There are more than a billion PCs in use and, according to StatCounter, only 71 percent of them run Windows. Among the rest, about 4 percent run Linux. That’s tens of millions of people with Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, etc as their desktop operating system. I envy them.
Windows 11 has become more annoying lately as it shoves ads for XBox Game Pass in my face, pushes AI features no one asked for and demands that I reconsider the choices I made during installation on a regular basis. Plus, it just isn’t that attractive.
I’m ready to try joining that industrious four percent and installing Linux on my computers to use as my main OS, at least for a week. I’ll blog about the experience here.
It’s hard to give up Windows forever because so many applications only run in Microsoft’s OS. For example, the peripheral software that runs with many keyboards and mice isn’t available for Linux. Lots of games will not run under Linux. So I think it’s likely I’ll be using Windows again, at least some of the time, after this week is through.
However, for now, I’m going to give Linux a very serious audition and document the experience.
To counterbalance the dryly pragmatic lack of enthusiasm for software freedom shown in this article, here’s another bit of writing from a recent covert to linux with fewer technical details but a more emotionally satisfying approach: https://alisonwilder.com/not-the-linux-audio-post-you-want/
My laptop did not go to sleep
Some people have similar experiences regarding sleep issue, including system just went blank on wake up.
From my experiences on Linux Mint in two different laptops, the sleep issue related to Linux system cache. By default, many Linuxes use these settings, vm.dirty_ratio and vm.dirty_background_ratio are about 5 to 20 percent of the available system memory. This is fine if your system has less than 4GB of memory installed, but if your system has 8GB or more of memory, this can cause problems later on.
So I have this “can’t wake up” issue on my two differents laptop, the first laptop has 8 GB of memory and the second laptop has 16 GB. And both laptops are running on Linux Mint.
In search of a solution, I came across this conversation https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/10/25/39
I also found some possible system cache related issues on various distros.
So I tried what Linus suggested, and I use lower values than suggested. And it worked!, the “can’t wake up” issue on both laptops just gone in instant!
Ubuntu is such a weird beast IMO. As someone who mostly uses Windows but works a lot in Linux, I’ve always instead recommended Linux Mint to people who are switching from Windows. it feels a lot less quirky and hand-holdy. TBF it’s been quite a while since I’ve tried a fresh install of Ubuntu, but the last time I did it really reminded me of Windows 8 or Windows Mobile. Way too much like a phone OS out of the box.
Linux Mint feels quirky to me. It’s an Ubuntu flavor, but not quite? Because it gets rid of a few Ubuntu things.
I dont think the criticism of installing apps is valid. Windows also has many ways of installing things. He criticizes the app center as if you can install everything from the microsoft store. On windows you still install stuff from a website, and you can use a package manager too it just isn’t a requirement.
How to install software on Windows (that I know of):
- EXE installer that you download from the website (Linux equivalent to a binary installer that you downlaod)
- MSI installer that you downlaod from the website (Linux equivalent to a .deb package I would say?)
- Zip executable installer that you download from the website (Binary installer again?)
- Standalone Zip that you download from the website (Standalone zip or tar file)
- Microsoft Store (App store)
- Chocolatey (Apt/Yum, etc)
- Winget (Apt/Yum, etc)
There’s not sandboxed applications like Flatpaks or Snaps though, which provide an extra layer of security. Which would be great in Windows, honestly.
The difference I think is in windows basically everything is just download the installer and click it, it’s very easy and people are used to that. And most apps have their own update system that takes care of things after install.
It would be nice though if the app stores were more complete on Linux, and showed all the available packages. I run into this on Fedora where the app store (discover) won’t show a package but I can install it with DNF on the CLI. And if it had a way to add external sources like a github release that auto-updated, like Obtanium does on Android that would make it a substantial step up from the windows experience.
- finds a bug
- can’t figure it out instantly
- reinstalls entire operating system.
Yep, definitely a Windows user. One who would go out of his way to use actual Google Chrome rather than Chromium. He seems to be starting to catch on, by the end of the week. I wonder if he’ll keep going.
To be fair, it’s best to install the whole thing straight from the ISO. You might end up with missing parts if you use the desktop meta-packages.
It can be really frustrating to fix a bug, especially one caused by a huge change like switching to KDE because so many things have changed and could be the cause. Especially if you’re not someone who likes to do that kind of stuff (me), and would prefer things just work in the first place so re-installing a KDE version is the way to go.
OBS Studio: There’s a community version but no official version of OBS for Linux.
This is incorrect, right? Im assuming had to install it somewhere else and presumed it wasnt official.
It’s in Ubuntu, but if you go to the OBS website it doesn’t mention that and tells you to use their PPA instead.
There’s an official Flatpak, and an official external Ubuntu repo you have to manually add, so they probably did get an unofficial build of some kind if they just ran
apt installon Ubuntu since it doesn’t come with Flatpak support.It’s definitely confusing when you’re new to Linux until you learn what all of that means, compared to being used to windows where you go to the website and click the installer.
Oh no as soon as I saw that dock setup and the ubtunu choice I knew it was gonna be cooked. Lots of valid criticism, he did quite a bit of successful troubleshooting for a beginner. He cooked linux pretty hard but could have been worse.
This is very similar to my experience, including the sleep battery drain issue on my laptop which I did eventually find a fix for (bios setting, had to disable ‘deep sleep’ mode of all things), why it works fine in windows but not in linux with that setting enabled I don’t know. The battery drain is still substantially higher in sleep but it at least lasts a few days instead of being dead over night.
My desktop is still on Windows because hardware compatibility just isn’t there yet, after waking from sleep I can’t click on anything or type letters, but moving the mouse cursor works, as does the windows key, tab, etc… It’s fixed by reconnecting both KB/Mouse but that’s a PITA. And the other is my audio interface only partially works, the 1st output is fine, but the 2nd output is very quiet even with volume at 100%.
A more minor thing that still bugs me a lot is it takes absolutely forever to resume from sleep mode, sometimes 30+ seconds before the screen comes on.
The problem is these just aren’t easy bugs to solve, searching for help is tough because they’re such weird ones, and I don’t really have the time to spend trying a bunch of random potential fixes.
Yeah, you gotta have Linux compatible hardware from the start. I’ve always had Linux in dual boot for the last 25 years, so I’m used to it lol.
