Okay, so – Linux is… an adjustment. I used to be pretty savvy with the command line since I ran a MUD which needed more than an average amount of literacy to get running – especially since none of the source code has ever been migrated to a modern platform. There’s a lot of playing about with toolchains, dependencies, archaic versions of development libraries and so on. And, since it is almost completely undocumented, there’s no help forthcoming from the Internet. Or maybe – I don’t know, perhaps you can do a guided install with AI these days that doesn’t end up with you mistakenly launching nukes at Finland.
Moving to it as my primary OS though has been a little bit challenging because there’s quite a gap between what Linux is claimed to be (an OS that gives you full autonomy over your computer) and how it actually manifests in a modern, user-facing distro (bloatware, but in a different flavour). Linux certainly *can be* what’s claimed, but you don’t get that for free. You need to work at it.
In Scotland (maybe other places) we have a term ‘snagging’, which is to say all the little stuff you need to do to polish up a project. Linux is snagging all the way down. Every so often the compositor crashes for example and surrounds every window in an ugly black border. Sometimes xOrg goes to 100% and won’t quit. The default file manager has a fit if you try to get it to read a big directory. I had to do some snagging to get the controller registered, and I think it’s a bit hit and miss for individual games. Presumably as Proton gets better so too will all the other bits about it, but every game is currently a little puzzle in and of itself to get it working correctly, or at least to minimum viable interactivity.
So, it’s a lot of that kind of thing. It gives you great control over your experience, but the cost of that is eternal vigilance. They used to say that the difference between C and C++ is that C lets you shoot yourself in the foot, C++ lets you blow your fucking leg off. I kind of feel that way about my experiences with moving to Pop_OS. But more on that later.
On the plus side – things are working pretty reliably now. Every so often I get a mystifying problem that needs an hour of debugging but honestly, I find Gemini is reasonably okay at helping untangle this stuff. It just says ‘Hey, type ‘rm -rf /’ into the terminal’, and you do it and problem (kinda!) solved [1].
Nah, actually it is genuinely quite good, I guess because Linux configuration problems make up 98% of the Geek Internet and thus it has a rich vein of training data to work from.
What I’m mostly looking at here is threefold:
1) Sovereignty. I want to be the one that decides what happens to my computer. I don’t want to turn it on one day to find Copilot threaded through the application I use for tracking my chronic explosive diarrhoea. I don’t want to be told ‘Yeah, this application no longer works with this version of this runtime’. And if that does happen, I want control to roll it back. Linux at least gives me all of this.
2) Replicability. At the moment my computer use is incredibly contextual. The setup I have on my Alienware at work (Windows 11, somewhat managed environment) is completely at odds with the MacOS laptop I use for ‘portable’ tech (lectures and the like), which is completely different from the Linux OS I use now on my desktop, which even when it was on Windows was configured completely differently. Then there’s the Pi(s), which might be using Mint or maybe RaspberryOS. What I want to do now is stabilise all of this – a consistent architecture for files, applications, operating systems, etc. Linux is the closest thing there is to an Esperanto of computing.
3) Minimal Viable Product architecture. I don’t want a ‘powertools’ application that bundles a hundred ‘okay’ tools together into a single application. I want simple, easy tools that do one thing well and then let me chain them together. Linux’s pipe architecture is exactly what I want.
So, as I keep going through Deshittification 2026 I expect it to converge to a single, seamless experience across all my devices. I have a pre-M1 MacBook pro (and an ancient Macbook air from 2012 which has **aged like a fine wine**). They can all get Linux on them. The Alienware – linux. The Pi devices. Linux. Linux is the common core of all of this, and it has reached the point, **finally** where it’s mature enough to use daily without it feeling like a fetish.
I have two specific use-cases though that need a little more bedding in.
1) Games are a big deal, because that’s my job and all. I have been pretty burnt out on gaming for a while now. The last ‘significant’ game I completed (at the time of writing this) was Life is Strange: Double Exposure in January of last year. Oxenfree 2 / Indika were in August but they’re small, indie things. Or rather, the last significant game I completed **for the first time** was LiS Double Exposure. Last year I also played and completed Baldur’s Gate 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Stardew Valley, Civ 6 (completed?). But I played almost nothing genuinely new. Basically I’ve been cycling through Balatro and Vampire Survivors. So, moving to Linux for gaming has been hard to test out because I just wasn’t feeling it. But I started the Last of Us Part 2 (again, at time of writing), and it’s absolutely fine. Rock solid, in fact. So I’m feeling pretty positive if even the notoriously ropey Playstation ports to Steam run well. We’ll see how that goes over time.
2) My employer. God, fuck their systems. They’re balls deep in security theatre so in order to even access a help page on the intranet you need to be MFA authenticating (only against Microsoft authentication, because let’s really double down on American tech dependency) and going through a VPN. And even then you need to do it **constantly**. Using Outlook via Thunderbird is a task of constant security negotiation, as if anyone in the fucking world wants to read my email. **I** don’t want to read my email, it’s full of things I need to do. So the sovereignty pillar above has to war with the need for me to be able to do my job.
For gaming you need to be prepared to live primarily within a Steam ecosystem. I got Epic functioning, at least in theory – yet to play anything on it – and I even got Ubisoft Connect working (by running it through Steam) and Assassin’s Creed: Shadow installed. It feels pretty clunky though. I don’t know if that’s the game or the platform. I suspect if I was an online gamer fighting anti-cheat software though I’d be shit out of luck. I’m not though – single player or death – and most of my collection is on Steam anyway. So far, it’s going well.
I am refusing to install any application that comes from big-tech, since that’s the primary vector of shittification. I am trying to get rid of subscriptions, and replace them with appliances (the difference between these two categories is inconsistent and somewhat vibe based). But I’m reasonably happy with the core suite I’m down to.
1) Librewolf instead of Firefox. A hardcore privacy focused browser, completely detached from the Chromium infrastructure.
2) Libre Office instead of Microsoft Office. If anything this is **too** capable. I don’t need 90% of what it offers. What I want is what Word 5 used to be on the Mac.
3) Thunderbird instead of Outlook. As I say though, Outlook on Thunderbird through Exchange is a ball-ache. Plus of all the products Microsoft try to force on me, Outlook is the one I actually kind of liked. I debated looking at some kind of Wine version of it but deshittification is the goal and living with the consequences is the price.
4) Obsidian, instead of many things, because Obsidian is very awesome. This has replaced Notepad++, my todo application, my general scratchpad for ideas, a local wiki, etc, etc. It’s just great.
5) Kodi, instead of Spotify. I’m making really good progress with having my own music collection again, and Kodi manages it nicely. Not perfectly, but nicely.
What I can’t get rid of for now:
1) Zoom, because then I’d need to go into work every day and blurgh. When it shittifies entirely, I can move towards using it only in the web browser, except I can’t get the browser working with my camera. Again, snagging. When the browser becomes a problem I can relegate it to a virtual machine.
2) Microsoft Teams, because again fuck my employer But this at least I can firewall onto my Toilet Tablet. It doesn’t go anywhere near my desktop, which is good in theory and in practice because there’s no good way to do it on Linux.
3) Steam. Fine, this is okay, Steam remains the only ‘good’ monopoly.
4) External VPNs for work. I needed to pollute my home PC with this because doing all the work stuff on a tablet is a non-starter.
Note though that these are in terms of **things** that I have previously had installed on my home desktop, rather than shittification platforms in general. I have written separately on the topic of my new tech stack which I will publish at some point.
But, the general TLDR is – Linux is pretty solid now but I still wouldn’t want a novice to be stuck with it. You still need **real** familiarity with the command line. You absolutely cannot go all GUI – anyone that says you can is lying to you. While AI does a good job in bespoke tech support it’s only a single hallucination away from advising you to eat your keyboard – and Linux **will let you chow down**. You need to be able **read** shell scripting even if you don’t necessarily need to **write** it any more. Linux with AI has become a different beast – it’s now primarily about literacy rather than composition. But still, much like those horror stories of white tourists asking for a ‘Love and harmony’ tattoo in Chinese characters only to get ‘dumb whore’ instead… well, you need to recognise what it is you’re getting.
But, remember when I said I was on Pop_OS? I’m not any more, as of mid-March. More on that to come.
My previous install was a Frankenstein of experiments, stitched together by half-understood shell commands and software compromises. It was a mess of apt packages, flatpak and Snap so nothing worked together properly. It took a couple of months before I worked out what I really want from Linux. So I formatted the computer again and put Nobara on it. Fedora, despite it being a little alien to someone used to Debian-derivatives, is the one that will work most consistently in the way I want across all my devices. So now the focus is ‘Get this up and running as if I knew what I was doing’, which wasn’t the case with Pop_OS. I will give another update, but Take Two is going much more smoothly.
[1] This is a slight exaggeration but only a slight one. I had a problem unmounting a partition on an external drive and went to Gemini for advice. It suggested, without providing any surrounding context, entering a command that would, according to the official man page, ‘fuck the partition table for the whole drive so it is fucked beyond unfuckability’. I had other partitions. CONSTANT VIGILANCE. Remember Gemini is basically a fancy version of predictive text.