generated from nhcarrigan/template
31 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
31 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
|
---
|
||
|
|
title: "Migrating From Windows to Ubuntu"
|
||
|
|
date: "2024-05-10"
|
||
|
|
summary: "Why I finally ditched Microsoft"
|
||
|
|
---
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
I grew up on Windows. My very first computer ran MS-DOS. My schools all used Windows computers (except for a brief stint with the colourful iMac). I thought myself to be intimately familiar with how Windows works. Becoming a developer showed me just how wrong I was.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
## Why Change?
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
When I first became a developer, I was running Windows. And only Windows. And it worked well enough for what I needed. Sure, all of the documentation for things I was using or working on was written with a *nix environment in mind, but I fumbled my way through with some Google-fu and the power of Git Bash.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
Then Hacktoberfest 2020 rolled around. I was just getting in to open source, and I was heavily involved (I mod their Discord now :3 ), so I wanted to try my hand at contributing to the website. But it was a Rails site, and support for Ruby on Windows was abysmal at best. Which meant it was time to explore other options.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
## Windows Subsystems for Linux
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
I'm a gamer girl. Hardcore. I knew I didn't want to give up the ease of gaming on Windows. So I explored Windows Subsystems for Linux (WSL). It worked surprisingly well. The biggest downside was that there was no GUI support at the time. Working at freeCodeCamp, that meant I couldn't run Cypress in "watch" mode. But I made it work.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
Taking advantage of that time, I became familiar with bash and *nix commands, and came to love Ubuntu. When Windows 11 shipped with GUI support, all of my pain points were solved. I had Ubuntu for my development environment, and Windows for my gaming environment. And I didn't have to muck around with dual boot.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
WSL had this magical feature where a web server running in Ubuntu was exposed to localhost on Windows. Made my work as a web developer significantly easier. Until one day that mysteriously broke. I had no idea how it worked, so I had no idea how to fix it. Sure, I could load the webpage in the Linux browser instance, but I wasn't authenticated on any platform in that browser, didn't have my password manager... I spent a few days mucking around trying to figure that out, and then finally gave up. Wiped my hard drive and did a full fresh install of Ubuntu.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
## No More Windows
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
I've been on Ubuntu for a couple of months now (I think? Time is a concept.) and it's been great. My development work has been faster and more streamlined, and I have yet to run in to any issues with my workflows. Gnome provides an experience that's similar enough to Windows that it felt like home from day one. I even have an extra fancy retro terminal!
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
Thanks to the advent of the Steam Deck and Valve's work with Proton, transitioning to gaming on Linux has been pretty seamless too. I've run in to a couple of games that don't run, like Demonologist (which to be fair barely ran on Windows), and some that need tweaking (which I contribute as documentation to ProtonDB), but some older games run even better. I have noticed that "heavier" (re: more graphically intense) games tend to play worse, but it's a trade-off I'm willing to make.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
There are a few things I definitely miss. I don't play games in full screen mode anymore - Gnome crashes if I alt-tab to Discord too often. And the lack of an emoji picker trips me up more often than I'd like to admit. But overall, it's been such a positive change that I haven't really looked back. And probably never will.
|