Were to start? So exactly a year ago today, I began a journey down the road to freeing myself from the nightmare that is Windows. I had watched so many friends, family members and co-workers struggle with the transition to Windows 10 that I refused to fall victim to the same fate. I was one of those people that said that you could pry Windows 7 outta my cold dead hands. Then reality started to rear it’s ugly head and it was clear that I was only going to make myself less and less secure as support and updates for 7 were coming to a close.
Not wanting to have to transition at the absolute last minute. It was time to take a stab at running a Linux machine full-time. The choice of distros actually was pretty easy for me. Linux Mint with the Cinnamon DE seemed like the easiest transition from Windows because of layout. Also the fact that it was built upon the same Debian platform as Ubuntu meant that it came with a pretty good community for getting help and would be great for broad compatibility.
So I actually began building a system for this very purpose back toward the end of 2017. Threadripper was a brand new platform and of course I could say that @wendell and the videos from L1T, convinced me that this was the absolute best bang for the buck platform for a HEDT solution and would offer me the opportunity for virtualization and passthrough. At this time, I had it in my head that I would like to still run a full fat version of Windows 7 with proper graphics alongside my new Linux distro. I struggled for quite some time, trying to setup a Windows 7 VM with passthrough, for various reasons. Not the least of which was having 2 of the exact same RX580 graphics cards. I tried off and on in my spare time to get this system setup and yet it never really came to fruition. Meanwhile, I was still running my old desktop with Windows 7 on it as a daily driver.
Towards the end of 2018, I made the decision to forego my plans of having a desktop with Linux and Windows running concurrently and decided that the only real way to do this was going to be jumping all in and running a Desktop with just Linux. It was time for me to get serious about Linux if I was ever going to actually make the transition to it.
So thus began the journey of full-time Linux use. As I said before, picking a distro was ultimately pretty straight forward for me. I had tried a couple “noob friendly” or “windows transition friendly” distros for starters. Distros like Ubuntu, Pop OS, Mint and Zorin. All of them were pretty easy on the eyes, but for some odd reason, I just liked the cinnamon DE better than all the rest. I think it was a subconscious decision based on the fact that it was similar to the windows desktop, but definitely different enough to remind me that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. So that’s what I stuck with Mint Cinnamon.
Getting the installation “just right” took some time. It took well over a month. I would install things, break the system and cry till the cows came home, wipe away the tears and get back at it again. I investigated trying out snapshots and specifically a Mint tool called Timeshift that would allow me to create snapshots of the system at points and times when I knew it was running smooth. Then if I screwed something up I could restore and everything would be fine. So I reformatted my drive to start from scratch. I had to Format it to BTRFS and I also wanted to run FDE so just getting all of the parameters and partitions right took some doing. Finally, I had FDE with BTRFS and true snapshots running on Mint. It was about this time that I actually started the 1 Year Linux challenge once it was all setup.
But that’s only the beginning of the story, the past year has been the best part. Aside from a few hiccups here and there, the experience of running Linux has really just been set it and forget it. Things used to break all the time in Windows for me. You would boot up your system one day and poof, some driver stopped working or you’d start getting BSODs or an update would bug you to the ends of the earth about upgrading to Windows 10. It has honestly been a treat to just see new updates come in at the bottom of my task bar and install them when I want to. I have also never been interrupted in Linux by some stupid pop-up telling me that Windows 10 is the greatest thing since sliced bread and I should totally update as soon as I can cuz it’s free (You’re the product).
If my disdain for Windows hasn’t been clear enough, I regrettably inform you that I must still use it in daily life. Of course my company uses it on their desktops and I just can’t get over how much I hate the experience. I can’t remember where I heard it (it could have been on a L1T video), but I too find it refreshing to have an OS that gets out of my way and lets me get work done.
I would say that the hardest part of transitioning to Linux (at least for my personal use) was finding programs or processes to replace my Windows work-flow. I found it rather helpful to actually take pen to paper and hash out exactly what those work flows were and investigate another way to solve them in Linux. Say for instance, I needed to do some writing, Libre Office has worked pretty well and I can still save things in formats that other people can read. If I need to do some picture editing, there’s Gimp for that. Need to rip a CD to MP3, try Asunder. Want to edit MP3 Tags, there’s puddletag. All-in-all, I did the research and found the solution to my problems.
I was also pleasantly surprised to see how many programs out there have a native Linux version. Obviously browsers like Firefox, chrome just have Linux Versions that work as well on Linux as they did on Windows. Another program I use all the time, Free-File-Sync, has a Linux Version that works great. VLC is here and works beautifully and so is Virtualbox.
I know that this has become a long Blog post, but it simply comes down to one idea. Transitioning to Linux has been a journey. It’s had its hard times and it’s easy times. Is it for everybody? I’d say probably not. You really need to have the determination to see things through and commit to the change. Ultimately though, is it worth it? Hell Yea it is! You can pry my Linux desktop outta my cold dead hands.
Cheers Everyone,
Whizdumb