System switching

System switching

I've been using Linux exclusively for the past 3 months and the switch to it has been pretty fun!

My main "worries" and/or misconceptions before getting into it were:

I had grown tired of Windows and Microsoft as a whole yada yada—

You've most likely heard this sentiment before, and no, I'm not any more special with my reasoning.

So... the hardest part about moving is, well, how would I move to Linux? There's so many distributions of it that I've had choice paralysis trying to decide.

Decisions

I went to set up a virtual machine to understand what I'd want out of a "new" operating system, so I tried out Fedora Workstation at first and it felt pretty seamless, I didn't have to use the terminal for much of anything. I tinkered with it for a couple of days before deciding to look up system/media installers for Linux distributions (that are able to be run on Windows) and coming up empty-handed, cluelessly thinking that somehow only Windows manages to offer one.

...Until I found Debian's System Installer for Windows (win32loader), which I tried running under a Windows 11 virtual machine to see if it would fail to install, and it didn't! So I just went ahead and installed it over my actual Windows partition (backing up my documents prior).

I would not recommend installing Debian to anyone new to Linux whatsoever, or with the method I used.

Here's a little anecdote:

A number of things went wrong on my first install, like my network devices being wiped off, and as a result, being unable to update my system via apt (I thought that it was DNS causing issues or not having enough mirrors for packages), and then it was unable to boot into my desktop environment, but not before almost deleting my entire system because of apt deciding to delete a ton of system packages in the process of trying to get Nvidia drivers to work.

In retrospect, it's pretty fucking funny, but in the moment I was dreading the possibility of bricking my system. ...Debian! But also Nvidia's awful driver support for Linux.

I immediately started looking at other distributions after discovering that Ventoy exists and started reading about Arch.

If anything, at least I got some experience with the terminal, which I thought it'd be kinda difficult to get into hang of without guidance.

Besides Debian, so far I've tried:

And out of them, Endeavour has been the most comfortable experience for me, so far.

I've had to troubleshoot Manjaro a lot, due to system updates not being straight-forward (having to log out of my desktop environment and THEN updating packages via a terminal/tty) and having graphical artifacts whenever my computer would wake up from sleep. I still don't know what causes this.

The cost of switching

A lot of the programs I was using under Windows over the years were stuff ported over from Linux. It's personally been no cost to me with the hobbies I have, keyword: personally.

Here's a few programs I used before switching over, that didn't/won't have a Linux port:

... that being said, the programs that I do miss using from Windows are:

ShareX is by and large the most useful tool for taking screenshots and packed with some miscellaneous multi-purpose tools inside, both Spectacle and Flameshot felt a bit lackluster in comparison. Despite that, I've been using Spectacle and it's pretty good if I look past that.

Everything by voidtools is just muscle memory as a result of Windows's slow search indexer. Dolphin can list any file I know the filename of way quicker than Windows ever could.

GAMING

Linux can run a ton of games with Proton. I'm not super knowledgeable about its inner workings, so I'm not gonna try to sound like I do.

...yeah I don't have much to say about this at the time of writing, I've basically been shuffling 3 games whenever I do play something lately. It's not been bad so far!

phooey...