Back on the blog, I have not posted a lot recently, and I want to change that. Some might call it a new year resolution even.
I have been busy last year with a myriad of small projects, most of them software related, some in finance, some in electronics, etc... To be fair, I can say that this is mostly due to AI's help to cross some bridges that were keeping me locked because of lack of time to break them. AI really helped me find the ressources, names that I was missing, methods and such to help.
Anyway, here are some thoughts on my linux experience lately. I have used all 3 major OS during my life at one point or another. I started with win95, then XP, then Vista on a laptop. At some point, I went to engineering school and I tried to install linux on that laptop, to replace the mistake that was Windows Vista. So I tried loads of distro, starting with Ubuntu in 2011, then Mint, then Arch. At that point, I would land my job at EPFL and buy a Macbook pro and it was basically it for my laptop experience. Nothing would ever top that. At the same time, I had a windows 7 tower PC mostly for games and or heavy duty simulations in COMSOL that was also pretty good. Now at my job, it is windows again, and at home, I still have my macbook pro laptops.
Well, I also recently acquired a minipc, for homelab projects, self-hosting the blog and more services for me. The minipc came with windows 11. My idea was from the start to switch it to linux. But I was still open to keeping windows if I liked. No need to hide it, I hated it. The Windows version we have at work is "sanitized", with little to no ads/spyware, little to no freedom really. And I use it mostly with the same couple of software, fighting windows from time to time, wondering if it comes from the IT overzealous desires to protect ourselves from hackers or from Windows' own limitations.
The first thing I was asked during the start of my minipc was to login into my Microsoft account. I didn't want to. I wanted to go straight to the desktop and download the linux image of my choice and basta. It was not possible to do that. I had to create an account for nothing, giving an email address, telephone number... Why? Once on the desktop, ads. Ads everywhere. On the bar, in the menu to launch the browser, in the browser itself. It was unbearable. My mind was set, I downloaded Rufus, and the latest version of Debian and went to create the bootable usb. Those 5 minutes were a pain to me, seeing how bloated windows became in these last years. I was actually OK with windows 7. Even windows 10 was OKish for the small experience I had with it. But this last iteration is the step too far for me. We are back to Vista territories, with a version of Windows that is just difficult to use, because it is slow, because it is asking for too much information it doesn't need. No thank you.
My beef with it is the ads really. I hate advertising with a passion. If I see an ad too often, I will go out of my was to not buy that product especially. But there, the issue is that my OS that I bought a licence for, is no longer free of ads. It is a breach of trust, where content I did not allow is showing up in my screen... Taking bandwidth both on my network and my mind. The internet has also become like this, and I don't think it can be used without an adblocker anymore, without turning insane.
So I went for linux obviously. My last trial with linux was with Arch (by the way...) and it was bittersweet. It was Arch from 2011 also, without an installer, and pacman -Syu breaking my setup every other week or so. To be fair, it helped me learn a lot, but the stress of the cycle of updating and fixing it was too much at some point and I gave up to the stable walled garden of macOS. Less customization, but it works, and in the end, this is all that matters. Also, the desktop environment I used was either XFCE, gnome or KDE, I can't remember well the last one I used with Arch but I would bet it was KDE. I only remembered that gnome was simple looking, almost boring and stable. KDE was bloated and would sometime hang, but would also have a strange mix of old style window with things so avantguardist that it didn't exist anywhere else, like the multiple desktops mapped on a rotating cube, this was pretty cool...
For my homelab miniPC, I decided to go simple, Debian with XFCE at first. Turns out that XFCE was breaking with the Remote Desktop App I use, so I eventually installed KDE Plasma, giving it a new shot. And holy crap, it looks great. I don't have the same feeling of bloatedness than before, it looks sharp and responsive. Good widgets too. All needed.
In the last couple of years, I have often read that linux was gaining shares in PC OS usage, and I can't help but be happy about it. It is a good thing. Microsoft is really going in the wrong direction recently, especially with the news that it will integrate AI directly in the OS, interfacing with the file explorer? Come on... Windows may still be the only alternative for newcomers to computers who wants a cheap introduction (cheap machines are always windows... Even if they could ship with a linux version instead and reduce costs...), but with the new installers, linux is really bridging the gap from the small portion of computer nerd to a larger portion of people interested in computers. Some distro like Mint are the real goto for newcomers that don't want to interact with the terminal and want something to work out of the box, with as little effort as possible. Although the install of a new OS on a computer can feel like a too big step, even for intermediate users, I remember the first time I did it, I was emotionally ready to lose my computer and buy a new one... Still, it worked and here am I.
So for now, Debian+KDE looks perfect for my little setup and I am keeping it this way. I can only recommend it.
