2025/06/16
Writing these posts out in plain text (my code editor) is pretty cumbersome, since newlines need to be keyed manually lest the content become impossible to review. So I'm going to try writing this out with my text editor "Kate" and see how that goes. At some point I will need to make some kind of content framework for this page that I can dump files into instead. Anyways, I digress.
A long time ago while I was in university I experimented with Linux, dual-booting Ubuntu onto my home PC, which was my primary PC. I thought it was pretty cool, but I had no idea what I was doing. I also had no idea *why* I was doing it. Very quickly I was back to living in Windows (7 at the time) and eventually the Ubuntu partition got nuked and forgotten. Over the years since, Windows has fallen further and further from my graces (or more accurately, Microsoft.) With the advent of Windows 10 I began to see a move in the software seemingly trying to emulate what Apple has done with their operating system. Pretty interfaces, obscured configuration, and a general sense of "it just works" (often to the detriment of things actually just working.)
As the lifespan of Win10 carried on, advertisements began to appear in explorer, and OneDrive became a much bigger focus from Microsoft. I remember the first time I installed Windows 11, and having to opt-out of logging into my Microsoft account manually. I remember having to opt-out of providing my user data, which they requested in order to "Improve the quality of advertisements". I was dismayed then. But it got worse. Recently my baby sister got a new laptop and I offered to help her navigate the installation. I was absolutely dismayed to learn that opting out of OneDrive, and the use of a Microsoft account was no longer possible. It is technically still possible for confident power users, but for the average user, these are now forced upon you. Ultimately, being pushed further and further away from the dialogs and interfaces that I grew up learning and loving, and being pushed deeper and deeper into the "You are now a member of the Microsoft ecosystem" hole, I eventually just couldn't take it any more.
Fortunately, some folks around me at the time had been giving me the thumbs up on a potential move to Linux, so I said to heck with it I'm gone. I did a bit of research on the flavors of Linux that were available, notably the differences between Debian and Fedora. Arch wasn't in consideration and frankly still isn't. I ultimately landed on Debian since it felt a little more "open" culturally speaking. I knew I wanted something well used and supported, and that was modern and would work more or less out of the box for me.
On May 6th, 2025, I installed Bazzite OS on
the recommendation of a friend who suggested it since it was tailored towards
gamers. Bazzite truly is tailored towards gamers and any non-technical PC user
that is looking to migrate away from Windows but wants a seamless experience for
primarily gaming and web browsing activities, Bazzite is a great option. But
one of the first things that I tried to do was sudo apt install
python3 and of course it cried to me "No! No! Bazzite doesn't like when
master tries to apt! apt bad! Use GUI package manager instead!" Well that just
wasn't going to work for me...
So I did some more research, this time with a little less concern for how well supported the particular distribution was, and focusing a little more on the featureset. I discovered KDE Plasma, and that led me to Kubuntu. So off to Kubuntu I went, and on Kubuntu is where I now write this post.
People have often urged me against using Linux with fears of things not working at all, games not being able to be played, and requiring a high technical skillset to even function. However I am here now and believe that some flavors of Linux may be even more user friendly and approachable than even Windows. There are certain pain points that I think would prevent non technical users from starting out on something as open-ended as Ubuntu though, for the truly uninitiated a system like Bazzite seems like an excellent entry-point where even the absolute novice can get some exposure to concepts that they can take with them and apply later on in more open ended systems.
Regarding gaming and performance, with very limited exception I want to mention that I get notably better performance on Kubuntu than I ever did in Windows. I tried everything in Windows to get better performance, and always felt like I wasn't really getting the oomph that my machine should be able to produce. It seems like I was right in retrospect. Now that I write this, I think I need to try out some Tarkov on this machine again and see how that goes.
I've put quite a bit of effort into doing as much as I can in the terminal, and
as a result have realized that the bash shell is obscenely powerful. Moreover,
the scripting language is very intuitive and easy to write, standing (in my
opinion) quite in contrast to batch. I actually wrote a small script to create
files (think mkdir but for files) only to later on realize that
touch can easily be used to create the same result. I have learned
a little more about networking (perhaps my least favorite field of IT), I've
tinkered with my compositor, I've discovered nerdfonts and so so much more.
Writing to document my journey with Linux was a big reason why I was reminded of my desire to have a website in the first place. Now that I'm writing this, I wish that I had gotten started on it much sooner as I have forgotten much of what this journey has entailed for me thus far. Ash to ash. My next big adventure will be recorded with detail in future posts.