10 months of Linux

I've officially been using Linux as my daily driver for a little over 10 months. Haven't quite made it to a year yet, but that's getting closer.

The most surprising thing about using Linux daily is how quickly it became normal. I thought it was going to take a really long time to get used to it after being a Windows user for so long. Nope. In less than a month's time I wasn't even thinking about Windows anymore.

However, that doesn't mean I didn't take notes.

On my desktop I keep a text file that's included in my nightly backup. Every single time I learn something new with Linux, I open up that text file and document it. Presently, it's over 1,300 lines long. I documented my installation, any packages I need to install, configuration stuff I need to do, and so on. Everything went in there.

Documenting like this is actually something I carried over back from when I used to use Windows. In the past, I got burned on getting my PC setup exactly the way I wanted, then having something screwy thing happened that required a reinstall of the OS. After reinstall, uh-oh, there was something I had before that I didn't document. Maybe it was a certain app, a browser extension, script, batch file or whatever.. and now I don't have it and either don't know where it is or it's gone. I got burned enough times to where I started documenting and have been doing it ever since.

Contrary to the way most Linux users do things, I didn't bounce over to a different distribution every month. For the entire 10+ months I've been using Kubuntu LTS and nothing else. I told myself that if I'm going to do this, I'm committing to just one distro and staying there to learn everything I can.

Is there really any bad stuff to report? No. I thought by now I'd have a whole bunch of stuff to complain about, but I don't.

My goal from the get-go was to get my computer back to how Windows 7 used to work, and I pretty much have that now. But at the same time I've learned a ton of new-to-me Linux stuff, so what I have is a Windows 7-ish look and feel with all Linux underneath running the whole show.

What I would tell anybody thinking of switching from Windows to Linux is to buy a cheap refurb Dell Latitude with 16GB RAM in it (Linux really likes Dell hardware and can usually detect 100% of it with no problem at all), get Kubuntu LTS and put it on a USB stick and just go for it.

With the Latitude, take out the old drive with the Windows it comes with and install a new 500GB SSD or 1TB SSD (I suggest Samsung EVO), then just install Kubuntu. If you like it, then you can connect a full size monitor, keyboard and mouse to the laptop later and use as a full PC. Done and done. If you don't like it, you can easily switch it back to being a Windows computer just by putting the old drive back in.

That's pretty much as easy as it gets, and it's exactly how I went about it. I do have a spare Windows 10 laptop but almost never use it. For my main computer, it's a Latitude with 16GB RAM and a Samsung EVO 500GB SSD with connected external wired keyboard, monitor and mouse.

I honestly believe the best way to go Linux is to get a dedicated computer for it instead of converting over your existing one. With a refurb Latitude, you get an entire computer, and don't need to connect anything external unless you want to. All your bases are covered, you don't lose anything and you can just transfer over everything from the old computer to the new one. This is stupidly easy to do these days considering how cheap a 512GB USB stick is.

Everything I do now for my content is done in Kubuntu. Written articles, image editing, video editing, all of it. It all works and works well, which at the end of the day is all that matters.

Published 2024 Apr 23