Hi! I’m new to L1T, and I found the 1 Year Linux Challenge mega-thread, so I thought I’d do a summary write-up of my Linux experience over the years.
Depending on what counts, I’ve been using Linux on and off for the last 25 years or so, and full-time on my home system for the last 12 years or so. Here are some bits and bobs of these years that come to mind:
- I started with computing in my childhood, using other people’s computers: mostly C64s and Amigas but also the occasional PC here and there. Middle school had a lab consisting of about a dozen and a half Siemens-Nixdorf XTs with 8086 CPUs, 640K RAM, two 5.25" floppy drives, and amber monitors, which could be switched to show the content of a particular one. The master station had an external 20MB HDD. We used these with MS-DOS 2.11 and TurboBASIC/TurboPascal.
- For my 13th birthday in 1990 I got my own Amiga 2000 (2nd-hand) with 1MB RAM, colour monitor, and a 24-pin printer. I used that (mostly for games, either long rounds of Civilization, or short rounds of Lotus Turbo Challenge, plus a few other games) until it became untenable in college, and I spent some money to buy a PC in 1998, with a PII 266MHz, 32MB RAM, 6.4GB HDD, and Windows 95, which was promptly upgraded to Windows 98 due to an offer by Microsoft to ship the disc out for free. Some time later I briefly tried Windows ME, and quickly went back to 98SE, as it was both saner, and snappier.
- While I had seen Linux before, college around the year 2000 was when I first installed it on my computer. Initially it was a dual-boot: I wanted to use Linux for most things but familiarity and the then-popular MSN and Yahoo messengers drove me back to Windows frequently. I played with Slackware first, then switched to CRUX because it had kernel and packages compiled for 686. I also played around with Gentoo for a couple weeks, bootstrapping the system from source, compiling kernels and packages (which took endless hours), and abandoning it after a portage update hosed the system, and I was unable to fix it.
- I met my wife, moved to another country, moved to yet another country after a few years, and shared a computer with my wife, running Windows XP, then Vista, then 7. Linux-wise I burned the latest version of Knoppix to a CD-R from time to time, and used that on and off when possible.
- Around 2012 I was finally tired enough of both sharing a computer, and using Windows, that I got myself a refurbished Dell Vostro 3500 laptop, and went Linux-only on it. Researching distros I came across #! (Crunchbang), and fell in love with its no-nonsense no-bling approach, and used it until the project was declared dead by its founder. Then I switched to BunsenLabs, but it wasn’t quite the same, and by chance I found out that Openbox can’t quite handle a secondary display with a much bigger resolution than the primary one. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t fix it, but XFCE and KDE both had no issue with it, so I started distro-hopping to find a replacement.
- In early 2019 I got myself a new refurbished laptop, a Dell Latitude E7450 with i5, 250GB HDD, and 8GB RAM. I got myself an SSD to speed up the system, played around with some 64-bit distros, found that BunsenLabs now had only a small advantage over other distros when it comes to resource usage, and switched to Solus Budgie, which I used for a year or so. I liked its interface which kept nicely out of the way. I didn’t like it erroring out on kernel updates, unable to update the EFI partition properly because I used btrfs, which the distro didn’t support at the time (and I was told there were no plans to support it). Thus I moved again, and ended up on KDE Neon, which was surprisingly agile, considering the memories I had of early KDE versions being bloated and slow. KDE Neon is kind of Ubuntu without Canonical’s nonsense, plus the latest KDE rolling. Together with my new-found approach to a simplistic btrfs setup that can easily be snapshotted, and rolled back in case of breakage (which I had to do once or twice only), this became my new daily driver.
- In August 2022 I replaced the E7450 with a refurbished Dell Latitude 7490 with i7, 16GB RAM, and 500GB SSD. Instead of reinstalling Linux, I merely created a new partition layout, initialized LUKS volume, swap, and btrfs, and btrfs receive’d everything over from the old laptop, then adjusted some configuration files (mainly fstab and crypttab). It worked, with the caveat that the 7490 has a chipset bug that causes Linux to freeze rather frequently. The only workaround I found so far is the kernel parameter i915.enable_dc=0 which causes the issue to (near as completely) disappear but it hurts battery runtime.
- So here I am, using Linux at home for the last 12 years or so, with the latest Ubuntu OEM kernel, Firefox as my browser (which is most of what I use), Skanpage for the occasional scanning, tex-live for writing the occasional letter, LibreOffice for other Office compatibility (thankfully I don’t have to use it often, otherwise I might have to look into running MS Office in WINE or so), and trying my hand on a bunch of little command-line utilities. My printer is auto-discovered, and uses a ‘driverless’ driver.
- About the only things I had to use Windows for in the last couple years were updating SSD firmware (there was only a Windows tool available, and I managed to run it using the Redstone live system you can find online), and decrypting a DRM-protected e-book using Adobe Digital Editions (I later managed to run an old version of that using WINE).
- When the Pinebook Pro was first released, I got myself one of the first batch with 128GB eMMC, and played around with it quite a lot over the years. Unfortunately I could never finish it to a usable state because a couple months ago, one of the hinge bearings broke, and it is no longer mechanically sound. I also have a Raspberry Pi 400 but it’s been boxed up the last two years with no usage.
- Future plans: I want to get more familiar with FreeBSD, and am currently working on installing and configuring it with Wayland and sway on a USB drive. If that works out sufficiently well, it might be the first time in a decade that I walk away from Linux. Not because I don’t like it but because I want to try something different. However, if it should not work out, I plan on trying the same with Void Linux.
- Work computers are, of course, a different issue: they are managed by corporate IT, and the reality in all my positions so far was that a corporate Linux image did not exist, and I did not have the time to tinker with the work machine, trying to figure out how to get everything I need running on it in a different OS. Upside: if a Windows update takes 3 hours, that’s a long paid break.
Please feel free to ask me anything about my experience so far.
