Mike Shehata Once again, I tried switching to Linux as my primary driver this year as I was looking into a change to make my desktop experience more exciting. I originally attempted to switch to Linux last year, but my use of Windows for over 25 years caused me to continually stay nervous anytime I couldn’t figure something out in less than 5 seconds: I would panic, and reboot into Windows.
As time went on, I realized that the issue was simply fear of change. I wasn’t giving Linux a fair chance, so I decided to “go all in” and really start using it as my daily desktop. So with the sole exception of my go-to audio/video production software available in Windows, I was going to try to use Linux as much as possible.
Around June of 2020, I started with Ubuntu, which worked very well, despite the fairly big difference in paradigms between Windows 10 and the GNOME environment. As time went on, I started reading and watching videos on various distros, and was surprised how many people bashed Ubuntu. There was much hatred towards it, some valid (Canonical sharing/selling user information in the past), while others seemed to be hating it solely because of its ease-of-use and popularity; like it was wrong to have an OS that was easy to use. Anyways, all the bashing eventually conditioned me to feel that if I should use Linux to its full potential, I might as well pick a distro that’s more respected in the IT realm.
Still wanting to go the simple route of using it as my daily driver and getting used to Linux in general, I opted for Linux Mint, which seemed to not have as much of a dark shadow on it as Ubuntu, while still having a simple installation procedure and overall desktop environment with Cinnamon desktop. So far, its been working great; my main PC at home and work are set to dual boot to Linux Mint & Windows 10. I have been able to perform 90% of my tasks directly on the OS itself, though I certainly still have some dependence on Windows VMs to this day. For instance, MS Teams, which has an official Microsoft supported app for Linux, has horrible luck with the screen-sharing function, and appears to be an issue for many users. So whenever I need to share my screen, I need to do it from a Windows VM. Another issue is the overall dependence in general on MS Office products. Evolution mail was the closest product I could find that would show my exchange email with a calendar/task preview on the same screen as the email view in a similar manner as Outlook, but was still nowhere near as polished. However, with all my various email accounts moving to MS 365, I now simply use the web version, and it works great.
The only issue left with MS products is the fact that some Excel files may have specific macros, or Word files may have specific formatting that none of the open-source equivalents can match 100%. Some do a much better job than others, but I still come across some documents with certain tables or comments that don’t display correctly unless its opened in MS Word. While the online version is a fairly good alternative, even that has its own limitations, so my hope is that as MS 365 continues to become more popular, the online version will eventually support all the same features as the desktop version.
In the last month or so, after feeling fairly happy with Linux Mint, I started to explore other distro options out there, based on Top 10 Lists that many reviewers made. I continually saw Arch Linux listed, so I decided to give it a try on both a VM and on one of my laptops. While I totally understand the reasoning and love towards the OS’s control of every aspect of the system (with the logic that you “only install what you need”), I still don’t understand why a simple installer wizard is not in use during setup. It makes no sense. Even Cisco routers and switches that utilize a command-line-interface have a simple welcome wizard to assign common settings, yet with Arch, you must reference the manual or read an online guide. I truly find this ridiculous, would it really be that difficult to have a simple welcome script at the very beginning (still in CLI) that says, “Would you like to use the setup wizard (y/n)?”, with the option of “no” letting you still use the traditional setup method? Not being a full-blown Linux expert, I tried Manjaro, which is based on Arch and has a graphical interface for setup, and compared it to the Arch install I created. I could not see a night-and-day difference between the two in terms of one being superior over the other, but just based on the installation process alone, I would recommend Manjaro over Arch. I think its complete nonsense that a user should have to reference a manual just to install an OS; its 2020, all that’s needed for any OS install is partitioning/formatting, language, timezone: that’s it, so why should a manual be referenced when a simple script can guide you through the process?
Anyways, I am now trying to branch out between PopOS and Manjaro, though I see myself leaning now towards Debian based distros. Assuming the MS Teams screensharing issue is resolved in the near future, I’m hoping to stay in “Linux” mode the whole day with the exception of my audio/video recording where I would boot into Windows 10.