Tagged linux

My experience with Linux

Or, Some minor OS evangelism

Shock horror, I unveil myself as a member of the penguin legion.

To get the (lack of) nerd credibility out of the way,
Distributions I am currently using:

Distributions I have used:

Why switch at all?

I personally stopped using Windows entirely because of the Windows 10 EOL, but I had been using Linux for some time before that. I prefer systems that work out of the box that require almost no maintenance to continue using - hence the absence of Arch on the list. Arch users are Linus' strongest soldiers but I do not have the time or inclination to do All That. Absolutely fantastic wiki however.
Currently, the Fedora base and Fedora Atomic derivatives are my daily drivers because they just work.

How?

Most distributions have fairly comprehensive installation guides that will walk you through the process of actually getting Linux onto your PC. They will all, invariably, involve using a special method to burn an .iso file to a usb stick. It is important to use this method as copying the .iso normally does not result in a usb stick you can boot from.

Which distribution?

This depends largely on what you need out of it and how close to the bleeding-edge of software you want to be. A computer that will be used to run a web server will probably want different distribution to a computer for an advanced user's personal use. Don't just take my word for it, have a look around!

Some suggestions:

Which desktop environment?

Desktop envrionments (DEs) are the largest contributors to how any given install looks and behaves. Which one you end up using depends on 1.) what you are running your system on, and 2.) what you are using it for.
Servers are recommended to use no desktop environment to reduce system overhead (why spend precious memory on desktop when you can spend it on what you're serving?).
For a personal computer, the major factor is available memory and user preference. Most DEs will run just fine on anything with RAM.
Some options:

My Personal Experience - How the hell did I get here anyway?:

I have two primary devices (we do not speak of The Box in it's tragic nonfunctionality), which for the purposes of this post I shall call Junk and Not Junk. Junk came into my possession for the purposes of note-taking and sports a sleek 8th gen i5, 8gb of ram and after two years in my possession, nonfunctional keyboard and trackpad. Not-Junk is my gaming PC, with the lofty specs of a RTX 2060, 16gb of ram, coupled with a 9th gen i7.

Junk was obtained second-hand for the express purpose of playing around with Linux and being slightly more functional than the tablet I had been using for note-taking at university.
So the first thing I threw on Junk was a fresh copy of Debian 12 and pretty much used that through the entire academic year.
Debian certainly is functional, sometimes I hit snags with packages, but I'd had specific issues with the battery on Junk and sent it under warranty to be repaired (always get at least a year of warranty when dealing with used devices). Naturally it came back entirely wiped (I had forseen this) but I didn't have a Debian ISO on hand and didn't want to spend the extra half hour flashing a new stick. Thus, Junk was re-christened as an openSUSE device.
When I tell you I wish I had spent the extra half hour downloading and flashing another boot stick.

There is nothing wrong, on the surface-level, with openSUSE. It is, indeed, an extremely functional linux distro.
The kicker with openSUSE was not any one thing, but a thousand little things that just got in my way. Updating the system with zypper would fail on large downloads; because I have notoriously bad internet, thus the package downloads would fail and time-out
This would mean I would have to babysit system upgrades, or pre-download THEN apply the update; and I have very little patience for babysitting a machine when I could be using it instead.
Thusly came the day I downloaded Fedora Workstation.
For Junk, specifically, what has come to be the most comfortable has been Fedora with Xfce as a tradeoff between functionality and memory footprint.

Thusly emboldened by my adventures in not irrevocably breaking Junk (software-wise), I installed Linux Mint on Not Junk.
The end of Windows 10 support was fast approaching, and I had very little interest in 'upgrading' to Windows 11 with... the everything about Windows 11 going around. This installation was a disaster, whether due to graphics driver issues or something else, I could not get what I actually wanted to use Not Junk for to work (starts with f, ends with inal fantasy fourteen). Thus disheartened I returned to Windows 10 for a short time because I am not running down my sub like that.
Now, a casual reader may ask why I didn't test it on Junk. This is because Junk is, well, take a guess why it's dubbed that. Running FFXIV on that would be torturing the poor thing.
And very possibly may have set it alight.


However, I later figured that as Fedora Workstation had worked so well for me on Junk, using it in an immutable form with tweaks specifically for gaming would suit my uses for Not Junk rather well. And save for a few teething issues, I haven't had to do anything with Not Junk and I am still able to play pretty much all my favourite games.
The sole dealbreaker for any installation was the ability to play Final Fantasy XIV, which has been satisfied (though it performs much better in fullscreen nowadays).

Alpine gets to run as a container on Not Junk for the sole purpose of building this website, because sometimes you do just need something that can Install Package™. I love Bazzite but I am not touching rpm-ostree or brew with a barge pole, and not for something this trivial.

"But where does Ubuntu (Server) come into it?"
For that, I have the unique displeasure duty of running the guild Minecraft server. This utilises a cloud server that I barely managed to scrape together, with a custom URL pointing at the server so I don't have to memorise or double-check an IP address when people inevitably type it in wrong.
The majority of the costs come from paying for the URL annually, which still comes in leagues cheaper than the previous (and similar) minecraft hosting services that were explored.
For the low, low cost of my sanity, I now have a minecraft server for (functionally) free! If you are the type to value your mental wellbeing as worth the $5~ a month, then a hosting service will probably suit you better and you will never have to learn how to expose ports or what a docker is.