Switching to Linux

about four to five days ago i switched from windows to linux and i want to detail how that went so for my entire life i've been mainly using windows and only last year started using macos as my secondary operating system and while windows has been good ever since windows 11 i started to notice that general usability and performance started to decline ignoring the fact that windows eleven is at least one to two percent slower on average despite changes like improvements to running foreground apps file explorer tabs dev home and some of the changes that it brought it didn't really help the experience all that much the fact that i could open microsoft edge faster than file explorer was insane steam taking thirty to forty seconds to open and mandatory sluggishness while i liked windows i liked windows for windows ten windows eight point one windows seven and all of these versions of the same core features which windows eleven is on track record to keep removing or redoing and i feel now that this situation with the current state of windows parallels all the way back to windows me and vista in a few ways the deprecated of key features the higher system requirements but what i think is the root of all of these issues is the old windows nt kernel when windows me released windows 2000 was already out windows 2000 had the nt kernel and was marketed for business windows me was marketed for consumers and had the windows 9x kernel the windows nt kernel was fast and stable but the older 9x kernel was slowly becoming more and more unstable and this is why it would have been a better choice for windows me to make it successful and ultimately why windows xp succeeded while the nt kernel was good back then and first debuted for consumers in windows xp it's quite old today when the windows 10x emulator was released it came with the windows core kernel windows 10x is limited but when the windows core kernel gets to consumers the root of all issues now may be fixed in the meantime i wanted to try something new from what i've heard about linux in the past it was mainly an os delegated to enthusiasts and developers but now linux can do pretty much everything that windows can and better from what i've seen i tried the popos! distro on my old gaming laptop and it was kind of similar experience to windows but at that point i had already been using windows with a hard drive on that laptop so the impact wasn't really that noticeable i then tried fedora 37 or 38 i can't remember on my macbook air and then also tried popos! again but i ended up having to reset my entire drive because i messed up partitioning so now i'm here looking to install a distro popos! is good for having out of the box experience with nvidia drivers but i felt like it was to handholding i thought that fedora was too new and so i should probably go with something more stable so i narrowed down my options to ubuntu and debian while i like ubuntu to and it's niceties i've actually ruled it out as an option going forward because it's too snap centered from what i've seen and personally i prefer binaries or flatpaks for my applications but that wasn't why i chose ubuntu initially it was because debian is known for being really stable and i wanted a comfortable out of the box experience and with debian 12 just being released i decided to use it i set up some goals for myself and the first thing was starting with setting up a desktop environment i actually chose xfce first time when i was installing debian 12 because i heard that it was really smooth and fast and i like the visual style of how it looked older but little did i know that it was actually pretty legacy and even though i could probably configure it to something great i decided against it because it was just too legacy for me so i reinstalled debian 12 which might i add only took around ten to fifteen minutes much faster than windows and i left the desktop environment to gnome which is the default this time it had everything i needed and looked more modern familiar and it was better to use for me next i went ahead and installed the nix package manager because i heard that it was pretty great for managing all types of packages but i couldn't get it to work with non free repositories so so i ended up removing moving it later down the line which is unfortunate but i could live without it anyways then i went ahead and installed the proprietary nvidia drivers and honestly it was just about the same as you would do on windows and fact probably even easier and faster i just type one command was told to reboot and in less than a minute i'm back on with the proprietary nvidia driver however i wanted to make sure it worked so i went ahead and installed steam the installation for steam went flawlessly and i was able to run a game through proton which is steams windows game compatibility layer afterwards it was onto the big part the big thing that i wanted to do when installing linux that was going to take my installation to the next level gpu passthrough with virt-manager unfortunately when following a guide to set this up i found out the hard way that i needed a second gpu now coincidentally i did have one a gtx 970 but unfortunately i didn't have enough power cables and this plan failed now i will specify i do have an am4 motherboard so technically i could go buy a later amd ryzen 5000 with integrated graphics to act as a second graphics device and not have to change many components but all the solutions either point to set ups that could be hard like single gpu passthrough or buying hardware neither of which i want to do so i decided to take another route with that i also want to specify that tried different vms no matter what my programs that i needed crashed because they probably required real graphics drivers and pass through and not simple virtual ones then i tried to install davinci resolve which is a quote unquote "linux supported program" however this definition is very general what this actually means is that it's professionally supported by enterprise distros so that means if you try to install on anything that isn't what davinci resolve supports or that doesn't have a similar base to what distros davinci resolve supports you're going to be in for a tough time fortunately we live an age where you can actually do stuff like set up operating system containers was stuff like this so i followed a tutorial that outlined setting up a fedora 37 distrobox container and i got all the way through and even installed the program the only issue was drivers for some reason davinci resolve would not open because it did not detect the driver for opengl yet even though i went ahead and installed it for that container after that i even tried to redo the installation using centos 7 but i couldn't get past installing the graphics driver so as it turns out they're not kidding with the requirements for davinci resolve and this is something that i'll talk about later surprisingly one part that went really well and that i guess is one of linux strong points is that since it's open and everyone wants to develop drivers for everything to get all hardware working on as many systems as possible my wacom tablet worked immediately after installation without any tweaks on windows and macos you have to install the driver to make it work and that driver can sometimes even break so this was a pleasant surprise during all this i managed to set up all my apps and configure my environment to be how i wanted it and honestly it's a step up my install doesn't feel slowed down because i have some apps installed and everything works smoothly and it's stable so ultimately this was worth it but this doesn't come without a few caveats while i think that linux is a lot more beginner friendly and approachable and than say five to six years ago if you're not willing to use terminal or can't fix issues you're gonna have issues sometimes it was dependencies or for example i tried to use tmodloader but i had to reinstall terraria three times to make sure i'm not running the proton version i think it's just inevitable with stuff like linux by the end of it you'll definitely reach a stable experience but on the way it's not as simple i also wanted to bring this up from earlier when i was talking about requirements with davinci resolve i want to bring up the very inconvenient seemingly unfixable issues with linux and software in it this can be attributed to anything but it is most prominent on linux i'm at a place where i'm so close to installing something or on the verge of completing something but then i got an error and then it kind of comes to a loop or a dead end it's frustrating and if you're using linux i think that's something that you're going to have to get used to even though it's a universal issue with everything couple things i did manage to install some windows programs on linux and this was really surprising since it usually shouldn't work so the first program i installed was ableton live and it was listed as silver on bottles so i was not that confident that it would work but surprisingly it did work vst's samples saving exporting i was honestly blown away that this was even possible it was very smooth experience there were about three issues during installation but they were all fixable the only issue was that there was a little bit of delay but i don't mind it all that much considering i'm running a program that shouldn't even work for this operating system i even managed to run some older windows x p programs but that kind of made sense since compatibility would be better for those i also managed to successfully install epic games launcher so i can access all my free games and they work fine which is awesome and finally there were a few programs i couldn't install and i want to tell you what i did about that my affinity programs unfortunately couldn't install through bottles and couldn't run on virtual machines but it's not that bad since i could just use them on my macbook air and they work smooth despite the fact that it's dual core and if i can't use those programs i'll just use photopea since it's a really great and insane website for what it can do not to mention you only need to go to it once and you can run it locally offline without internet for free and of course davinci resolve couldn't get it's work maybe i will another day but until then i'm using kdenlive to edit videos it's honestly really good for it foss video editor so for now i'll keep using it and that's it that's my linux experience it was honestly pretty smooth some issues which i think will happen to anyone but as a desktop operating system it's really solid for me i'm glad to have made the upgrade am glad that i'm more familiar with linux now so see you later :)

Channel: AbsoluteVendingMachine

Views: 431,774

Keywords: linux, windows, switching from windows to linux, switching to linux, debian, debian 12, avm

Id: tB_oSFLQXVo

Length: 11min 4sec (664 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 29 2023