Switching from Windows to Linux: A Journey
I’ve always been mostly a Windows user all my life, dabbled a bit with Linux while in university, and Mac was never really a thing for me. That is until my last job required me to switch to using a Mac, and a lot of what comes with it.
My previous work was under a heavy Microsoft environment, so it made sense to develop our code on Windows machines, deploy it on Azure servers, and everything else in between. I even dabbled a bit in old classic Windows Forms and WPF afterward. But since switching to my latest job, I’ve been exploring the Mac development environment a bit more and everything else that comes with it. Also, it was my first time really doing everything under a package manager and wow! After working with Homebrew for a while, I even started using Scoop on Windows (amazing btw) and, of course, Winget. I do prefer Scoop due to the way it stores versions and configurations.
Considering the Switch to Linux
With all this said and done, the recent “Recall” news on Windows, or how it was “Recalled” badum-tssss, made me even more curious about how it would be to switch for a while to a complete Linux environment. Here are some considerations I had to take into account:
- Gaming:
- I thought it would be pretty great since, with the Steam Deck introduction, everything seems to run fine there. Oh boy, how wrong I was!
- Configuration Stuff:
- How could I bring the things from my PC back into Linux? Like the Firefox profile or Thunderbird configuration. I needed to have a system.
- Lacking Software:
- I still remember when I had to run some programs via Wine because they weren’t available on Linux. I’ve noticed that everything major currently has a version on Linux, so I didn’t think this would be an issue.
- Hardware Issues:
- Big unknown! I thought it would be smooth, but honestly, I have a lot of peripherals connected to my PC, and it would be terrible if something didn’t work correctly.
- Distro:
- The big one! What distro to use? There are so many to choose from. For me, it was pretty straightforward as I already had Arch Linux in mind. It’s a pretty barebones distro that allows the user to completely customize it the way they want, which really attracted me to it.
The Switch
Two days ago, I decided to make the change! The installation went very smoothly. I simply formatted an SSD I had already installed on the PC (it was hosting some Steam games) and installed it there. So I’m currently dual-booting Windows and Linux on my machine under a GRUB boot manager, which has Windows configured on it, so I can go to it whenever I need to.
Regarding Linux, post-install, I had some issues with the compositor, namely how Wayland behaves under NVIDIA GPUs, since I’m using KDE Plasma. But besides that, we’re good to go. I even did a quick setup to back up most of my dotfiles using stow, which was really simple. I’ll probably do another post in a bit explaining how I’m handling those configurations on two different machines and OSes (namely Linux and Mac).
This journey has just begun, and I’m excited to see where it leads me!