Hated Windows. TechTV had a download of day that “works on both Windows and Linux!”
“I don’t know what Linux is but it can’t be worse that Windows.”
I’ve been on it ever since. That was 20+ years ago.
I honestly don’t know how windows works… I only ever used it for about a year and some change when I was a teenager in the 90s.
It’s easier to think about Linux on the context of what an individual application needs to run. Pretty much everything you do will have these components.
That’s really it. If something isn’t working, it’s pretty much exclusively going to fall into one of those categories. What that means is going to vary significantly from app to app but understanding this is how literally everything works makes the troubleshooting process a lot easier.
Decouple!
CI should just build container images and do testing. CircleCI, Github Actions, Gitlab, Travis… Jenkins if you don’t have any other choice…
CD should manage the deployment of that compiled code into a working environment… Renovate Bot, Argo CD/Rollouts, Flux… Ansible if you’re still doing things the old way…
If you are still stuck doing stuff the old ways (bare metal, VMs, ansible, etc), packer is great for building immutable images so you can hopefully dump config management entirely.
My personal laptop is whatever the first gen Framework is called. After many, many years doing the “cool” distros, I’ve settled on Mint and don’t really have any motivation to do anything else… I have real work I need to do and can’t be bothered to deal with figuring out weird shit. I just need it to work.
TBH, the only things I use my laptop for anymore is a browser, vim, git, and kubernetes tooling… I barely have any interest in running Linux on a workstation at this point. The only things that really interest me anymore are being run in distributed clusters. Desktop Linux is kinda boring and tedious for me.
Those days gave me a career so I can’t really complain.
Back in the dark, old days of Linux I spent 5-6 hours digging through dbus events and X11 configs to get my mouse working. It was unplugged.
In my defense, in those days, Linux was such an insane asylum that diving into dbus and X11 as a first step was usually the logical approach.
What software are you using that is keeping you on windows?
FWIW, the last version of windows I’ve run was WinME circa 2001ish… I’ve been on Linux since '99 or so. You can certainly get by for day to day stuff. The only thing holding you back is going to be pretty niche.
Don’t overthink this. Just start using something.
distro hopping is a waste of time.
Very much so. There are limitless things you can do with a computer. Installing a new OS for me falls squarely in the annoying and tedious categories… There are so many more interesting things to put effort into.
I feel like I left arch a decade ago. 😄
It was rough going around the time of the systemd transition and needed something more consistently reliable. I’ve been on Mint ever since.
I have long loooooong ago given up on distro hopping because, at the end of the day, most distros are close enough to each other that it doesn’t really matter which one you choose at the end of the day. These new immutable ones though… They seem cool as hell. I need to give one a go someday.
FWIW, once I got deep enough into it, the thought of going back to the old way seemed like a crazy idea. I don’t want to manage servers like that again if it can be avoided. YMMV.
This was me until the kubernetes transition occurred. Now I ssh into nothing unless it’s a personal box. I’ve become a zsh convert.
Talos. Make the jump.
The FOSS absolutism is exhausting.
Most of this thread reminds me how unbearable the open source community can be.
Mostly as kodi/plex front ends. I’ve set them up as a kubernetes cluster in the past but they didn’t have enough ram to run my torrent client. Now I just use an old Thinkpad running talos.
Why? What’s the goal?
Mint with Cinnamon on the desktop because it’s not flashy or unique in any way. I have actual work to get done and I just need the OS to get out of my way. I’ll customize my shell environment but only for productivity… I’m not spending hours tweaking my DE theme or color palette or whatever.
Server side, where I spend the overwhelming majority of my time, the base OS doesn’t really matter. I am entirely in kubernetes so that’s mostly all abstracted away.
Bluetooth on Linux fucking sucks