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.

#linux #linuxmint #steamdeck