This weekend I finally got around to switching to Linux on my desktop PC. Like many others, I've become increasingly annoyed with how Microsoft has been pushing changes that help them but hinder me. Unfortunately, despite my paying good money for a Professional license, I am viewed as the product and not as the customer.
I'm not scared of Linux. I've used it off and on for quite some time, first getting curious about it all the way back in the bad old days of Windows Vista. Remember how bad Vista was?
That said, I'm not a Linux pro by any means. I still need to look things up fairly regularly. I expect (and require) a certain level of things "Just working". That's just the kind of user I am; I like tinkering with things, but it needs to be on my terms.
The hardest part of making any change like this is overcoming the inertia of the status quo. There are a few mandatory steps that one must take when repaving their primary PC, and sometimes those steps take a while.
I've actually been working in this switch for a few weeks now, slowly, here and there as I get time. It's been a good exercise in digital housekeeping. Stray files have been moved to my NAS, where things are generally more organized. I've inventoried the programs I used on a regular basis, and came up with a plan to replace or do without. Finally, I got to the point where I was ready to pull the trigger. The reinstall itself is actually the easy part.
Choosing a distro took me a bit. I decided that I didn't want to use anything based on Debian, just because I've had a lot of prior experience with Ubuntu flavors and derivatives. I wanted to try something else.
Ultimately I decided I would either go Fedora or openSUSE Tumbleweed. I generally prefer getting new features faster, even if it means less stability, and these are both distros I've been eyeing for some time that meet that need. Since I haven't used KDE in a while, I ultimately went with openSUSE, as it's allegedly one of the best KDE distros. I find KDE plasma to be quite easy to work with, and it's a looker besides.
So far there have been no outright failures. Everything I've tried has either "just worked", worked after some tinkering, or works well enough for my purposes.
I was a little worried about Steam, but so far I have not had issues with any games that I've tried. Not that this is the biggest deal, as I'm not too much of a gamer these days, but gaming seems to be the one thing that really keeps people tied to Windows. The days of that being true are slowly coming to a close, I think.
The biggest disappointment has been Proton VPN. Apparently if you're not using one of the small number of distros they bother to support, you have to use a snap install or a flatpack install, both which limit functionality in a pretty significant way. This is quite annoying for a commercial product that I do pay for.
In the end, though, I'm happy with the change. Trying to distros is fun, and now that I've got my stuff organized properly, any future distro hops will be trivial. I'm calling it a success, for this weekend at least.
~nullish
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