Here's what it's like to live with Linux as my desktop OS.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31142642

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.

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    There was a time that Ubuntu was the distro for the masses! Their branding featured a bunch of diverse young people in casual clothing. That’s no longer the case. I outright recommend against it now.

    • ohshit604@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      21 hours ago

      Unpopular opinion, if you’re going to use a Debian based distro you should just use Debian.

      Yes, it is command-line/BASH heavy however, once you learn it it’ll make all the other Debian based distro’s even easier to manage. Only real difference is system directories are in different locations distro-to-distro.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        21 hours ago

        I find the amount of terminal usage a given distro requires depends mostly on the DE. Gnome is allergic to features so you’ll need to bash it more than KDE or Cinnamon, for example.

    • Wolfie@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      I can understand that. Plus they had some tracking or telemetry of sorts implemented. Think it had ‘balloon’ in the name. Unsure… Quite disappointed ^^