I say this a lot: but something I’ve wanted to do for a very, very long time is run a Linux OS as my primary operating system for day to day usage. I took the plunge recently and have learned a lot. One of the biggest things learned? How much easier Linux has become after last trying this around a decade ago. Here’s what I learned…
Firstly, Linux isn’t nearly the beast it was in 2010. A lot of things just work out of the box now, including third party drivers for such things as graphics cards. My first time testing this a decade back I couldn’t get multiple monitors to work, I couldn’t get USB devices to register and everything was very prone to crashing. So, it’s time to start tinkering. Let’s start with my rig:
*Ryzen 3600, 32GB DDR4 RAM, NVidia RTX 3070
With that, I tossed an extra Sata SSD into my desktop and dived headfirst into my first distro to test: Garuda.
Garuda bills itself as a gaming focused OS. Most things worked out of the box but I quickly found that my background in Debian/Ubuntu wasn’t much help when getting into package management and application support. I decided to change it up and quickly went to Xubuntu, based on the XFCE GUI which I’ve been a fan of for some years due to it’s low resource requirements which should mean it will run quickly on my gaming rig. I was disappointed, however, with some of the limitations and how the GUI looked/felt. This brought me to the my current and hopefully final OS: Kubuntu
Kubuntu is Ubuntu running KDE Plasma as a GUI. As with the other distros, it worked mostly out of the box. Speakers, monitors, USB hubs, everything just worked. With a little tinkering I got my monitor positions lined up and dug into getting the software I wanted running on this install.
My goal was to replace as much of my Windows 11 experience as possible. This included everything from Dropbox, Slack, Discord, Spotify and my VPN provider which were all available in .deb packages and easy to get running. After about 2 days of tinkering, I’m up and running with 90% of my Windows apps in Linux and all working seamlessly. Steam is also installed but I’m still having some issues with games but I knew this would be a challenge going into this, not a big deal.
The good: The customizations available within Kubuntu are incredible and I’ve had a ton of fun messing with settings to get everything just the way I want. Things just kinda work, I even got a local wikipedia mirror to run at boot for offline browsing as a fun project. I feel a lot more secure knowing this is running Linux versus Windows 11 which has become more and more based on collecting user data.
The bad: Steam games are crashing quite a lot; I’m not sure what the issue is but working through this now. I also cannot for the life of me get my Bluetooth headphones to connect without the GUI crashing but this also sounds like a common issue. Windows 11 definitely has a more user friendly interface; I find myself missing the tabbed File Explorer natively within Windows. Nvidia Broadcast is also not available in Linux which was an amazing product to use for Zoom meetings.
In summary: I’m very happy with using this as a daily driver. Apart from a couple crashes, things have run very smooth. I’m very comfortable working in a Debian/Ubuntu environment so this has been a treat. I’m looking forward to using this as my primary OS for the near future and will continue to post more as I learn and progress with this.
I hope you enjoyed the read, have a good one!