Thoughts on Linux 1 – General observations over the past 20 years

I’ve been an on-again-off-again Linux on desktop user since around 2001-2002. My first foray into it was testing Red Hat on a 900MHz Celeron HP prebuilt that was a bit crusty by that point. It more or less ran fine but I honestly needed more background on both software and hardware that I lacked at that point in time. So, fast forward to college in 2007 and I had my first MacBook and I had an MSI Wind netbook that had Windows XP which was a rather lackluster experience on that machine. So, I installed Ubuntu 7.10 or 8.04 and that was my first real experience using Linux in a more or less daily capacity.

It worked fairly well as a simple notetaking and paper-writing tool for college. The most irking issues were centered around the Wifi drivers that were frequently hit or miss for the internal card. I had a spare USB 802.11g adapter however that was natively supported and worked flawlessly. Overall, I had a pretty positive experience with Ubuntu and Linux as a whole during that time. I developed some skills both in the GUI and in the terminal with it and found it stable and peppy enough given the slow hard drive, first generation Intel Atom processor, but upgraded to 2GB of system memory.

Throughout college I would run Linux on secondary computers to varying degrees. Sometimes Ubuntu, other times Mint, openSUSE, by the end I had tested at least a dozen different distros. Some I would occasionally boot into using a flash drive to fix some sort of issue that Windows was having difficulty, usually to do with partitioning of drives. Puppy Linux was nice for that being how quickly it booted and lightweight it was.

For several years after graduating, roughly 2016-2019, I didn’t dabble much in the world of Linux distros and was mostly using Windows and MacOS. A combination of factors made it more difficult, and less enjoyable, to explore my interests in technology. So, I kind of stopped paying as much attention to the tech world and focused elsewhere. Then, 2020 happened. A lot happened. Suddenly finding myself with more free time, and a lot more idle energy, I got back into my tech hobbies again. I started getting back into mechanical keyboards and into Linux as well. I started back with my old favorite, Ubuntu, and started branching out again from there.

The first impressions of returning to Linux was how much more polished the experience had become. No longer did I have to go through the terminal to install graphics drivers. Most drivers installed as cleanly, if not even more cleanly, as in Windows. The user interface, though still somewhat irregular has become massively streamlined for the most part. No longer did I have a swath of different design languages, instead having more applications aware of the current system profile and adapting to that. And while some still feel distinctly like they did 15 years ago others have become much more streamlined and cleaner. One that felt like a terrible cluster of menus and windows for years was Gimp. Now it is all contained within a unified, single window with a menu design much closer to its competitors like Paint.net, Photoshop, and other such image editors. That change in usability is absolutely massive, especially for the average user.

It’s so much clearer where options and tools are located when there aren’t a plethora of small windows hovering about the screen. Another example came from my earlier days with MacOS and from a Microsoft product line. The confusing and haphazard UI was what I found with my first versions of Office for Mac. Tiny menus floating around, mixed design languages that were neither particularly OSX nor Windows. It honestly made the experience of running Office on Mac far less appealing than on Windows. But when they unified the UIs between both Mac and Windows it was a huge boost in usability and one of the best improvements to user experience from Microsoft in years.

Which brings me back to the window managers and desktop environments of Linux. I currently have three computers that I use regularly, aside from the supercomputer I keep in my pocket (that is to say, my smartphone). I have my desktop, a powerhouse I built to run the latest games and to be able to experiment once again with virtual machines. A Ryzen 7 2600X with 8-cores and 16-threads has been a delightful experience for me. Especially paired with 64GB of RAM, NVME system drive, and the simultaneously worst and best tech purchase I’ve ever made, my RTX 2080 Ti. I’ll not get into that right now but suffice to say what I thought was incredibly stupid turned out to be accidentally brilliant. Regardless of that, it tears through games and I can even leave my virtual machines running while playing games to no deleterious effect, something I honestly could have only dreamed about in years prior.

My other two machines are my portable options, a 2017 MacBook (you know the one, bad keyboard, 12”, Core m3 processor…), and a 2019 Razer Blade running an 8^th generation Core i7 and an RTX 2070. Those I’ve been fortunate to do even more testing with Linux as I could leave my main machine running Windows and have one of those on the desk beside me for whatever I should need while gaming. Initially, this was easier as I could choose whatever distro I wanted but when the Windows 11 public preview came out with the requirement for TPM to be enabled unless you want to do some work-arounds with the installers, I decided to see how distros would cope with that particular monkey wrench thrown into the mix. It turns out Ubuntu, and many of the distros derived from it, works natively with TPM. Put in a password at install, reboot into it and put in said password, and you’ve got it all registered and playing nicely. As far as onerous security measures go, it was hardly a pain and merely another step in the installation process that only pops up once then is complete.

Which brings me to where I’ve been spending my time in Linux today. As much as I appreciate the more familiar environment of Ubuntu, it is also a bit bland now. It’s the “safe” option. The easy option. Kubuntu and Xubuntu are options but for some reason KDE has just never been particularly appealing to me and XFCE feels more like I stepped back to Ubuntu 7 and 8 all those years ago. Great on older hardware but when I don’t have older hardware, it just feels hampered by it. Mint has quickly become a favorite of mine, specifically with Cinnamon. It looks great and feels great running it. I simply like it a lot and it’s currently what I have installed beside Windows on my Blade. But, as with any interests of mine, I’ve been going deeper. I’ve tried both openSUSE and Fedora via virtual machines and found them well polished but I also found myself wanting a lot of the built in experiences I found with Debian and Ubuntu based distros, like DEB packages and apt. And if I’m going to just install those anyway, why deal with YAST or what have you in addition to them? Just cut out the fat and go straight for an Ubuntu based distro to get those and built-in access to the Ubuntu repositories.

So, that brought me to my current VM test environment of MX Linux. Ubuntu-based, stable, and most interesting to me, a variant that is built around Fluxbox. To make an addendum to my experiences prior, I had tinkered with different WMs and DEs all those years ago. I tried the usual, KDE, XFCE, Gnome, but I also tested out some more esoteric options, like Openbox and BlackBox. And when I found out that Fluxbox is still in development and is a fork of those older designs I knew I had to try it. I was one of those truly bizarre people in that I had tested the BlackBox port on Windows and had liked it as a shell replacement for Explorer! It simply clicked with me. I loved being able to do anything from a right-click on the desktop. And it had been over 15 years since I last tried any of those *box environments so I figured I may as well test to see just how much was genuinely good and how much was nostalgia glasses providing a far rosier picture than reality.

So far, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how intuitive it is and how well it has been working for me. I wouldn’t recommend it for most users but for people who are familiar with that style of window management it does work well. That said, switching window managers with Linux is as easy as logging out and logging back in so trying it at least is quite simple. I believe other managers are more friendly to people coming from MacOS or Windows and there are a plethora of options that are similar to both of those as well. I figure I’ll end up writing more about this but mostly I want to applaud all of the people who have been contributing to the desktop Linux experience because every release is more polished than the last and I love seeing it become an easier choice to recommend to current Windows users.