My venerable old sticker-encrusted laptop finally died after ten years of faithful service through coffee shops, airports, office breakrooms et al. God rest its slimline DVD drive. It was an ugly beast and hardly top of the line when I got it, but it was a workhorse, with a decent keyboard, and all the ports you could possibly want.
(Well, it's no longer usable as a laptop anyway. Seems like its battery controller is knackered and it will only power up on mains with no battery connected at all. And yes, I've tried all the things.)
So I finally pulled the trigger and bought myself a new one. It came, as expected with Windows 11 pre-installed.
I dare say that you can figure out where this is going...
I've been using Linux as my daily driver on both my desktop and that old laptop for a while now, but I occasionally dual-boot into Win10 for the odd thing, mainly FLStudio since I've never gotten it to play nice with my audio interface when running in WINE.
Since I want to use this laptop for music stuff, amongst other things, I was considering either installing Linux in a dual-boot configuration (can be fiddly, and I'm lazy) or even just leaving Windows on it as-is. It can't be that bad, surely, I thought.
It's not like I'm a massive Linux nerd. The old laptop didn't meet the requirements for 11, and I peevishly didn't like the nagging to upgrade. But Win10 was fine. It worked. Hell, I even defended Windows 8. Win 8 had some nice improvements over 7, and the much-hated fullscreen launcher that everyone moaned about didn't bother me in the least. I could still hit the Windows key, type the first few letters of the application I wanted to launch, and hit return to launch it. It was barely ever on the screen for more than a few seconds.
I was willing to give 11 a chance, I really was, but the first time startup process was SO FUCKING ANNOYING. Gigabytes of updates to download, ads for Office 365, insistence that I sign in to an MS account, AI bullshit, cajoling to sign up for GamePass, asking me to turn on Recall (fuck. no.) etc etc. By the time I finally saw the desktop I was so pissed off that I almost immediately shut it off and began preparing a Linux install on a USB stick.
Which is where you find me now. I'm not even dual-booting. Fuck it. I'll fiddle with FLStudio some more and if I still can't get audio recording to work I'll look for an alternative. Bitwig looks nice,
I know it's been said a million times before but my god have Microsoft ever shat the bed.
I expect I could have persevered, disabled all the AI guff, ran de-bloat scripts and bullied it into something usable (at least until the next update turned all that shit on again) but I really can't be arsed.
Not that Mint is perfect. I had an issue with it freezing up which required a bit of searching and an adjustment to a configuration file. But at least it's not constantly trying to sell me shit I neither want nor need.
If you can read this (which you clearly are), it means that not only have I successfully installed Linux Mint on my main desktop machine, but I've also got a working C#/DotNet dev environment on it. Something that, I must admit, I assumed would be a lot harder than it actually was.
I've dabbled with Linux on-and-off for years and found the idea of using it as a daily driver appealing, but in the end always shied away from making the commitment for one big reason. My impression - and until very recently it was a correct one - was that Linux, while great for serious work, was not a great platform for gaming, with poor driver support and only a few titles shipping with Linux builds.
All that changed when I bought myself a Steam Deck. By golly I love that thing. It plays almost everything I've ever thrown at it, and the few games that didn't work 100% right away were quickly fixable. It has freed my backlog from the desk that I spend far too much time sitting at during the week anyway. And underneath the game launcher interface that it boots into, it's actually a fully-fledged Linux PC shrunk into a handheld shell, which can run the vast majority of Windows games via a Valve-developed compatibility layer called Proton, which miraculously translates Windows API calls in real time with surprisingly little performance impact. In some cases, because it's using Vulkan as its graphics backend instead of Microsoft's DirectX (and Linux itself tends to use fewer resources than Windows), some games may even run better under Proton than they do natively. No, it's not entirely perfect. For example, Some online multiplayer games implement anti-cheat mechanisms that take offense to being made to run under Linux. But those sort of games aren't really in my wheelhouse anyway.
So with that final hurdle out of the way, Windows 10's end of life date approaching, and Windows 11 looking to be even more bloated and full of ads I decided it was time to make the leap. I've still got some work to do to move everything over, such as my Plex server, but so far it's all going much more smoothly than I anticipated. Yes, I'll be keeping Win10 around in a dual-boot setup for the time being. Linux is a little behind as far as VR support goes, but I look forward to the day I can nuke that partition for good.
So has The Year of Linux on the Desktop actually arrived? Distros like Ubuntu and Mint have done a lot of work to take the pain out of setting up a new installation, but I'd still say that it requires a tad more technical nous than Windows or MacOS. Then again, maybe TYOLOTD has already been and gone. My wife uses a Chromebook, and ChromeOS is essentially just Linux with a super-easy UI on top and tight Google integration. And due to its proliferation as an embedded OS for things like streaming devices, game consoles etc etc, most of us are already Linux users without even realizing it.
