My Linux Journey - 1

First encounter

I don’t remember why why I decided to try Linux back in 2017. The reason might have been a growing concern over lack of privacy and ownership on Windows 10. Or it might have been just sheer exasperation with Windows’ updates and background processes. Whatever it was, I spent a good week trying out a few Linux distributions (or “distros”) on my laptop with a live USB. (For those that don’t know, a “live USB” is a USB stick with an operating system inside that can be run when booting up the computer without having to actually install the OS.) Again, memory is fuzzy, but I do remember liking Ubuntu (with the Unity desktop, I believe) and disliking Linux Mint in all its variants. After years and years of using Windows, I wanted something entirely different in terms of looks, and Ubuntu fit the bill. Mint, on the other hand, felt familiar (like Windows XP or 7) and old fashioned. Sadly, because I was still tied down to Windows software for my day job, and not being tech savvy enough to “dual-boot”, I decided to stick with Windows. Linux was cool, but just not for me.

Second chance

Two years later, I am using Vim for the first time on Windows. I came to use Vim after looking for ways to replace my bulky and disorganized OneNote. Vim was new, exotic, with a steep learning curve, and just all-around great. Together with the vimwiki plugin, which allows you to create a personal wiki, I was finally creating a true knowledge base; sort of a second brain. No more struggling with tabs, tree hierarchies, formatting that breaks down, etc. There was just one thing that bugged me: it seemed to me (again!) that a good portion of the info about Vim related specifically to “Unix-like” operating systems, like Linux and Mac OS. So if I needed to run a command in the terminal to compile work done in vimwiki, and I wanted to follow the traditional Linux directory tree, I had to use the Cygwin environment in Windows to emulate the Unix environment. This was a mess and eventually became a headache: once more I had to translate Linux-speak into Windows-speak. But the upshot of all this is that I gradually was getting more exposure to Linux content.

Enter Luke

While researching what Vim could do, I found a YouTube channel by a guy named Luke Smith, of whom I’m sure most Linux users have heard. It is thanks to him that I got excited again about using Linux (and LaTeX!). Seeing the Linux operating system in action in his videos, instead of just reading about it, proved to be pivotal. What particularly piqued my interest was the speed with which Luke could transform documents from one format to another. Not to mention, his “desktop” looked about a 1000 times cooler than any customization one could achieve on Windows. (I say put desktop in quotes because Luke uses a window manager instead of a desktop, but back then I hadn’t the faintest idea what a window manager was.) With Vim and Luke’s videos, I could see how stripping down software to bare-bones could actually improve my workflow and make computing fun again. Still, about another year would pass until I finally made the switch. In the meantime, I would try to customize Windows to imitate what I was seeing on the YouTube Linux community; for example, putting the taskbar on top. How naive I was!

The last straw

Sometime in the spring of 2020 I think I just got fed up with Windows’ constant updates & heavy background processes that made my laptop’s fans very noisy and the machine run hot (extremely hot in the summer). Some early mornings, immediately after waking up, I would hear my laptop running, even though I had set it to sleep the night prior. Windows had a habit of turning on the machine to run an update. On top of that, many of my customizations disappeared at every new major update. I needed to make the switch, and soon. But, how? I didn’t have the courage to erase the Windows disk. If for some reason I didn’t like Linux, or if there was some software incompatibility with what my job required, I might have to go back. (Recall that at this point my sole computer was the Dell laptop) Dual booting seemed like the only route… but I had heard that it could create a lot of problems down the road. Windows, they say, doesn’t play nice with other operating systems on the same disk. In the end, I decided to purchase a new NVMe drive and use that for Linux, and keep the Windows drive somewhere safe, in case I needed to revert to it.

Ubuntu

For a couple of weeks, I did my research. I didn’t want the transition to be a headache, so for my first Linux distro I went with Ubuntu. It was what I had liked back in 2017, and also the best-known distribution. So, on the very evening that I received my new NVMe drive by mail, I went to work! The installation itself went smoothly, but the reboot gave me a failure. Turns out that I forgot to enable UEFI! I can’t tell you how stressful that was. When you are a “normie” trying to venture into forbidden tech territory, every little glitch and bump on the road seems like the end of the world. And, again, I didn’t have a spare machine. So I was really on edge, worrying that I might mess everything up. Fortunately, it didn’t take long for me to find the solution on my phone and get Ubuntu up and running. What a relief! Immediately I began to explore my new OS, and I found that I really liked it! So, all was well… for about a week.

They say Ubuntu is a really stable distro. After all, it’s made for the normies! Well, that might be the case, but something weird happened to me a week after installing Ubuntu. The time came for an update, and so I updated. (Btw, hadn’t I left Windows precisely to escape updates? Oh well.) Midway through the process, I notice that the graphical update app is downloading huge files of something related to “Pop! OS” (another Linux distro). And then the updater hangs. I force quit and reboot… and now my system is messed up. Some icons disappear, menus are wonky, and restarting the update does not work. OK, what to do? Well, the only thing you can do in that situation as a newbie—reinstall!

(To be continued…)