Linux: Going Native
So, recently I’ve felt a little fed up with using Windows on my own personal machine, up until recently, the only reason I have had that’s stopped me from using Linux & kissing Windows goodbye is the gaming aspect of it all. However, I’m shocked to discover just how stable Linux can be with gaming, if you have a quick look online, you can see that there’s distributions such as Pop OS & Manjaro that are considered to be relatively good or solid options.
I’ve personally decided to go with Pop OS as it’s based on Debian & I’ve previous experience with Debian systems, including Elementary OS & Ubuntu. I just thought I’d test the waters with something that’s at least somewhat familiar.
Having done research online & learning about the likes of Proton DB & Lutris, it makes the experience with getting your games to run with much less hassle. In some cases, from my own personal experience, Linux actually outperformed Windows, one primary example being Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Which is a surprisingly CPU intensive game, I mean when you think about it in reality, it’s not that surprising, but I was amazed to see on average higher frame rates within Linux.
However, I have had a couple of hick-ups along the way & to be fair, I’m still learning the vast & rich Linux ecosystem. The problems that I’ve had so far include:
- Audio – I’ve managed to solve this, although it was an odd & long process.
- Power Management – When put into sleep/suspend mode, when the computer re-awakes, my mouse & keyboard stop working for some reason. An easy fix is to just do a hard power off.
Those little issues aside, I’m thrilled with using Pop OS & for those of you that are interested, I’ve decided to use the KDE Plasma desktop environment. One it’s just stunning, secondly it’s just pleasant to use & three, in my own opinion, gnome is kinda ugly, it works sure, but it’s not my cup of tea for the most part, at least not without some major customization, i.e. cardio-dock.
Anyway, I’m gonna cut this one short since I’m really tired & I need some sleep, followed by an immense amount of coffee! I know that there are areas that I need to learn more about, including maintenance (clearing cache/temp data, backups, etc.), exploring different windows managers & desktop environments & I’d also like to learn more about the different file systems. Once I’ve learned more about these topics, maybe I’ll proceed to something more intermediate or advance, who knows?! Either way, based on my personal experience, I think I’ll be saying goodbye to Windows for my personal machines in future unless there’s some very solid reasons that I can’t think about right now. Anyways… G’d night guys! 😪
P.S. Maybe in future, I’ll cover what I’ve done & what I’ve had to do to achieve the most stable experience I can get with my Linux installation if you’re interested. So, if that’s the case, stay tuned! 👍
