Switching to Linux

After decades with Windows, it's time for something new

Vladimirs Nordholm

making the switch sucked, but i am so happy i did and i will stay on Linux.

i think it’s a bit unfair when sharing frustrations with switching to a new operating system. i have decades of experience with Windows, i know where to look in the system when i need to fix something, where how to do this or that. when some new obstacle feature was introduced, i could find out some way around that.

the biggest win for Windows and macOS is that everything works, even if a bit shittier over the past years.

i’m almost a year in now, and the pain points have moved. i want to write this as a little reminder for myself (and others) what the hardships of moving to Linux were.

cognitive overload

when i made the switch, suddenly everything was different. from the graphical interface to the installing hardware drivers. the main strength of Linux is that you can change and modify pretty much anything, which is the complete opposite of what i wanted when just trying to set up my pc.

i will say though that i probably made it a bit harder by choosing NixOS as my distro. it’s great, but having to learn how the Nix language works just to install a package was tedious. just adding program names to a list wasn’t that hard, but understanding how the configuration file works and how much of the system it handled took me months before i felt i understood it somewhat.

if you’ve never dealt with Linux as your main distro, how would you decide on the following:

my reasoning went something like:

uh, i’ve heard of and used GNOME before, so i’ll choose that. i think Wayland is the “new” thing, but i read complaints about it online pretty often. what is GTK or Qt really? do they work along side each other? graphics drivers i’ll take whatever i can get.

and before i’ve even installed the os i feel overwhelmed.

what ended up working for me

what i’ve realized is that in order to get my pc in a working state, so much so that it can act as a replacement for my old Windows pc, i need to accept that my config won’t be perfect first try, and it won’t be as snazzy or “riced”.

i just went with the defaults, and worked my way from there. for the first months i went with GNOME, and once i felt like my pc was in a working state, i would dip my toes into something new. i switched to KDE and for another few months that felt great. in the mean time i learned more how the NixOS configuration file worked, and i can navigate that file.

although i don’t play game that much, Steam has worked pretty much flawlessly. i had some issued where i thought i could put my games on an exFAT formatted drive, but that did not work at all, and the solution was to reformat to ext4. it had something to do with pointing to files, and the exFAT specification being limited (or something, idk).

what didn’t work

some things just didn’t work out of the box or at all.

NVidia

it was so bad that i downgraded from my NVidia RTX 3060 to an Intel Arc B580. although, i think that “no more random system hangs” count as an upgrade!

i spent who knows how many hours just trying to get my 3060 to work, and when it worked it worked really well. until the system wide crashes happened. my screen would completely freeze, and nothing i did would resolve it. it was random, and i couldn’t reproduce is consistently. i specified specific driver versions, custom flags, and who knows what else just trying to get it to work, and after each change i would just have to wait (sometimes days) and see if the system hanged again. which it always did.

i was extremely frustrated, so i bought an Intel Arc B580. the configuration process was like night and day. i went to the NixOS wiki and just copied a small little configuration file, and afterwards it worked flawlessly. genuinely, from spending hours with the 3060, to maybe 15 minutes to get my B580 working.

the performance was a downgrade though, but it was so much smoothing to get it running i am still thinking about it today. from what i’ve heard, AMD cards are similarly easy to set up, but i haven’t tried that though.

iCloud, Apple Music, and anything Apple in general

there is no native Apply Music player for Linux, and the alternative is a paid for app that i don’t felt comfortable with.

there are no native Linux apps from Apple at all. accessing my iCloud files i had to do with rclone. until Apple did something that the integration stopped working, and i had to use either the browser or my phone to access my files. as of writing today, it might actually be fixed.

in general, “it almost just works” when using the browser, i just wished that a trillion dollar company could put some resources into making Linux native apps.

missing apps

similar story as with Apple, but some apps i used have no native Linux version. some highlights for me are:

where i am right now

i’ve been taking things one at a time, and making changes to my system piece by piece. i switched to Sway as my window manager, and have been spending time configuring it to work for me. i’ve also accepted that it won’t be perfectly configured the first time around, so i do try to learn when i feel i have time and improve where i can.

sidenote: the biggest hack i found to get into a tiling wm was to move the mouse to the left side of my keyboard. that way i still had the mouse when needed, but it was just a little bit more annoying to use it, making me use the keyboard instead. when i need the mouse i would move it back to where it’s normally at. now when i’m used to the wm, it just sits where it normally was, always.

next big thing for me: moving to NixOS’s Home Manager. but for now i’m happy my pc works :)