I have an ancient Windows 10 Skylake system (i5-6600k) that I use for a small handful of important work tasks. (For reference: it has 16GB of RAM, a Radeon R9 380, and an ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming motherboard).
But with Windows 10 going EOL and Windows 11 not supporting processors this old (nor any processor that’s socket compatible), I’m going to have to find an alternative.
This system is perfectly adequate for what it needs to do in terms of performance, and, importantly, it stays below the noise floor of the room it’s in. So, if possible, I’d like to transition this system to Linux and save my hardware budget for other upgrades.
I’d like some advice on how to test for hardware and software compatibility (hopefully with a live image) before making the swap, and then get some advice on which distro to use and how to configure things to minimize the maintenance burden.
The system primarily uses OBS to record programming / statistics tutorials and presentations. We use a couple of OBS plug-ins: Reaper for sound stuff, and Droidcam to let an Android phone double as a camera for filming. There’s a Rode microphone for audio that sends input to the computer via their AI-1 USB device.
It also gets used to attend meetings and screenshare with Discord/Zoom/Teams/Skype and has a crappy Logitech webcam for that.
It uses Dropbox Sync so that certain folders are live-shared between it and other systems.
The software that provides my commercial data feed (Sierra Charts) was historically Windows-only, but they now say it will run in Wine. (I need to test this in particular.)
The programming is mostly R and C++ and should actually be better on Linux as long as the distro makes it easy to stay with the latest releases of everything.
A “nice to have” would be the ability to run the old Windows system in VirtualBox (or another container) for any minor apps (or maybe MS Office) that end up not being Linux compatible down the road, but I don’t know if hardware this old is going to have adequate performance for that.
Is anything that I’ve said above a show-stopper? If not, can ya’ll recommend a good process to thoroughly test hardware and software compatibility to confirm that moving this system to Linux would work?
Assuming everything is compatible, what distros would be good for this use case? And how would you recommend handling the transition to minimize disruptions?
I primarily want stability and the ability to quickly roll back any updates so that I don’t have to interrupt my workflow to go troubleshoot a problem. But I want it to be as automatic as possible to keep R, gcc, clang, and friends on the most recent releases and to keep those versions synced between all my systems.
Potentially, I’d like to be able to code for the latest versions of this stuff, but keep the core parts of my system on LTS versions for stability.
In terms of what I know: From the late 90s until ~2017 I used Linux as my daily driver (and used Free/Open BSD for various servers). I started with Redhat, then Gentoo, and then went to Ubuntu. I also did Linux From Scratch at one point to learn how everything fit together.
But a lot has changed since 2017 that I need to get back up to speed on. And I wasn’t ever really happy with Ubuntu. A lot of what it was doing felt opaque and I always seemed to run into odd problems every now and then, especially after upgrades between LTS versions.
So, my initial inclination is that it would be worthwhile to invest in learning NixOS. I don’t really want to deal with juggling multiple distros long term and I’d really like for all of my systems always to have identical packages and configurations as much as possible. NixOS seems like it would make that part easier. Being able to quickly roll-back any update that messes things up so I can get on with my work and deal with the problem later sounds ideal as well.
But, while I’m fine with an upfront learning curve, I don’t want to spend a lot of time tinkering or troubleshooting once everything is set up. I want the ongoing admin burden to be minimal. So if keeping everything I’m doing working is going to be an uphill battle with NixOS, then I’ll take an easy / push button alternative if ya’ll have one to recommend.
I also don’t know how I feel about having a special configuration language that doesn’t directly match the documents from the packages themselves and would appreciate any insight people have on this aspect of Nix.
Also, as an example of what I mean by “identical” – aside from matching my KDE, Vim, git, and other settings, I’d like to have the versions of R and everything else on this machine match the ones on my development machine as well as the WSL image on my personal gaming laptop.
It also seems like I’d going with NixOS would let me use the Nix package manager on my Steamdeck to keep it mostly in sync as well, letting it double as the hardware to run presentations on when I travel to give them.
And if this Linux transition goes well on my work machines, now that Valve has basically fixed gaming on Linux (for the games I run), I’d like to eventually swap that gaming laptop over just to have all my systems work identically. I might even want to get a new tablet if Linux tablets are good now.
So, in terms of distributions, does NixOS actually do what I’m wanting from a distro long term? Is it worth the effort needed to learn it in order to get those benefits? Or are there better options or at least other options I should be considering?
Thank you all for any help or advice you can provide.
P.S. For anyone who is curious – I stopped using Linux in about 2017 as my primary OS because I needed to use MS Office to run / build some complicated Excel spreadsheets as well as run a few other Windows-only applications. That’s no longer a critical need, but I didn’t swap back because everything was working fine and I didn’t see any point causing an unnecessary disruption to my workflow. But now that Microsoft has decided to disrupt my workflow for me, I might as well go back to something I’m more comfortable with if that’s possible.