One Year of Using Linux

Well, a few months more than a year at this point, but the title is nicer this way.

I've been using Linux as my daily driver OS since December 2023, after years of Windows 10, so I thought I'd share how my experience has been. tl;dr: a lot of good but some issues.

The Background 

About a decade ago we had at one point a proper(?) desktop PC that ran Linux Mint, but the experience wasn't amazing - hardware issues mostly, from what I can remember. So, after it was thrown out, me and my sister used our dad's old Mac Mini for a few years. Not amazing but it worked.

I got my first own computer in 2018. It was a used HP ProBook business laptop, bough from a Finnish company that specializes in buying perfectly fine but "outdated" business laptops from other companies and reinstalling Windows on them and selling them to consumers. The specs were already low-to-mid-end at the time (4th gen Intel Core i5 with integrated graphics and 8 GB RAM) but it did serve me well for years.

Its age did start to catch up with it, though. It only took a couple of years for the laptop's own monitor to mostly stop working, essentially forcing the use of an external monitor, and the battery life took a nosedive not long after. A laptop that can't be used as a laptop is not very useful. That's why I got my current laptop in 2023, and I knew from the start I wanted to install Linux on it.

The choice of distro was something I had already decided by the time I got the laptop in my hands, but the process of choosing took a while. I initially considered Kubuntu because of the KDE Plasma desktop looking the most appealing to me, but when I tried the live environment, I ran into problems with even getting Firefox to run. I searched about the error message and it was something Snap-related. That left a bad taste in my mouth so I decided to not use any Ubuntu variant that has Snaps.

In the end I chose Linux Mint. Its newbie-friendly reputation helped a lot, but I also just generally liked many aspects of it: LTS distro with new version every 2 years is the right amount of stability for me, Cinnamon is a nice desktop even if it has less features than Plasma, and being based on Ubuntu but Snap-less means I get the upsides of Ubuntu (like a huge amount of official packages) without the downsides.

So, how has my experience been? Let's start with the good.

The Good

Most things just work.

No, seriously. I'm the kind of computer user who spends 3/4 of his screentime in the browser. And I had already been using Firefox on Windows. All my data and extensions carried over so it was business as usual.

I had also been using many other open-source programs on Windows, like LibreOffice and GIMP, so the transition was mostly painless. Sure, university stuff sometimes requires Microsoft Office apps, but if I need a feature that the web versions don't have, I can just walk to the campus and visit a computer lab.

One of the improvements over Windows I noticed almost immediately was that Linux is just simply faster and more responsive. Especially with updates. Windows Update is software from hell, takes forever to apply updates and only then tell if a reboot is needed, and sometimes updates just fail. In Linux Mint's update manager I can choose exactly what to update, follow the progress and get detailed info about the changes. The speed is of course limited by how big the updates are, but at least I know what is going on.

The ease of installing programs is also nice. No need to download EXEs from websites, just open the app center, choose between system package (size) and Flatpak (recency) if both are available, and install. If I need development tools like a compiler, a few words into the command line and I have it. Do you know how difficult it is to install a compiler on Windows? No wonder developers prefer Linux.

And finally... I like that it doesn't get in my way. No ads. No annoying popups telling me to log in to OneDrive. The peace of mind that I get from knowing no-one is spying on me (hopefully) is nice too.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows, though.

The Bad 

Most of these are minor annoyances, but I don't like it when things don't go my way, so they keep bugging me. 

Let’s get the big one out of the way first: I like anime. I have a collection of anime Blu-rays. I have an external Blu-ray drive that I like to use to watch the discs on my computer. On Windows I used a special program to bypass copy protection (which is legal under section 50a subsection 3 of the Copyright Act of Finland!), which integrated nicely with VLC.

Doesn't work on Linux, at all. There is an another way to bypass it, but it doesn't work for every disc. So for now I've kept using my old laptop to watch Blu-rays that aren't supported by the other method. I really need to figure out a long-term solution eventually, but for now that's my workaround.

There's a few (very niche) cases where a certain app isn't available for Linux and there's no alternatives. Even if they're open-source, compiling is a pain and afaik not even possible for many .NET apps. Then it's Wine time, which also sucks for .NET apps, even with Bottles.

Steam makes the little gaming I do (mostly visual novels) fairly straightforward, but sometimes I buy elsewhere for various reasons though, and then it's a toin coss on whether I can just install and play, or if I have to dive into Proton troubleshooting or (worst case) deal with a broken native port. That actually happened for me on Steam - had to mess with the bundled libraries of Umineko to get sound to work. 

Cinnamon also isn't a perfect DE, though annoyances tend to be minor, like the clock applet not showing seconds properly.

The Future

I've mostly been satisfied, though.

If there's one thing that worries me, it's the current political climate. I'm not a huge fan of the packages I use being built by employees of an American company. Linux is niche, but you never know if the current U.S. administration would decide to force Canonical to put backdoors in packages. 

I know OpenSUSE is Europe-based, and offers KDE Plasma as a desktop, so maybe I could switch to Leap if my paranoia ever gets affirmed. For now, though, I'm satisfied with Mint.

Alright, that's it for my... already way too long current thoughts on Linux usage. I'm not a hugely technical person, but it hasn't stopped me from having a largely positive experience with it.