Wisedocks

Windows Has Spoiled Me

I have a love/hate relationship with Windows. Windows 11 isn't inherently bad, it just ships with so much bloatware that it is annoying. A few days ago I fell down a rabbit hole, just the wrong one.

I've been getting a lot of errors and random crashes. Before doing much investigating at all I just decided that Windows was being a pain in the ass. Boredom more than anything led me into Linux territory. Pop!_OS has come a long way since the last time I tried a Linux build, which was Ubuntu about 10 years ago. I made the snap decision to ditch Windows entirely and try out Linux. I have a small 500 gb M.2 hard drive that only host windows OS files. I keep everything else on larger SSD's so the change should be smooth right?

It was at first, I was able to get into Pop!_OS within 30 minutes. I did a clean wipe of Windows and only had the Linux OS running. The first problem I ran into was that my other SSD's are in NTSF formats, which I found out later that Linux hates. Only one of my steam games was able to run on Proton after spending a few hours just simply trying to figure out how to mount the drives. Props to Factorio for being a Linux native game and running like a champ. The problem is that I play lots of small indie titles and none of them worked. Even Proton GE doesn't work unless you convert your file system to Ext4 or something similar. 

I wasn't prepared to jump through those hoops of moving files, converting the file system then moving them back just yet, and I'm glad I didn't.

I Missed Rainmeter Immediately

Rainmeter is a program that I missed immediately, Vclouds with 8 day forecast has been running on every pc of mine for that last decade. I like running a second monitor just for this and Soniq clock, calendar, and system stats. There are similar setups on Linux but they are a pain to setup and I gave up trying after about 5 hours.

Errors Persist

As soon as I loaded up Chrome, the errors were still there. That confirmed one thing, I have a hardware problem. I upgraded my RAM to two 16gb G.SKILL sticks about 6 months ago, and one of them is giving me issues. But, it isn't causing enough trouble to tackle just yet. We will save that for a rainy day.

I realized after about 18 hours of struggling through the Linux build that I am just spoiled to the ease of use of Windows. I enjoy building websites, so I assumed Linux would be right up my alley. It is in some ways, but it's a bit too much. Terminal is a blast to use for small things, but as a daily driver, it is not. I'm lazy and like to point and click. Windows is nearly idiot proof, if I want an app, I google it, point and click a few times and the app is working. That's more intuitive than hunting down an app that will work for Linux then trying to find the write command to install the program and all dependencies needed to make it work.

I may spin up another Linux on an old pc just to tinker with later as a home server. Self hosting my websites would be much cheaper and they don't get much traffic so I think it would work well. But, as for my daily driver, I think I'll just stick with Windows for now.