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

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.

  • Snot FlickermanEnglish
    13•4 days ago

    Boom. Chrome installed. However, why can’t it be in the App Center where it would be available with only one click?

    Hey check it out, this guy doesn’t understand that closed source apps aren’t distributed this way! Chromium and Firefox are available, ya dingus!

    Control my phone from the desktop – this appears to be doable in KDE desktop but not easily in Gnome desktop environment

    scrcpy, man this guy needs someone walking him through better solutions. He’s even trying to use Notepad++ instead of things like Kate.

    Hardware support is the Achilles Heel of Linux

    Only if you have fancy shit, it seems like. I am a low-end end nerd and I rarely have hardware issues.

    Anyway, yeah, people need help from the community first time around or they’re gonna be figuring out what works by piecemeal instead of having quality suggestions.

    • cabbageEnglish
      13•4 days ago

      Notepad++, fucking what hahaha.

      And yeah, it really does not take much research online to learn about gsconnect.

      I don’t understand the hardware support part, but I also don’t understand “peripheral software that runs with many keyboards and mice”. If I had to install software to use my keyboard I would riot. Maybe I’m just too primitive.

      • lost_faith
        1•3 days ago

        This is an issue for me. I have a G13 and cannot find drivers to get it to work, I’m talking to program the buttons so they do something as right now it does nothing but display G13 on the screen. Of the 2 options I have found/been told about g13d and g13gui neither will compile to work on my system

    • MwaEnglish
      3•4 days ago

      You can still install chrome via flatpak and their website