Shortly after writing report #5 a lot of changes happened and from the perspective of writing this, kept happening.
The first thing to get out of the way is that I’m using Windows again, that alone might have people stop reading but I’d rather not save it for the end as some sort of surprise.
For anyone else still reading there is plenty of Linux related thoughts, mostly realistic but hopefully positive.
After writing report #5; It was a few weeks after writing it that all of my Solus systems stopped booting, something about a particular update would prevent it from booting up, couldn’t find out why. While the folks working on Solus are talented programmers, watching the weird events unfold about Doherty and the Patreon for Solus (which I was apart of) being locked out of sent way to many red flags to me. With the combination of being weirded out and Solus just not booting, (even after a fresh install and update) I had to go look else where.
At this point I needed working machines again so Ubuntu would be the easiest thing to slap on and go but there were still things that Ubnutu kept doing that I wasn’t the biggest fan of. One of the big ones was the default install of snap apps for things as basic as the calculator taking ages to load, even on a higher end system.
While distro hopping can be a little disorienting I did try out a distro, one a week; OpenSUSE, Manjaro, Fedora, even considered going Linux Mint again and pumping it full of PPAs. This trip down distro lane was both frustrating and informative in how others view the functionality of how a distribution of Linux works for them. For example OpenSUSE has this wonderful control panel where you could change lots of little details without having to mess with the terminal. This greatly appeals to me as I think there a lot of settings that could/should be easily user adjustable without the use of a terminal. I’m not anti-terminal, just that there are adjustments that should be more end-user discover-able without having to know exactly what to type in.
One thing in particular I found missing from everything unless it was an Ubuntu based distribution is file sharing not being enabled by default, particularly Samba shares. My home server is a FreeNAS box, it uses Samba shares for my computer along with my wife’s machine which is Windows, Samba is the easiest way for it to work with both systems. For some reason trying to enable automatic file share detection wasn’t working for me on any distribution of Linux unless it was Ubuntu based. There might be something I’m missing I spent a better part of a day trying to figure this one out. I’m to the point now if something like this takes more than an hour to figure out, then to me it’s simply broken.
While I’m on the thought of Ubuntu based, any time I see another spin/flavor/remix of Ubuntu, Arch or what have you, I can’t help but roll my eyes a little, but everyone has a different fit. So when seeing all this buzz on Pop!_OS, I did my little “another one?”. At this point though I was hitting a roadblock with nothing fitting me and started up reading up on what System76 was doing with Pop!_OS. There was actually quite a few things they were doing I found interesting. So I went ahead and installed Pop.
It’s been almost 2 years using Pop!_OS and it’s been a great fit. I’ve only encountered two snags this whole time. The first one was upgrading my CPU to a 3rd gen Ryzen cpu, my system would freeze up on heavy load. Had to use a custom kernel for a month until the mainline Pop!_OS kernel got patched and that’s not really a issue related to the distribution. The second snag is more of me unknowingly setting up a trap for myself. When upgrading from 19.10 to 20.04 the upgrade kept throwing errors until I removed my custom PPAs. Now this isn’t the first time PPAs have caused me problems, it’s happened in Linux Mint and vanilla Ubuntu as well. Even after successfully upgrading to 20.04 I had left over programs and packages that I had to nit pick remove with Synaptic, everything works fine after that. The less trouble I have to deal with when using my computer the better, so I’ve opted to stop using PPAs.
I’ve used Flatpaks as a side repo for quite some time now so with wanting to ditch PPAs and Pop!_OS fully supporting Flatpak in the Pop Shop itself this made things a lot easier.
Now this whole time I might be sounding like I’m hammering on about how every distribution of Linux is greatly flawed. This is not the case, as whats frustrating to me is that the desktop side of Linux is so very close to being a very good desktop OS, almost perfect. I don’t entirely mean perfect for me, there is always something to change to feel completely settled in. An example in Pop!_OS is that by default the Minimize & Fullscreen buttons in the title bar of the windows are not enabled by default and you have to download Tweaks for Gnome to enable them, old habits but I need these controls or I just feel a little lost.
What I mean by perfect is that just about anyone can install and get going with minimal setup. No having to mess with packages/.deb/appimages/PPAs (let alone explain what they are) or install Nvidia drivers if need be. All they would have to do is install the programs they want to use from an app store which at this point most people understands to a degree. No fussing with any system configuration to make sure file shares work and power management is enabled by default, it’s just all there already.
Now to what I wrote about at the beginning, that Windows thing.
I attempt to be a realistic person with the things I use and buy. One thing I can clearly see of myself now, after using only Linux for over 4 years is that I wasn’t being realistic with myself in how to use it.
It’s software, it’s a tool to use in a functional way with as much ease as possible while using it.
While I did use it as a tool in my day to day, I also let creep in that it’s somehow apart of my identity, somehow this software is a reflection of my personality. This is dangerous behavior, as it lead towards several traits I never quite saw in myself before, or at least severely amplified in a negative way. One of the big ones that got in very quickly was the superiority idea, an idea that simply because I’m using this free and open source software it makes me or my work just “that” much better than say someone who uses Windows or even, Apple.
Second trait would be the die-hard idea that open-source is the only software to use, nothing else matters unless it’s free (in both sense of the word). Luckily this trait didn’t last that long after rolling with the Novu drivers for my Nvidia card, it was not fun to use. But I did still heavily lean towards this idea for about a year into my Linux only journey.
Another trait that more slowly crept in was finding other groups of Linux users and just disliking or outright hating on them. Why? Because this programmer said this thing, or they don’t use completely open software and/or services like Twitter, Reddit, YouTube. Or this one person has a beef with another person, so you gotta pick one right?
Nope. Not a lick of that matters. This trait in particular has even caused some grief with others, I’ve apologized to them but still something I’m disappointed in myself about.
I’m sure other issues arose but these were the big ones.
These issues are indeed entirely my fault, I let all of that in. This is strange for me as normally, I keep far away from hostile fandoms and their behavior. So how did I slip down this far? It was perfect timing of all things going on. I’ve been using Windows very early on, sense 3.1 days and slowly over time the little nit picky things you’re very familiar with somehow become this larger issues.
Even without Linux being present in my life it was already happening, I was looking at news about Windows 10 and gearing myself up to absolutely hate it.
With my need to use something else, anything else other than Windows, especially Windows 10 with all of it’s “extra” features I didn’t like or outright disagreed with. I was ready to jump onto anything and latch onto it.
The one big thing that got me to flip the table on Windows was upgrading my laptop to Windows 10 and unable to encrypt the drive unless I had a Microsoft account. I travel with my laptop and if it got stolen, anyone with the slightest clue can just grab my browser info. And I refuse to make a Microsoft account! Well, not true I already have a Microsoft account, I just didn’t want to link my desktop to it. Just in my head that’s how I said it, but this is how the negative traits will spin you around.
So I got fed up and started eagerly soaking in as much information about Linux, but rather than just getting informed about how to use bash, ssh or what have you I also listened to a ton of podcasts and videos from other Linux users. With that came their opinion on matters, often times very opinionated in every aspect about how so much better it is.
This combination of being eager to get on board whatever wasn’t Windows came with “yeah screw that other OS, I never need it again”. Shortly trailing whatever thoughts and opinion with it. Which I get, it’s extremely difficult to talk about Linux without their being some sort of opinion on the matter as Linux itself is pretty much built by other people fed up with what was currently available and often times that comes with a personal disdain towards something or someone. Then there is the reason on why would you would switch over to Linux (or even BSD for that matter) in the first place. It’s not like their are Linux computers sitting on the shelves at Costco, it’s something that must be perused.
So about 2 months before writing up this post,I was writing the draft for report number 6, this draft is not at all what you’re reading now. Shortly after that draft I found myself suddenly in a situation that made me very unhappy with everything on my system. One of the days where nothing properly worked, or if it did work it wasn’t as it should be. For some reason it was the day that every game I tried to play had graphical glitches. Even TF2 had the bug where white polygon squares would show rather than grass. That’s a Valve game, the biggest company outwardly supporting Linux.
I also broke my own rule and started dual booting Windows, mainly for Hammer, a map making tool for the Source engine. Was trying to finish up some CS:GO maps but then never found myself finishing the maps anyway as dual booting is just a pain in the ass.
Making maps is something I enjoy doing creatively, there are even maps I haven’t put up on the workshop as they were just a few hours on one tiny scene, a idea draft for the future.
This is where me being unrealistic with using Linux made me extremely unhappy. There were still tools and games unable to simply run in Linux. Follow that up with me spending hours of my day trying to find and alternative or forcing it to run through Wine was just adding up to my frustration.
You’ll also find very little help or info on these sorts of things as most of the time you’ll get a response of: “It runs on my end.”
Running it isn’t the same as working. Hammer runs in Wine just fine, a lot of it doesn’t work though.
So it furthers the frustration when getting and even seeing remakrs made to others that can be clearly seen as: “You can’t Linux? Wow you’re dumb!”
Is every single person who runs Linux this terrible person? No, not at all, quite a few good, reasonable people out there much better than I was about it. But it’s a small niche group, so when it feels like a large group of the Linux users are yelling at you, it sure does fell like all of them are.
And if the ones who yell, are not yelling at someone, they are yelling at each other.
One of the other negatives that surfaced in me is how much my creativity suffered, not because there wasn’t any tools, far from it, Krita and Blender alone could keep me busy forever. But the ever present need to feel updated on every little thing in the Linux world or some new daily build of software I most likely won’t really use. Had to keep the feed coming in at all times or I wasn’t good enough at using my own operating system. Then the time spent trying to get games running was another big time sink.
So that’s it? Dropping everything and just accepting the Windows life?
Not quite that far in.
This migration through Linux and open source software in general has brought me a lot of good tools, for example my router is running on PfSense and has been running on a low power Celeron box without hassle or restarts (only update restarts) for almost 3 years now. Unlike other off the shelf routers that need to be manually reset every month it feels like. I’m able to do all sorts of highly detailed rules for the firewall and was able to turn on RADIUS for my WiFi when the WPA2 KRACK vulnerability was discovered, so it gives security in running on older WiFi hardware.
The biggest thing I’ve done with open source tools is FreeNAS. Normally for sharing files and backing up data I just had some external HDDs. Then I moved over to some dual drive Netgear hardware that worked fairly well but no upgrade path and slow even for a 1Gb network. Before using FreeNAS I was using spare parts with Ubuntu and some drives thrown into it. No RAID, just drives.
It had a 3TB HDD in it. It failed. Data was lost.
The next server I built was running Debian but with ZFS. Almost went with a hardware RAID card but heard about to many nightmares about that, so software RAID it is. For several months I was running this server through a terminal via SSH, which worked for file sharing but I wanted to be able to run virtual machines and containers, sure I could do all that via terminal but why would I abuse myself like that.
FreeNAS felt like the best fit and so far it’s done everything I’ve wanted it to, even have it duplicating to another machine so there is a backup of the server.
Also want to note that ZFS has proven to me it’s been very bullet proof in dataloss. JBOD cards are also cheap compared to dedicated RAID cards which helps me save on cash now and later when it fails.
As for my desktop, it’s Windows. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in Linux to either get something working or find an alternative to, sometimes it either won’t work or there isn’t anything else. There are to many tools and games that frankly I don’t have time to miss out on. With the world as it is currently with Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter protests going on is a sharp reminder that life is way to short to make sure everything works exactly how you and only you want it to. It won’t, and you’ll be miserable.
You can however be thoughtful in what and how to use software. Writing up this whole post I used FocusWriter with Syncthing syncing the document to my laptops, one of which still runs Linux (a X230 from eBay for $90 bucks).
Do I never ever pay for software then? No, there are some I’ll gladly pay for such as FL Studio. But there are others I pay for I’m not quite so happy for, such as Windows. Ones I’m not paying for are as-a-service software, cloud stuff such as Adobe or Autodesk. While I’ve paid for these before and used them in a semi-professional manner the alternatives do exactly what I need and cost me nothing, so I don’t see myself ever paying for that again.
The hardest part in all of this is knowing what you need and is there an open source version of it somewhere out there? A lot of the times there is, but it sure is hard to find, which is why I see often times people will pay for things like Dropbox or Photoshop, it’s a known name, that’s way easier.
I imagine report #7 will be about what interesting or useful software is out there that I’ve found useful. So if you’re wondering what I’ve discovered, it’ll be listed when I make that.
This whole venture has changed me dramatically and despite what the internet thinks, yes you are allowed to change. I've gone from one end back to the beginning with just extra info. I’m hoping this post can help someone else out in their journey not take quite so long or at least not as taxing. I’ll go over what key ideas that should help anyone looking to move from Windows or simply introduce more open source programs rather than paying for something you might be using at just a surface level.
If you’re looking to migrate all the way to Linux, check what programs you’re currently using and if there is a Linux version out there. If there isn’t one, then you can choose to look for something that works a lot like it or decide if you even need that program. If it’s something you use often and there isn’t anything else out there quite like it then don’t worry about it, Linux isn’t ready for you yet.
An example I can easily give right now is Photoshop. If you manipulate images/photos on occasion then GIMP has a high parity to it, not a carbon copy mind you but it’s features are very similar. I make HDR shots within GIMP and the workflow is smooth, some examples
If you’re an artist you can still use GIMP but for drawing in general I’d recommend Krita.
While in Windows, download these programs and give them an honest try, the hotkeys will be all different, layout changes or even different names for something that works the same in Photoshop will be annoying but unless you’re working in a professional studio or a company I don’t see any real reason why these can’t work for the everyday person.
The choice of Linux distribution from my point of view comes down to two.
Pop!_OS if you’re doing a lot of gaming and want to get going right away. Major updates come every 6 months. Gnome desktop takes getting used to from Windows but I really liked it, there are features I miss from Gnome now that I’m using Explorer again.
Linux Mint if you want to set it and forget it, very Windows user friendly when navigating, a lot of the hotkeys are the same. Major updates are every 2 years but changes are very minimal at the user desktop level.
With the gaming side, you can easily check protondb.com and see what your Steam collection looks like. Be aware that Steam and itch.io are the only Linux native digital store fronts, while you can download Linux games from, gog.com, their galaxy client is Windows/Mac only. As for all the other digital store fronts, it’s all pretty much Windows.
If it’s online gaming then I’d just honestly say upfront to wait. A lot of issues arise when the online portion of gaming comes into play here, things like DRM and anti-cheat software will simply prevent the game from working. Just taking a look at protondb.com shows Pubg at borked with all the reports about EAC preventing the game from launching. While there is constant progress in this field, it’s a slow one.
Monster Hunter World is a game I was playing on Linux but every time it got updated it broke hard and had to wait for an updated ge-proton. The time and effort put into making these proton packs are amazing with high praise from me that this is even possible. I just don’t have time to worry about that any more.
The progress in gaming on Linux in the last 5 years are highly impressive by hard working people. I imagine the next 5 years will be even more impressive. Would I go back to full-time Linux in the future? Maybe at some point. Things changing and being improved will happen anyway but most of all, general support from other companies and not just Valve would have to happen. A lot of eyeballs are looking at the Linux eco-system but only very few are taking time and money into it. To be clear I’m not looking for total domination at all, that will never happen at this rate. Perhaps close on the heels of OSX, I’m interested to see what that would look like, if that could ever become a reality.
As noted before I’ll be doing another report but will be calling it something else.
For now I’m going to clock out of being updated on what’s going on in Linux land and go make stuff and even play some games.