I've been using Linux for over a month

Amazingly, I finally got to a point where I could use Linux full time as my main OS.

And wow, has this been a long time coming. More on that in a moment.

Of the two computers I have, one runs Kubuntu 22.04 LTS and the other Microsoft Windows 11 Pro.

I may write a full article on Win11 later. My gripes and complaints about it are the same as others. However, it does have some notable improvements. For example, Command Prompt finally has tabs, and you can have both Command Prompt and PowerShell in the same window. You can even have Command Prompt, PowerShell and Azure Cloud Shell as 3 tabs, again all in the same window. That's actually pretty good.

But of course, Linux has had the multi-tab thing in Terminal going on for a really long time, so... yeah. Let's get to Linux.

For more years than I care to admit, I've been trying to switch over to Linux. And finally, in this year 2023, I did it. As noted above, Kubuntu LTS is what I went with. Why Kubuntu? I like Debian based Linux and also prefer KDE for my desktop. A long time ago when I first tried out Linux, KDE was always the best, and it still is.

The way I prepped for my Linux switchover was that I first bought a brand new Samsung SSD so I could save the old Windows 10 installation on my other Samsung SSD just in case I needed to go back to it.

After that, I backed up some files to USB sticks and just went for it. Being I had a brand new SSD, I let the installer format the whole thing to the proper ext4 type and the installation went through with no issues.

From there I started to piece together my new operating environment. What I did (and still do) is keep a text file documenting everything I installed, every configuration change I made, every customization I did, and so on. It's just a big ol' set of instructions in case I want to install Kubuntu elsewhere or possibly even go with straight Debian in the future.

See, here's the thing. Whether using Kubuntu's default "Discover" and/or Synaptic Package Manager, I knew I would be installing a fair amount of stuff, and did. I also knew that if I had to install this all over again on another computer, yeah, I'd need documentation, hence the text file I maintain just to do it all.

I actually did this same thing for Windows 10. I had a text file called windows crap.txt just for getting through a Windows 10 installation. I don't use Win10 anymore, so that's no longer needed.

Oh, and kind of a funny note (or at least funny to me). My successful switchover to Kubuntu was actually the reason I installed Win11 Pro on my other computer.

Believe me, I was dead set against Win11 and didn't want to touch it. But after diving in to something totally different with Kubuntu, I said what the heck, let's dump Win10 Pro and put Win11 Pro on the other computer. I went ahead and downloaded Win11 and did a from-scratch install. Works fine...

...but I'm sticking with Kubuntu as my main OS. Surprisingly, I quickly got used to The Linux Way of doing things. While true I can get Linux-like stuff going on with Windows 11 PowerShell, it's still at its core a Windows environment. I'll be using PowerShell, go try a standard Linux command and whoops, nope, can't do that because I'm in Windows. An example of that is something as simple as a directory listing that shows everything. You can ls to your heart's content in PowerShell and it works every time, but ls -a? No. That's dir -Force in PowerShell, a Windows thing.

Yeah, if you couldn't tell, I use Terminal. But then again, I was a heavy Command Prompt user in Windows.

The stuff I use in Linux is almost the same stuff I used in Windows

Many moons ago I switched over to as many free and open source programs as I could. OpenOffice, GIMP, 7-Zip and so on. I did that because I'm a cheap computer user. Unintentionally, going with free and open source programs was prepping me for Linux use.

The end result is that there really wasn't any "Oh my God, I have to learn a whole new OS and software that's totally unfamiliar" thing that happened. GIMP in Linux acts the same as GIMP for Windows. LibreOffice is a more advanced OpenOffice but most things are generally in the same places. Firefox acts the same in Linux and Windows, as does Google Chrome, as does Chromium web browser, VLC media player and OBS.

Where things get different concerning the stuff I had to learn is with file management and Terminal.

Published 2023 Jul 20

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