Curiosity at first after it was mentioned a few times by others. This was back in 2007, and I've been off and on with it over the years and being pleasantly surprised with the amount of progress it had made each time I used it.
I switched for good when I built my new PC last year. I didn't actually mind Windows until it began to get filled with crapware, which has really gotten out of control more recently. It's just as well that Proton has eliminated the last reason I needed to use it.
I got into Linux because I used a shitty Acer laptop in middle school and I couldn’t stand how slow it was. Somehow I ended up stumbling on some article or video about Linux being faster and installed Ubuntu WUBI (I think that’s what it was called, it let you install Ubuntu in Windows). Then I found myself on IRC and became a distrohopper for a few years.
When I was younger I was probably obsessed and proselytized a bit but not so much anymore. An OS is just a tool and people should use what works best for them to solve the problems they have at the time.
But I still daily drive Linux so I guess it’s my preferred tool.
I don’t support Linux fanatics who insist that Linux is for everyone and anyone. It is vastly different (IMO in a good way) than your typical Windows OS but once you spend some time figuring it out, following “cumbersome” installation instructions might take no more than 5 minutes.
This article is on the other side of the spectrum. Presenting the Linux desktop as a “collective delusion” is, at least, disrespect to all the people who struggle to make it real.
I know people who switched to Linux as their main OS and claim to be more productive than they were on Windows because they can adapt the desktop experience to their workflow and there are no unnecessary distractions like popups and ads that Microsoft likes to overuse in their latest OS versions.
LibreOffice is just good enough for most paperwork with good MS-Office compatibility (neither I nor anybody I know ever had a single problem in years).
Of course there are drawbacks, but most of what the article mentions are purely over-generalisations, distribution-specific quirks or “I can’t be bothered to spend 5 minutes to learn something new” type of arguments. In Linux, the time you spend learning something new is a good investment.
Finally, I myself am a computer geek who likes to meddle in programming. For me, using anything else than a *nix-based POSIX-compatible system (except, perhaps, for Haiku) would be a nightmare.
Linux is not a religion. It’s a tool, and you should always pick a tool based on whether it can perform the needed tasks and whether you are comfortable with it, without fanaticism. And Linux is objectively better than Windows in some respects, and vice versa. So, if I were to follow the author’s logic, the Windows desktop would be as much a collective delusion in my eyes.
LibreOffice is just good enough for most paperwork with good MS-Office compatibility (neither I nor anybody I know ever had a single problem in years).
Are you sure, it can’t even handle simple typing and bullet points consistently…
OnlyOffice is indeed a good choice for the best MS compatibility. Also Google Docs is amazing for collaboration in teams (yes, I know it’s not FOSS, but hey, it works). NextCloud is nice but it doesn’t offer collaborative editing of Office documents AFAIK.
For presentations I have been lately preferring Inkscape. It has multi-page support since some versions ago and can export to PDF, clickable links and everything. I don’t use animations or anything too fancy in my presentation and I like the flexibility that a vector editor can offer me, so Inkscape works well for my case.
Linux has found its niche on the server side and among tech enthusiasts and counter-culture types, and that’s okay! I, for one, like it that way. Having Linux at home is a nice change from using Windows at work all day, but I might not feel the same way if I used Linux at work.
I don’t consider myself a Linux fanatic by any means, but I do think that something like Linux Mint is viable for pretty much anyone as their home desktop OS, in the much the same way that Android is viable for anyone as their mobile OS. As others have said, the main thing where Linux needs to improve for home users is game support, and that has already come a long, long way. If all my games worked perfectly on Linux, I would ditch Windows at home altogether. Fortunately, Steam is pushing for more Linux support.
Keep notes on what you do including outcomes. You can always reinstall, skip all of the extra crap you didn’t need to mess around with and have a good clean system without having to back track.
It’s easy to forget the steps you took to do something on your computer, especially several months later when you’re trying to upgrade. Sometimes when you try several different ways of solving a problem, it’s easy to forget which method was successful the next day!
It’s a very good idea to take notes about the software you’ve installed and configuration changes you’ve made. When editing configuration files, it’s also a very good idea to include comments in the file explaining the reason for the changes and the date they were made.
This has saved me so much grief. If ever I mess up a system so badly that I want to re-install or when I want to set up a new machine, having a clear set of notes makes it a breeze.
It’s easy to forget the steps you took to do something on your computer, especially several months later when you’re trying to upgrade. Sometimes when you try several different ways of solving a problem, it’s easy to forget which method was successful the next day!
I really do recommend doing a Gentoo install at some point, because I think you would learn a lot from it. It’s a really nice experience and a well put together distro. The compiling is potentially not as bad as you think, but there are a couple of packages that are notoriously painful to compile (there are prebuilt binaries available for some of the painful ones if desired too). You’d probably get a decent amount out of an Arch install too. Arch isn’t my cup of tea, but lots of people like it and it’d be quicker to get started than Gentoo. I’m not sure I’d recommend it for you at this stage but eventually you should check out NixOS too! You can even try the package manager out on any distro you want. NixOS is really interesting, but it does things a bit different from other distros, and if you’ve done an Arch / Gentoo install it’ll be interesting to see what NixOS does in contrast.
Other things to mess with… You mention partitioning, so make sure to check out LVM, and also consider reading a bit about filesystems. Maybe give btrfs a go :).
I wouldn’t worry about daily driving either Gentoo or Arch. Once you have them set up you’ll probably be fine.
I don’t think it’s that clear cut to be honest. More code doesn’t mean the package benefits more from optimizations at all, and even if that were true you might care more about the performance of the kernel or various small libraries that are used by a lot of programs as opposed to how fast some random application that depends on qt-WebKit is:
Another vote for Arch. Manual Arch install was an interesting, and positive, experience. I did it multiple times so I could better understand what was actually being done. It helped me understand the boot and EFI partitions because I wanted to dual boot Windows.
For Arch itself, I’ve had a way snappier experience with pacman than apt and the AUR is a really convenient resource. So many packages there that you would otherwise have to build from source.
Bleeding edge packages can cause problems, but there are ways to recover. downgrade from the AUR makes downgrading packages really easy. The latest Nvidia drivers caused a bunch of problems with games for me on Wayland so I downgraded them and the Linux kernel and added them to pacman’s package ignore list.
Yes, you flash the installation system onto the USB stick, boot the laptop from this USB and then it should be a simple graphical installation wizard. There are plenty of tutorials online and even if all computers can be slightly different it is basically the same scheme.
Once Steam is installed Proton is automatically downloaded for games that by default use it. Games that are not officially using Proton can have it enabled in Steam’s game properties. Most would point you to protondb.com, site showing what games you can suspect to work.
I love how this expansive, barely-biased summary - which is WAY above-bar, to be clear - is followed up by everyone’s “this is my favourite distro and you should run it too” even if it’s completely badly-matched.
Flatpak apps will use the same dotfiles as apps installed via traditional methods, however the storage location will likely be different. Most dotfiles will be contained within their respective flatpak app directory under ~/.var, so you can cherry pick which settings you want to bring over.
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