Image credits: https://amt-lab.org/blog/2007/08/tux-the-linux-penguin-vs-bill-gates
My Linux Experience So Far
I love using linux distros. They give you freedom out of the box. I’m sure you can customize MacOS and Windows to a pretty great deal, but you just can’t get the same amount of customization as you can with a linux distro. And I’m not even an addict of ricing, like the people over at r/unixporn. My journey has been something like this, started off with Fedora 35 and I think I upgraded to Fedora 36 at some point and was with that as my daily driver for about 1.5 years. During that time, yes I used QEMU with virt-manager for Windows 10 virtualization, bought a dummy video display usb C plug, bought a 32 GB single stick of ram compatible for the gaming laptop (looking at you fellow 40GB ram laptop users lmao), and had a simple bash script to launch the windows vm all because I didn’t want to dual boot and wanted the feeling of going “all in”. It worked well for a while. I remember fondly playing Detroit: Become Human that way. Then, I had the opportunity to boot into a clone of my college roommate’s Windows OS disk (he got a new NVME drive) on the laptop just for shits and giggles. I think at the time I was playing Gujian 3 (never did finish that game nor looked up what happened in the previous titles…) and I was not very happy with how well it was running in the vm. On decent settings I think I was getting somewhere between 30 to 60 FPS, but not consistent 60 FPS. It was definitely playable, but eh. So I tried out the same game on my roommate’s Windows install on the same laptop, and what do you know? Windows bare metal was performing better. Many linux elitists would’ve told me that I probably did not have a good config for my virtualization setup, and they were probably right. I was, and am, still new to running linux-based operating systems. But it’s fun and freeing, even if it has honestly probably made me less productive at times because I was just busy trying to get something to work. And man, I just want to yap about how annoying how fast the scroll is by default on touchpads (on all linux distros I’ve tried out of the box!). Anyways, trying any linux distro expecting things to just work out of the box isn’t what you want to have in mind, instead just be a kid and forget productivity for a moment and try to figure out why is my thing not working lol; going through those rabbit holes has taught me a lot – another thing to humble me. The ladder of abstractions goes a far way down from the nice GUIs we all know and love.
Anyways, shout out to asus-linux.org, I could not have started my personal computing journey with linux without their guides for my asus laptop.
Then I think I got a new laptop and was kind of just sticking with Windows 11 on that while keeping Fedora around on my old laptop. At some point I was doing some kind of screen recording with OBS using the NVIDIA encoder NVENC on the laptop GPU and it just crashed. Well, trying to boot it up again and it just wouldn’t load the NVIDIA drivers properly no matter what I tried to do, reinstalling the drivers, booting up in safe mode and trying to use DDU to do a “deep clean” of the drivers I think it was called, but to no avail. I was kind of sad, because I was happy with Windows 11 while it worked! And it ran video games without any need to jump through any hoops.
Time to install PopOS! At the time, I think it was based off of Ubuntu 22.041, so PopOS 22.04. I think PopOS was kind of boring, or maybe the novelty of trying LInux had worn off and I could finally actually start doing real work (that did not happen and I’m now unemployed), but either way what was most memorable about my PopOS times was trying all of that new Stable Diffusion stuff. My new laptop had a mobile 3070 TI with 8GB of VRAM so I could try some things out! Stable diffusion 1.4, 1.5 23 and Waifu diffusion 1.5 beta 4. Man, those were the days. It felt like that was the start of this AI hype to me. Like a moth drawn to a flame, I was enamored for a little while. (I don’t exactly remember if this was during 2022 or 2023 tbh, it felt like a blur that went by too fast!)
After a while, I was slowly waking up to the reality that I was not specialized enough, nor serious enough, and to be quite frank not actually good at programming. All this playing with Linux does not make you a good programmer. Sure, you learn more about how computers work, but if you don’t think about designing software and then actually writing that code, solving problems, and then figuring out your initial designs were stupid because you lack experience or were just being stupid, struggling to decide if you want to redesign everything and start anew or just build on top of the poorly designed AND implemented thing, ok keep going put a bandage on this gaping wound with some duct tape and keep going, etc. you don’t actually practice the skills necessary to become good at making things. It’s like reading a math textbook and fiddling with the examples given but never actually going and trying to solve the practice problems. I forgot this common sense, being a moth drawn to a new, irresistible flame. You don’t need to know how computers work like this at all if all you want to do is write MATLAB code to do signal processing, make web apps that make you money, or try to craft immersive and unforgettable experiences by making video games. I feel like I wasted a lot of time, my actual linux knowledge is less than half baked, and I wish someone would’ve slapped me sooner and told me to learn some employable skills.
Ok, back on topic, at some point I just couldn’t boot into my PopOS install anymore, probably sometime in the later half of 2023. I don’t remember doing anything that would prevent booting into my favorite DE gnome 👀 but oh well. Went back to Windows with WSL2 for a bit. After a couple months, I just couldn’t help myself. Like an addict relapsing, I started dual booting Windows and Ubuntu 22.04. Moved all my programming related stuff over and never looked back. Still use that install to this day as my daily driver.
Since then, I have tried tinkering with Arch on the old laptop, because of all the memes, and gave a manual install a single try with a couple of hours one day and couldn’t get it to boot (who knows what I did wrong, it’s called skill issue, and I hope it’s not terminal). Told myself I shouldn’t be wasting any more time on this while I don’t have an income stream, so I just went with Archcraft – I just need a backup computer to be ready to run at any time.
And unfortunately, I can’t help but not be able to keep this addiction, obsession under control. I keep thinking about another distro I found out about – NixOS, because the idea of declaratively describing how you want your system configured with Nix is new and exciting and omg I need it now. Just have to say, no stop bad. Don’t do that, you need to make money first, before you give into your addiction.
And thus, I settled for writing a blog post about linux instead ;)