product they're designing? From all the people I've heard who have any opinion on this, even outside of software an into the realm of Real Products™, like t-shirts and keyboards, the answer is an obvious yes. But someone at Microsoft seems to have missed that particular memo. Instead, they ape MacOS without understanding why people like it, and the reasons people like MacOS very rarely have anything to do with any specific minutia that Windows is gonna be able to CTRL+C and CTRL+V into its own UX experience without also upending Windows as a whole.

    Part number the Second - Linux Mint and the tale of Sane Defaults

    I went with Mint for my first install. The reasons should be obvious. After Ubuntu's fall from grace, it seems to have become the default recommendation for most any use case that a Linux novice can reasonably want. And honestly, that's with good reason. The Cinnamon UI is like a breath of fresh air compared to Windows 10, and even more so compared to 11. I find it hilarious that some Linux people recommend KDE to people who migrate from Windows. Now, that's not without reason, since KDE is pretty Windows-like, and gets a lot of active development, but the thing for me is that KDE to me is not Windows-like. It's Windows 10 and 11-like. Cinnamon on the other hand is more Windows 7-like, or heck, probably even earlier, but it sprinkles in the modern stuff without getting in your way.

    Because of this older Windows-style UX, my first impressions were fantastic. I had installed Linux Mint before, when dicking about in VMs for whatever reason, but even in actual use, it's still good. Now, some settings weren't to my taste, but the thing is, all the settings I did want to change, were right there in the settings menu, and not even that deep down. Less than an hour in, and I had already gotten my clock to display seconds, the drag-to-top gesture to maximise rather than tile, and the grouped Window list in the taskbar to show me window titles again. And this is in a fairly new environment for me. Even if the defaults weren't the best for me specifically, they were decent on the whole, and easy to change. I already feel more at home than in Windows.

    After getting comfortable, it was time to properly settle in and install the programs I would need. On Windows, I already leaned pretty far towards open source, so most things have direct 1:1 equivalents. VLC is VLC. Handbrake is Handbrake. And even outside of that, Steam is Steam, and Anydesk is Anydesk. And on that note: Flatpak and Flat­hub are amazing. Even if most things would probably work without Flatpak runtimes and whatever else, the fact that they have so much software there, with a growing library and feature set, and it's all inter-compatible with any major Linux distro, is fucking amazing. That said, there are some things that aren't there, but the list, at-least for me, ended up being pretty short:

    There were also these that were in Mint's repos, but not on Flat­hub

    All in all, that's a really good showing, and even if these didn't have the ideal install method, they were all easy to install. Hopefully the rest will be brought to Flat­hub soon (some of them are probably pretty easy to export there, but I'm no developer). Even funnier is how I installed openRGB with the deb first, and never got it to work without it running with sudo, while the flatpak version just prompted me to run a shell script to set up the udevs, at which point everything worked perfectly. Should have just done that to begin with.

    Also, the Mint update utility is great. It's easily readable, it doesn't bug me, you can turn on automatic updates if you want, but you don't have to. It does everything all at once: system packages and flatpaks, so it keeps everything up to date, even the random programs I rarely use, that would never get updated on Windows. It's great. I feel respected by it, and I respect it back.

    I did also set up a Windows VM to run the few programs I have that weren't on Linux. All of these are things I need pretty rarely, so they aren't really worth setting up Wine for, although it would be nice to be able to change my mouse's settings without passing it through to a VM, but since it's mostly set and forget, I can deal with it.

    Part number the Third - You're gonna have issues, no matter what you do

    While the first impressions were pretty amazing, problems were gonna creep up. Most small though, thankfully.

    The first thing that I noticed, was that there wasn't any GUI way to configure a RAID array. I have a RAID-1 array in my main PC for, reasons. The GNOME Disks GUI utility is pretty good in-fact. It does damn-near everything you need it to do, but I apparently found an edge case where something hadn't been implemented. So I went looking for a GUI utility to do this, something to just set and forget this array, and then go about my life. Turns out, the Linux Consensus™ is that if you're doing RAID, you're savvy enough to do it from the command prompt. Great. That old jingle.

    The command-line, while very powerful, is no substitute for a GUI. Even a basic one will do in many cases. Some guard-rails and discoverability does wonders for software, especially simple software where there's just not that much to do, so it doesn't become paralysing, or devolves into me having to constantly go back and forth between a program and its documentation or the man page just to do this one tiny little thing this one time. I just want to make a RAID array and not have to triple-check that I typed sdb1 and sbc1 and not sdb1 and sda1 accidentally. A GUI showing the drive model numbers would do wonders, but no, not today. This gets into the always funny deal with even how Grandma can use Linux just fine. Of course she can! She only uses her computer to read email and pay the bills. She needs naught more than Firefox, and maybe Thunderbird. Maybe even Libreoffice! But the instant you go outside the very well defined boundaries of Novice Linux Territory, you need to know your way around a terminal. Linux software is very often still designed with a command line-first philosophy, while Windows left that back in the DOS days for the most part. The average Windows power user will very rarely need to touch the command line beyond maybe an install script or similar when dicking about to get an old game working. On Linux, the instant something goes not quite as expected, it's off to the command line (or off to Google, which then tells you to punch in whatever commands to fix it, even though you should never run commands you don't understand! ugh).

    Now that I'm comfortable with the command line, I do end up using it a fair amount. Some things are in-fact pretty easy once you know about them and get used to them. This however, does not entail that there shouldn't be a GUI option for those who want it.

    Either way, I figured my way around mdadm to setup a RAID array, only to have it degrade after first boot, because I typed sdb and sdc and not sdb1 and sdc1. Lesson learned at-least? Also, the drives wouldn't auto-mount even though the default settings said they would? I just turned off the default switch in GNOME Disks, but didn't actually change anything, and then the disks mounted automatically on boot. Weird. Also-also, those drive show up in the GUI as unmountable, with a little eject icon. Is this really necessary with internal drives? The unmount button is there in GNOME Disks, so the setting's still accessible through the GUI, but I'd think only external storage, like USB drives and network devices should really be unmountable through the file manager and tray icon GUI, but maybe there's something I'm missing here.

    Second, Steam. Proton is Wonderful, no doubt about that. But it's not without flaws. And neither is Protondb. Most things did Just Work™, beyond some GPU issues that I'll get to later. However, I quickly realised I needed to to take what Protondb said with a grain of salt. For instance, Battlefield 4 was rated Gold when i tried to play it, which I took to mean 'close to a perfect experience'. In reality, I didn't get past installing it. Steam downloaded it just fine, I launched it, and then it hangs on the EA App setup. Of course that thing was gonna curse me from beyond the grave. Origin wasn't bad enough, and EA can't shake their DRM grip. This is probably fixable in some way. It's probably just that the EA App setup changed since last time they changed the proton script or whatever, and as soon as it can get past that, it would play fine. It's probably just a menu I need to click past, but that doesn't help me if I can't click past it. Rough start I'd say. Thankfully, other experiences as far as games were concerned were great. Prism Launcher for Minecraft is just *chef's kiss* once you get used to it, and osu! Lazer is just as good on Linux as it is on Windows, if not even better. The only thing I'm missing is Vortex, or the old Nexus Mod Manager. Work is ongoing on getting that to work on Linux though, and is pretty promising, so we'll get there eventually.

    Third, swap. I'd never have imagined that'd I'd run into a problem with swap, but I managed it. I was doing a fair amount of rendering to AV1 using Handbrake, and the SVT-AV1 encoder just fucking loves RAM. I've got 64 GBs of the stuff, so you'd think I'd be fine. Mint sets up 2 GBs of swap, just so you have some, but it's only there because there are Good Reasons™ to have some nominal amount of swap available, and not because it's expected that people are gonna have giant swap files with data constantly flowing through them. I managed to get the OOM killer on my ass twice. This prompted me to expand the swap file (thank fuck it's a file and not a partition, progress has been made), at which point I discovered that there also isn't any GUI utility to adjust that. No surprise there, but another data point for sure. Thankfully many people have asked about this on the Linux Mint forums before me, and the chain of commands to get to where I needed to be wasn't actually that complex. Now I'm in a much better place as far as swap is concerned, and haven't had problems since.

    Fourth, GPUs. Yes GPUs. I'm one of the idiots who bought an A770. Now, I've been mostly happy with it, and it's fun to be an early adopter when you're ready for some jank. I also have an older 2060 that's permanently on Folding duty. Slight problem though, these don't really like to co-exist. Nvidia Optimus has three modes, and is very clearly aimed at laptops, where there's a powerful Nvidia GPU and a dinky Intel iGPU; the exact opposite situation of what I'm in. The first mode is Nvidia Performance, where the Nvidia GPU does everything. The Intel card doesn't even work as a display output. Funny that. Can't even use GPUs from different vendors just to get more heads. That's a downgrade from Windows. The Second is Intel Power Saving. That one doesn't even enable the Nvidia card at all. I boot, and it's only listed in lscpi, not in the Nvidia settings at all, and Folding@Home doesn't see it. Well fuck me. The third is Nvidia On-Demand, where things get off-loaded to the Nvidia GPU. This is a big yikes, since that card is constantly busy with folding, and my Intel card is the more powerful one anyway. So what's the solution to this problem? Jank.

    I boot in On-Demand mode, so that my Nvidia card can initialise and the driver can be loaded. Everything's fine until I launch something GPU accelerated. So what I do instead is enable Intel Power Saving mode, then I log out (I don't reboot or anything, I just log out), because that setting doesn't take until you log out and back in again, and when I'm logged back in again, the Intel card takes everything that's GPU accelerated, but the Nvidia card is already initialised, and Folding@Home can do its thing with it. It's janky, it's not nice, it's probably Nvidia's fault, and it's also my fault for buying weird hardware and mixing it, but Windows handled this just fine. It's a shame Linux doesn't.

    There's also a decent line of problems in the 'X11 is janky, Wayland soon to be' category. Discord share screen worked fine for me, which was nice, but audio wasn't shareable. Supposedly this is being worked on by Discord, but Linux is low-priority, and Wayland changes this dynamic quite a bit. VRR is also not a thing on X11 as far as I can tell, at-least with Intel, and mixed refresh rates is also not a thing, at-least not without tearing. VR is also apparently somewhat broken. There's been some regressions on Linux on this front on Steam, probably because VR is very low priority. Anydesk also ran very slowly from other machines when remoting into my Linux machines. Not sure what that was about. It also doesn't have feature parity with the Windows and MacOS versions.

    Other random problems of note:

    All in all, I'm very happy I migrated. Microsoft is headed down a dark path, along with much of the industry, and I don't want to be a part of that. I don't need more abuse in my life. My interests as a user are better preserved by FOSS, which is incredible. You'd think that Microsoft and its billions of dollars would be able to provide a decent, if not good, product, but that's not the path they chose. You would think that I would at-least need some time to get used to what is at-least nominally a completely unfamiliar environment, and that I would have strong preferences for the Windows style of doing things after having been in that mindset for all of my computing life, but since Windows is moving away from what I consider to be a good Windows style of doing things, and Linux can provide a decent substitute of that experience, it may be no wonder that I did settle in so nicely and so quickly.

    I got to learn a lot by migrating, and ended up with an overall much better user experience than I would have imagined. At the rate things are going, the future looks bright for the Linux Desktop. There are still a lot of kinks to iron out, but things are clearly and visibly improving.

    Even after a failed SSD caused me to have to reinstall my OS, I'll be sticking with and reinstalling Mint. Just a few months in, and I'm already comfortable. With time, I'll migrate my server over to Linux as well. It too makes no use of Windows exclusive software or features, so I might as well go all in on Linux, with there more or less being no downside in doing so. Once my server is migrated over to Linux, I'll no longer be the personification of some meme guy who runs Linux on their desktop, MacOS on their Laptop, iOS on their phone, and Windows on their server. It's a good bit, but I'd rather just have my life be as easy as I can make it, so, incredibly, Linux it will be. I wonder how many people would have expected Joe Schmoe Windows Power User to start migrating to Linux in anything even pretending to be decent quantities 5 years ago. But through a mix of Valve help, Microsoft incompetence, and the constant march of FOSS, it's actually happening, and I love it.

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