I have been a long time linux user (10+ years). My fascination with linux began in 11th grade when I stumbled upon the Github Student Developer Pack. I was already interested in programming by then but this gave me access to a whole new world. And ofcourse, a VPS was one of them. Oh boy was I excited! I spent the better part of my winter vacation trying to figure out how to work a SSH client (PuTTY), set up a simple web server (Wordpress with the LAMP Stack) and so on. It wasn’t until I started using Discord (yeah the popular chat platform) that I truly started understanding a lot of the inner workings. I worked day and night on getting my chat bot working, adding new features. This forced me to learn a lot of new things like -
- git (to keep track of changes)
- python3 (for the bot)
- postgresql (database)
- simple bash programming (to keep the bot up and running + some maintenance)
- html/css/js (for the bots frontend)
- nginx
Soon, 50-60k+ people were using it. You get the idea! The early days of discord bots were truly the golden age.
Enough talk about the past! What I wanted to get to was, even though I was using linux quite a bit, it was always limited to server use only. I think I was afraid to switch to linux on my laptop (from Windows) because it was what I was familiar with and did everything that I wanted. Also, gaming was an issue (luckily not anymore). I finally decided to take the plunge for a few reasons:
- Windows 10 will stop being supported in 2025 (main reason) and my laptop can’t run Windows 11 (no TPM).
- For some reason my bluetooth stopped working properly
- It was a major pain to get my services running in my LAN (networking issues)
- Startup time was bad. It would take atleast 3-4 mins to get to a useable state.
- Sleep didn’t work. It would keep crashing my laptop on wakeup.
Yeah I know most of this can be addressed just by upgrading to a better laptop. While that is true, I just didn’t find it in me to let go of my current laptop. It has been my learning partner over the years and its still going strong. And so I made the decision to switch over.
Linux is not a single OS. There are a lot of variations (called “distros”). I wanted one that was-
- similar to Windows in look and feel
- was straightforward to use
I shortlisted two - Ubuntu (which I have used in my server for a very long time) and Mint. After some reading, I decided to go with Linux Mint Cinammon. It’s been a week since and I am sitting here wondering why did I not switch sooner.
