Year of the Linux Desktop
Linux was far from a new concept to me. Although I never had it as my primary OS, I played around with different flavours many times before. I remember having multiple VMs throughout the years with Mint, Ubuntu, and Debian to name a few. The closest to a main machine running Linux was a Windows laptop I had used during my study years that got a second wind thanks to elementary OS, it worked great for another couple of years! I also used macOS for many years at work so I'm pretty used to the terminal.
On top of that, I had a co-worker that was a Linux enthusiast and had many coffees discussing why it was worth the jump. Another close friend had it setup as the main dual-boot option in their home PC and we had chatted multiple times about what was the experience like. Of course, the Steam Deck and the progress Proton has made towards gaming on Linux was not lost on me either.
The Incident
I was just a regular Windows user. I had all my stuff there: Steam with all the games I'll never finish, a Plex server running as a service to feed the TV in the living room, WSL2 with Neovim setup just how I liked it, and many other small hobbies that I pick up from time to time. Neovim was the most recent addition. I was a VSCode fan since it came out as an alternative to Atom but when I discovered nvim, it fascinated me and I spent a decent amount of time configuring it, as it is tradition.
One day, Microsoft thought I had nothing better to do so it decided that as part of a regular system update it should also break my WSL installation. All the content was gone, it still worked but it was a fresh install of WSL for some reason. I looked for a fix for hours. I tried as many ways to recover my data as I could but to no avail. All my projects were backed up to GitHub but my Neovim config was not. I know this was my mistake but still I was sad to see it gone.
Messing with my Neovim config was the last straw. Microslop and I were no longer friends and I had to do something about it.
Internet meme
Leap of Faith
In a rare (for me) compulsive purchase I bought a new NVMe drive online and started looking for a distribution that would fit my needs. I knew that I was going to dual-boot but I wanted a distro that could game in hopes that it would reduce the amount of times I had to boot into Windows. I focused on gaming because I knew that, for the most part, all distros would cover the rest of my needs regardless of which one I picked. That meant that a lot of popular options moved down the list and one distro particularly stood out: Pop!_OS. I had heard many good things about System76 and knowing that their distribution supported Nvidia graphics meant it was perfect for my use case.
As soon as the drive arrived, I installed Pop!_OS and made a list of all the things it had to do to truly replace Windows. One by one I started installing what was necessary to cover them. Jellyfin replaced Plex, I installed Neovim and setup a dotfiles repo, and games were running in Steam so easy I couldn't believe it. I did it, I made the switch, and the grass was greener!
Over the next days and weeks I looked for a solution to those small bits and pieces I was missing: A small script to switch between speakers and headphones, an automation to download and process the latest Critical Role episode VOD, enabling mouse middle-click scroll on Firefox, etc. It's by no means perfect, but it feels stable and comfortable which is more than enough for me.
What the Future Holds
My wish for the future would be to finally ditch Windows. I know, I'm asking too much. As long as gaming is involved, there's no guarantee you wont be forced to boot to Windows. It's mostly for anti-cheats or external launchers in my case, although this last one seems to be less of a problem nowadays.
At some point I'll want to distro-hop. I want to try Arch just to see if it's really that different, but for now I just need a system I can rely on for my personal computing. Oh, and exploring the world of tilling window managers is also on the horizon.
Hackerman - Kung Fury (2015)
A Parting Gift
If you're on the fence, I recommend you follow in my footsteps (except the losing the Neovim config if you can avoid it). The best advice I can give you is, going in with a plan to have a replacement read for each of my use cases was the winning move. It reduced the friction and gave me goals I could work towards each time I sat down at my computer. I enjoyed the journey as much as I now enjoy the "end" result.
One day I'll talk about the move from VSCode to Neovim :)
Thanks for reading!