Switching from Windows to Linux

The time has come, the Walrus said,
To talk of many things: Of switching now to Linux,
Putting Windows in the wings.
- (Nod to Lewis Carroll)

I was a software engineer on UNIX systems for fourteen years. When I retired in 2004, I switched over to using Windows on my home computer. Windows XP was great. All of the software I wanted to use worked fine on it and life was good. When Windows Vista was released, I simply ignored it and continued happily on my way with XP. Then one day, due to a death in my family (my computer), I was forced to buy new hardware. Fortunately, at that time Windows 7 was available, so I started using it and life continued to be good. Windows 8 came and went while I happily continued using Windows 7.

Unfortunately, I eventually experienced another computer death and ended up buying a Microsoft Surface laptop running Windows 10. I hooked it up to a 27-inch Dell P2715Q Ultra HD 4K monitor, a Das keyboard, a Gigabyte mouse, an external hard drive, a Brother printer, and an Epson scanner. Life was still pretty good. All of my software worked. The laptop sent full color range to my monitor so I could edit photos and create gradient images in GIMP and Inkscape with no problem. But now I was subjected to uncontrollable system updates which usually occurred at the most inconvenient times right in the middle of when I was doing some work. It was possible to work around that (mostly) by checking for updates every time I turned the computer on before doing anything else.

In August 2018, my wonderful computer world came to an end. Microsoft forced a firmware update onto my computer which, for some unknown reason, switched the linkage to my monitor from full color range to partial color range. I was no longer able to create images containing gradients due to horrible color banding. Over the next few months I searched for a solution, but nothing I did worked. That was the last straw.

In January 2019, my husband bought me a new system76 Meerkat quadcore computer running Ubuntu Linux 18.04.1 LTS with these specs:

• Memory: 31.3 GiB
• Processor: Intel Core i7-8559U CPU @ 2.70 GHz x 8
• Graphics: Intel HD Graphics (Coffeelake 3x8 GT3)
• GNOME: 3.28.2
• OS Type: 64-bit
• Disk: 979.2 GB

The only change I made on top of Ubuntu was to install Wayland. Why? Because my monitor is 3840 x 2160, which means the default 100% text size is really small, as are all the little buttons in tool windows. Without Wayland, the next larger size of text is 200%, which is way too big. With Wayland, I was able to set my scaling to 125%, which is still somewhat small, but usable. I have found that not all software works with Wayland (for example, GIMP), but I intend to use it until and unless I find it causes me a problem.

I hooked up all of my peripherals mentioned above to the Meerkat and most of them worked fine immediately. I got full color range to my monitor and the weird and intermittent USB problems I was having with Windows stopped happening. The only extra step I had to take was to download drivers for the Brother printer. Wow. How about that.

Linux has come a long way since I last used it in 2004, where I used only shell windows. Many of the flavors of Linux have desktop environments, file explorer tools, and file icons, which makes the switch from Windows a lot easier.

Here is a screenshot of the default desktop of Ubuntu Linux. Notice that the task bar is vertical on the left side of the screen instead of along the bottom. This lets you make your tool windows taller.

Ubuntu Linux Desktop

Fortunately, most of the software that I’m used to using is available on Linux, such as:

• Chromium (Chrome)
• Firefox
• GIMP
• Inkscape
• LibreOffice
• VLC

I had been using Notepad++ a lot for simple text files, and it is available on Linux, but you have to install WINE to use it. I decided against that, so I’m using the default text editor for simple text files and LibreOffice Writer otherwise. I also installed Emacs, which I had used a lot back when I was working in the corporate world.

I’ve been using my new setup for only a couple of days at this point, and the only big difference I’ve noticed so far is with drag-and-drop, which seems to work fine when dragging files and dropping them into tools or moving files around on the built-in disk, but doesn’t seem to work when trying to drag-and-drop a file to or from my USB disk. However, using right-mouse-button copy/cut and paste works fine. I've also had problems with dragging images from the Chromium browser to the desktop. It seems to hang up the desktop and I end up having to reboot. I will have to experiment for a while to find the best method for getting images out of the browser.

If anyone reading this article is tired of Windows shenaningans and is thinking of making the switch to Linux, so far I can recommend it. Though I do have the benefit of my husband’s experience, since he made the switch a while back, I can say that the things he has explained to me are straight-forward and doing web searches whenever a question or problem comes up results in a wealth of information.

Goodbye Windows! Hello Linux!

Update 11 August 2021 - I have been happily using Linux since I first posted this article. I can't think of any reason why I would ever switch back to Windows. My Windows gaming machine died a while back and I switched over to using a Linux machine for gaming. With the existence of Steam Play and Proton I have generally had no problem with playing the Windows games that I own on Linux. I have found only a very few games that don't work on Linux. It's easy to check the status of any game as regards to Linux by looking up reports about it on protondb.com. I'm doing my part to update protondb's database by filing reports about games that I've played on Linux (under the name Zorinda).