Windows 11 has finally reached the point where it becomes self parody.
Everything is broken, loaded with new features with telemetry that is also broken. Services you can’t stop, and that restart as soon as you figure out a work around to do it. Reboots so often that they’re considered normal. GPU memory being 25% full with no games or AI work running. It was time for a change.
I started looking at Linux again, wondering how much better it was since the last time I tried it as my daily drive. It looks like it finally has everything I could possibly want now. I researched many distros, and watched many, many, MANY videos on the subject, subscribing to a lot of new YouTubers and bookmarking many new sites, before deciding on an Arch based distro.
I put it off forever, and wondered when I could get around to doing it, budget wise. I cracked open one of my USB hard drives that I knew had a 2TB SSD in it, installed it in my motherboard, put Ventoy on a USB drive, put my distro ISO on it, and just…did it. My dual boot was dual-bootable. Linux was set as the default boot.
The next step was to make sure my old windows home directory was mountable so I still had access to my old files.Then I had to boot over to windows one more time to properly shut down and end WSL so that I could mount its Ubuntu image as well. So then I had Linux working just fine, and I still had access to my Windows and WSL files.
I spent a couple of days, like you normally do, installing everything I need for my day-to-day work and routines. I fixed pain points where needed, usually finding something better in the process (who needs EN INTL keyboard once you find out about Compose). Evolution instead of outlook. Obsidian still exists. Office is still available through the web. LM Studio, VS Code, all still available. Docker, Steam, Minecraft (for downtime)… all still there. Edge, Godot, signal. Epic, GoG stores…both still accessible. The only thing I need Windows for that I can think of, and it gets less and less likely by the day, is if someone needs me to write something in a variant of C# that isn’t cross platform.
I’ve been daily driving it for 8 days now, and yeah, there’s been some cultural differences. For example, having to do pacdiffs to keep things up to date in arch. But if I wanted it easy, I could have picked one of several windows or mac-like distros instead. The end result is, with pacdiffs, unlike windows, when a new piece of software comes out, things break. “Oh yeah, that just happens when you upgrade, just go back in and change the setting you liked”
That brings up another point about the pain points. In Linux, they’re fixable. If I don’t like the way something works, it’s tweakable, extensible. It’s worth learning the system because you can actually do something about what you “wish” your computer did.
Oh, and the speed. You don’t realize how much of your computers is being borrowed by Windows itself. It feels like a whole new computer with a huge upgrade.
It looks almost just like my windows setup at first glace. Then you see stylistic niceties, see how you can snap your windows where you like them, and not just choose from a few options, all without leaving the keyboard. The windows manager and compositor can work together to remember not only what apps you had open but where you had them open if you reboot. No more dreading an update that requires a reboot and then trying to remember what all you needed to reopen, the tabs you had open, and re-arranging them where they’re needed. And after the reboot, in a multi-monitor layout, you don’t have to worry about your monitors all switching places, resolutions, text magnifications. A reboot happens, and seconds later, you’re back exactly where you left off.
Sometimes there’s a bit of work involved, like rewriting some of my automation so that I can post straight to my blog from my text editor, just like I had set up on windows. But the end result is better. No more orchestrating things between windows and WSL and the quirks that only Windows has. Everyone who has worked with multiple architectures has seen it. The people who work with Mac, with Android. They start off saying “Why doesn’t this work like windows?” and with enough time notice things. They start asking “Why does everything work one way on all these different platforms, but not Windows?”
And lets not even get into Windows fake multi-user parlor trick. “Sorry, this is open by another program. Shut everything down everywhere and try again.”
I’m sure at some point something will come up that will make me re-think things a bit, but for now, this feels great.
🐧 👉😎👉 ZOOP!