I moved from a Pop_OS install where I wasn’t sure I knew absolutely what I was doing to a Nobara install where I’m absolutely sure I don’t know what I’m doing. However, I have to say Take Two of moving to Linux is going pretty well. Everything feel cleaner, smoother, and more responsive and I think that’s less to do with the distro and more to do with simply taking the plunge to commit properly.
Phase One of this was exploratory – answering the question as to whether Linux up to the job, day to day. It’s certainly up to many jobs, it just wasn’t clear if mine was one of them. So I spent two months living with it – I didn’t dual boot, I didn’t offload tasks onto other devices. If I needed to do something on my computer, it happened on Linux. That led to two notable insights:
1) Linux is a terrible platform to use when you just need something working for, say, the meeting you’re about to have in two minutes.
2) Even so it was actually absolutely fine.
The key thing here is realpolitik. I’m not comparing Linux to Windows as it was in its heyday (let’s say – Windows 10, or even Windows 7). I’m comparing Linux to Windows as it is now – enshittified, indifferent to my desires, desperate to fill every spare pixel with ads or AI. Telemetry up the wazoo. Endless negotiations where it tries to force Teams, or OneDrive, or other ‘services’ onto me. A daily struggle about getting to save my own files to my own computer [1]. You know you can’t even install Windows 11 these days without a Microsoft account? Madness.
Linux has a usability bar to clear but it’s one that is descending ever closer to the floor with every passing day, as if held up by an increasingy fatigued limbo operator. I think at this point we’re at, as Pratchett notably put it, ‘the place where the rising ape meets the falling angel’. Where the rising penguin meets the falling Clippy.
And… well, there’s a reason that Take Two is migrating to a different Linux distro and not just giving up and reinstalling Windows 10. Thew midway review is this – Linux is pretty good now.
But as I say, the real change comes from committing to the bit. It comes from throwing your cap over the wall. Hesitancy added real technical lag to my system. I was mounting Windows drives in Linux for example – my main OS partition was native, so was my games partition, but all my ‘personal files’ were still NTFS and thus enshittified down to the bit level. That means every file access needed a translation, which meant that Linux was notably choppy. File accesses were lethargic. Copying was slow as ass. But I wasn’t going to do anything about that because what if I gave up and went back to Windows? I’d really kick myself if I ended up having Linux-formatted drives in Windows because it works even worse the other way.
But nope. I am not going back so I went through a tortuously convoluted process of shuffling partitions and drives around so I could reformat each to BTRFS. It was like a regency farce, but for filesystems. And now there’s a real smoothness to performance. It all feels super nice.
I had put Linux on an old Macbook Air of mine from 2012, but a different distro because I thought ‘all Linuxes[2] are basically the same, right?’ And – kinda, yeah, but the little changes in philosophy and config do stack up. I had Ubuntu on the Macbook (Debian based) because I guess I’m just most familiar with Ubuntu. But Nobara is Fedora based, and I don’t want to navigate different file structures or installation sensibilities. So the air gets Fedora too – it doesn’t get Nobara (I won’t be gaming on it) but it does get the same philosophy of interaction upon which Nobara is built.
The Macbook Pro I have – it’s a little trickier because it was made in the era where Apple were locking everything down. The T2 chip means that you can’t just reinstall the OS if you want things to, you know, work. That means you either spend hours wrestling with the OS to make it function properly (often by pressing a Mac install and a Linux install together and demanding they kiss) or you get one of the hobbyist distros with T2 support built in. Luckily there is a Fedora dist that does that, and now that Macbook Pro too is purring away with Linux.
Final system in the ‘fleet’ is my Alienware laptop. Nobara – went on like a dream.
That’s what two months (January to February) got me in the end – the confidence to go ‘all in’ to the point I can say in mid June that it will take a miracle to get me back onto Windows, and an even bigger one to get me to install MacOS. I think this migration is permanent. There are still snags in the edge cases, you still sacrifice ‘seamlessness’ when dealing with organizations that insist upon compliance with proprietary tools. But you gain a lot more in return.
The Air is an interesting case study there actually – you can’t even put MacOs on it any more. The version that will install doesn’t connect to the web because its security protocols are out of date, and I couldn’t find a workable path of available ISOs that would get me to the Internet as enough of a functioning proposition to let the update cycle work. It’s essentially a fancy paperweight if you go down Apple’s intentional route for it. Landfill fodder. Useless eWaste. After all, who would want a nearly fifteen year old laptop?
And yet with Linux it is snappy and performant (within limits). I watch people on Youtube talking about 2026’s Macbook Neo, saying ‘Oh it’s fine for basic tasks like email and browsing the web’ and the technological fetishism is genuinely quite alarming. This fourteen year old Macbook Air is also perfectly fine for basic tasks like email and browsing the web, what the hell are you even talking about? The definition of ‘basic tasks’ shouldn’t be permitted to expand to the point you need a supercomputer to do them. They used to model nuclear explosions and the birth of the universe on a Cray Supercomputer in the 90s. A Macbook Neo is literally 1000x faster than that, with four times as much memory. What the fuck are you talking about?? That Macbook Neo, if it wasn’t so crudded up with abstractions and telemetry and containerisation has the raw horsepower needed for a home user to simulate God. Get a fucking grip.
It’s the Red Queen effect of course – running full speed just to stay relatively still. As technology gets better, software gets bloaty, which requires better hardware, which inspires more bloat. The gains are marginal and yet Capitalism insists we need to buy ever new equipment for ‘basic purposes’. We don’t! You have a laptop in a drawer somewhere that does everything you need it to! THEY’RE LYING TO US.
I’ve got an old HP-Pavillion P-series that – well, let’s not pretend – sucked from day one and sucks so badly now it won’t even take a Linux install. But I’m going to replace its mechanical hard-drive with a cheap SSD and throw PiMiga on it to give myself a literal Amiga laptop. And while I probably won’t take it anywhere with me (because the laptop is heavy and this feels a bit too much like a kink at this point) it would I think still be feasible to use for the majority of tasks I have. It would handle markdown, music, and even some light web browsing provided I stayed on the hobbyist ‘Amiga Internet’. 95% of my life with an Amiga was offline and I never felt the absence.
So, I guess the point of this update is simple – you don’t have to bend over for Windows. You don’t have to accept Apple’s sociopathic ‘all in’ mindset. And you probably don’t need another computer if you’re willing to spend a little to upgrade the chokepoints in old tech. I feel so much happier thinking this HP Pavillion still has a life ahead of it than I would throwing it into electronic recycling. I now have:
- My home computer. Undisputed control centre of my digital empire. Nobara.
- My work Alienware. Main work computer. Needs to also allow me to play and develop games. Nobara.
- My 2012 Macbook Air. A lightweight, relatively long lasting ‘take to meetings’ laptop. Does email, web, obsidian, etc. Fedora.
- My 2019 Macbook Pro. My largely sedentary ‘second desk’ device for the refugee office I have set up while building works are going on in the main building. Fedora.
- My 2014ish HP Pavilion P-Series, A dead laptop I’ll put a super cheap (290kr) 120GB SSD in. It’ll be my Amiga laptop[4].
- My ASUS Ally ROG. Bazzite (Fedora based). This was originally running on Windows 11 and provided an objectively awful experience as a handheld gaming environment. So I formatted it, put Bazzite on it, and it’s basically a super-powered SteamDeck.
- Various Pi devices, but those are ideally ‘set it and forget it’ so I don’t mind if they’re not fully consistent with everything else. It’s actually quite good I think to occasionally have to remember how things work on Debian.
But the real message here is – expect an aborted attempt at moving over to Linux if you try it out, but expect to be rewarded if you actually take the time to familiarise yourself. Most of the snagging I had with Pop_OS went away by simply setting things up properly myself and choosing a distro aligned with my needs. But also, don’t start with Pop_OS because their Cosmic desktop manager is not yet fit for purpose and you’ll blame yourself for a lot of what are actually bugs in the software. That still needs time to bake.
The next step is consistency of experience, rather than consistency of technology. I want to sit down at each of these and know I have the same apps, mapped to the same areas, with the same updates and plugins. I can’t do this one for one – my desktop has like… six drives or something in it and my Alienware just a single SSD. But I can make sure that they all have synced directories and expectations. I can get them to a state where they are 70% identical, 20% tuned to their specific use-case / context, and 10% uniquely annoying quirks. I can live with that – for a long time I’ve had absolutely no consistency between any of my devices. A Mac laptop and a Windows PC, with a Pi media server. That changes this year, and for the better.
[1] Real example of this, but it’s on my phone. I had to do a metric fuckload of electronic PDF signatures in the past few days. The specific kind of signature I need to do is a proprietary Adobe format that isn’t supported by any tool I could find. So I had to log into the computer by the printer in work, download the files there, print them and sign them by hand, then scan them in and send them. Nightmare. But a couple of those forms had come to me by an unorthodox route (Discord) and I didn’t have access on this stripped down work PC. So I downloaded them to my phone to email them to my work account [3]. But every time I downloaded them Outlook told me I didn’t have them. Searched everywhere. Nothing. Took five minutes before i noticed that if you scroll down far when you attach a file it lets you choose files FROM YOUR OWN PHONE rather than from whatever OneDrive malware it installed in the background. Discord respects that when I save a local copy, I want it – you know, local. Outlook says ‘Fuck you, you dumb fucking idiot’. In an already irritating process, this was an unnecessary element of enshittification that shows why sovereignty actually matters.
[2] Linuxii?
[3] Look, the reality of living with Linux is that you’ll need to do stuff like this on the periphery of your life. Just accept it.
[4] Maybe 2027’s project will be ‘live with a 1990s operating system’. After all, ancient computer hardware with a tiny drive is still ‘supercomputer adjacent’ for what anyone would expect from the time. A 120GB hard-drive is enough to hold every single piece of Amiga software ever released, along with a C64 archive and all the Deluxe Paint pictures I could ever create.