Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13

Although I have used Linux on and off for more than 16 years, its main OS status in my household is nearing its anniversary so I think I am in a position to share my experience.

The machines I've installed Manjaro are:

- HP Stream 13 (Celeron 1.6 ghz, 2gb ram 25 gb hdd)

- Clevo W230ST (i7 3.0 ghz, 16 gb ram, 240 gb SSD)

- AMD Ryzen 1600x, Nvidia Geforce 1060, 8gb ram 100 gb SSD

First of all, I hadn't experienced a "Okay that's it I am moving to Linux because of X". It was more of a gradual process. My one limiting factor was gaming and after realizing I was able to play 103 over 137 games waiting in my backlog in Steam I decided to give it a try on my Hp Stream - which I call my Potato.

It needed some tweaking due to HP using rtl8723be and connecting one antennae for some reason. I needed to compile a kernel module to select the right antenna. But apart from that it was smooth sailing.

My turning point to using Linux, or rather KDE, was the muscle memory I gained and the ease of use. For example when you press alt-space kde provides an easily accessible searcher which I configured to run software only - but it also searches for anything you write in your file system as well. Secondly, yakuake is a wonderful tool which provides a terminal just by pressing F12 and thirdly, last but not the least, KDE Connect is a huge game changer for me. See, if you are on the same wifi network with your pc you can:

- see the notifications from your phone and reply back

- share the clipboard with your pc and phone

- find your phone if you lost it in your home by ringing it from your pc

- and it turns off your music player in your pc if you receive a call.

I felt like I was missing those features when I was using Windows in my other PCs so I converted them to Manjaro as well. They didn't need tweaking compared to HP; practically everything was working out of the box. The stuff I did was with Clevo I needed to install Bumblebee (which is VERY easy with Manjaro and for some weird reason I couldn't do it in Ubuntu derivatives and ended up with a black screen) to use switchable graphics on it and with the AMD case I installed Nvidia proprietary drivers for performance and gaming reasons.

Speaking of gaming steam's proton provides a good experience for most of the games I've tried. Lutris is also good, I tried some System Shock 2 and Fallout on my potato (because my gut feeling was if a machine with limited resources run it adequately I wouldn't have any problem with the others and I was right) and they ran quite good. I experienced some sluggishness with SS2 but well... that was expected to be honest. HP's 3d performance isn't something to write home about generally.

As for programming my biggest test was running Microsoft stack. I heard good stuff about .net core so I started with it and saw that even my potato was able to run ASP.Net MVC 5 successfully. For a more native experience I decided to install a server 2016 plus Visual studio in a virtual machine. I used my clevo to do that and was pleasantly surprised that it ran quite well with providing 4 cpus + 4gb of ram to run the container. As a personal note I doubt I'll use it much due to I have exited the IT industry practically and unable to enter it again, not that I want to any more. (people expect a bachelor's degree in Engineering or in Programming here and I am a Humanities graduate with a bachelor in philosophy and a master's in sociology)

Other languages which can be installed on linux natively like python, ruby, java didn't cause any problems so all was fine on that front.

A question might pop up about Manjaro. Why Manjaro? Well because I think it has a lesser resource overhead compared to Ubuntu derivatives. The fans on my clevo never stopped turning with Mint and Kubuntu but Manjaro KDE is a cooler (no pun intended) experience for it. In addition to that I like AUR and the concept of rolling release. Another distro which is famous for its up-to-dateness is OpenSUSE but it borked post install for some weird reason so I can't say I had a good experience with it.

So I hope I helped with my personal experience with "converting to Linux". Thanks for reading!

Because noobs can install Windows in 5 minutes?

First you need the drivers, how will you get them if you don't have a CD ROM and ethernet is not working?

Sometimes drivers suck, sometimes Realtek sound drivers mess up the Realtk network cards, will your noobs know what happened?

Then you have to install apps like VLC, good luck ending up on the official site and not some random download site

Other issue I personally have with windows as a disabled person is Windows did not allowed me to set custom keyboard shortcuts for the Magnifier app. In the worst case with an open source app I could edit the code and fix it but KDE allows me to set the shortcuts as I need

Yes, you've got to try very hard to be worse than MacOS that is openly sabotaging OpenGL and Vulkan efforts.

Runs 5000 games run on Linux vs runs well on Linux. Unfortunately - Linux still has some way to go. Generally, you get lower FPS on Linux(could matter for competitive gaming). There are graphical glitches and artifacts even on well supported games(I am looking at you Dota2). It is far more likely for game to be entirely broken via an update on Linux than Windows and it can take quite awhile to get the fix.

I did this ten years ago and I've never looked back. When I see what Windows 10 is today I'm so glad I made the jump. Linux is easier to use than ever. It wasn't always this easy. I run Gentoo at home and everything just works and what's more is I understand why it works (well, mostly).