Diary of my switch to GNU/Linux
An excerpt from my my diary, from the 12th of February, 2024.
Preface
I’ve been sent on a journey since the middle of 2023, that has entirely turned my Internet and software habits on their head. My perception of using large, proprietary providers of any service, went from complacent and unquestionably necessary, to incredibly hesitant, and begging for serviceable alternatives. As I sought out more free and open source applications, replaced the proprietary software I could, and began using and financially supporting federated Activity-pub servers, there was still an elephant in the room: Windows. The very operating system I used every single day—for everything—is entirely proprietary.
An excerpt from my my diary, from the 13th of February, 2024.
My initial thoughts about switching, was that it would be a bit over my head until I changed my hardware. I have some atypical peripherals, but my biggest concern was my NVIDIA graphics card. I had heard that this was a company notorious for being unfriendly with GNU/Linux development, and that people have problems using their components. I had my heart set on some hypothetical time in the future, where I’d get a new PC with AMD components, and hop to GNU/Linux Mint Debian Edition. I started looking into a distribution I heard about called Pop!_OS however, because it seemed like it might be possible for me to install it easily on my current system, without modification.
An excerpt from my my diary, from the 15th of February, 2024.
After taking a bit of a break to just watch some videos, and get more comfy with the environment, I figured it was time to get back into it. First off, I still have absolutely no idea if my webcam will work. With no built in way to check, I figure some software off the Pop Shop would work just fine. Grab some program literally just called Camera, which seemed simple enough, but couldn’t recognize the device; no idea why. Maybe it’s expecting a different type of equipment, but regardless, there are other options. Perhaps I needed some controller application first—like the proprietary Logitech software on Windows—but obviously something free instead.
An excerpt from my my diary, from the 16th of February, 2024.
You know, it’s been a few days since I’ve installed this system, and I only just now realized something: hibernation actually works on my device perfectly. I always, and I mean always, have issues with hibernation on my desktop Windows systems. Clearly it works for a lot of people— because I don’t hear about this being an issue—but for me, across multiple versions and computers, hibernation breaks. I’ve always opted to either leave my stuff running, or turn it off entirely, because I will basically have to restart the device anyway if I try to use hibernation mode. On Pop!_OS though? Oh wow, it works flawlessly, boots back up in a few seconds, and everything is just excellent; I am honestly stunned.
An excerpt from my my diary, from the 17th of February, 2024.
Today, I got a request from a family member to create a DVD, from several short videos of him playing on the guitar. I figure this shouldn’t be a big deal, but I was incorrect. Apparently, authoring DVDs is a giant pain in the ass—at least with the media I was given. All of these clips were in some strange AVI formatted video, which was massive, and didn’t even want to play properly in some media programs. I imagine the best course of action would be to just re-encode this mess, maybe into MP4 with ffmpeg, and just be done with it, especially as I wasn’t confident it’d fit on the DVD without modification. Okay, so let’s hop into the terminal and get ffmpeg installed. What’s even nicer about this, is it’s very easy to just open a terminal right in the directory, and modify my existing scripts.
An excerpt from my my diary, from the 18th of February, 2024.
I’ve been putting it off too long, perhaps because it concerns me a fair bit. I need to be able to use my tablet, in order for this to be even remotely viable long term. Digital art is basically my only hobby at this point; without my tablet functioning, this whole project is going to come crashing down. The one thing I believe I have going for me, is that it’s an old Huion device with no screen; an incredibly basic tablet with only a few buttons and a drawing area. While rummaging through the settings, I noticed that there’s an entire segment dedicated to Wacom tablet configuration. I’m assuming this isn’t literally only for Wacom, but maybe it’s specific drivers which also have generic support as well? Fingers crossed tight...let’s plug my tablet in!
An excerpt from my my diary, from the 18th of February, 2024.
Be me, hear about how Steam is revolutionizing the availability of playable games on the GNU/Linux platform, install Steam. I figure getting the proper .deb over the Flatpak makes more sense, given all of my stuff is on an external drive, and maybe it would need to break sand-boxing in other ways to do emulation? I’m not sure, but may as well go for it just in case. Steam installs easy enough, and I check off a setting to utilize Proton experimental. However, literally just enabling this was a huge problem. You might think it’d just download and install, but actually no; it kept stalling in a manner which was literally unable to progress. I couldn’t uninstall it, couldn’t reset—couldn’t do anything at all. I tried killing Steam several times, but it just hung instantly on the install process at 56% when reloading. Tried clearing the cache and restarting; it retries and then fails to install, hanging at 56% again.
An excerpt from my my diary, from the 20th of February, 2024.
Hey, did you know this environment has a recent files folder, and that it’s cross compatible with literally all apps on the system? Super cool, except I guess anything amorous will also appear there too. Whatever, this is free software after all. I’m not exactly beaming this info to John Microsoft anymore. I suppose I don’t mind catching a glimpse of a picture or two while opening a file, if I choose to go to the recent tab; it’s my machine, and only I use it. Speaking of using my machine, I haven’t exactly been using LibreOffice like I had intended to. Let’s get caught up with my mood calendar in Calc, and then maybe start a new project in Writer. I figure it’s been about a week now, so let’s start writing down some of the stuff I’ve been doing in my new GNU/Linux system, with all the ups and downs of my adventure.