Windows vs Linix

As part of a new job the company promised to cover half the price for a work computer that could then become a personal PC after two years.

At the time I had mostly been on Macbooks for about ten years as a personal driver. That was also the usual drivers for my work machines too.

Since I could get more hardware for the money I went the Windows route. While not a primary motivator, the ability to play games on it pushed my decision over.

After months of problems with Windows 11, I decided to take the plunge and move over to something more sustainable.

This week I made the switch to Linix and I can't be more glad that I did.

What led to this change?

Default apps you can't refuse.

No matter what you do or how many settings you change, Windows will always open Internet Explorer's descendant Edge. It will still periodically try to get you to use OneDrive and upsell you on more storage with it.

Severe hardware "errors" that seem avoidable or made on purpose

When you sleep a computer, the expectation is that it gets logged out and the screen goes dark. All processes are paused. When you sleep a Windows machine it'll give you a login screen but it keeps running processes. You can hear it. You can feel it overheating your bag because there is no circulation in there for a laptop running processes.

I'd occasionally get a "blue screen of death" with the Bitlocker code needing to be re-entered. It got to the point that I left my computer for more than 10 minutes it would do that. The only fix was to grab the latest update (but not so soon that it would have another untested change triggering Bitlocker again).

The nail in the coffin

Because I needed to update my machine to avoid the Bitlocker issues I noticed a "Dell SupportAssist" message telling me to update my machine. Being a good little customer that's what I did. The moment the updates finished, I hit a BIOS issue. My computer wouldn't even start up and Dell presented a message with a QR code tell me my hard drive was broken and unrecoverable. Thinking the QR code would send me to useful instructions to get me out of this mess I scanned it. The QR code was a link to their store upsell me a new solid state harddrive. The hardware that famously was supposed to last longer than the old disc and needle style hard drives.

After restoring my BIOS to the last working settings. My PC worked again (in spite of the "broken" hard drive). I'll put up with some issues but holding me hostage with a lie in order to sell me something I don't need? That was a bridge too far.

What now?

I spent two days backing up all my files to a hard drive, installing Ubuntu and transferring the files there. It's been smooth sailing so fair. I installed DDterm in order to get the Quake style dropdown terminal window I liked to have in my WSL and Apple environments. I'm able to run Steam to play games. I can use popular open source stream capture and editor programs to gather any clips of the gameplay that I like.

Overall Ubuntu is way smoother because it's not tasking my hardware with tasks and programs I didn't ask it to open.

If you're into programming, Ubuntu feels like a cross between Mac and Windows, but way smoother. The native GUI elements are well designed and smooth. It's hard to explain but this feels like how I should have always been programming. Mac came close to that feeling but there are still a ton of environment workarounds you need setup there to get similar behavior (like homebrew etc). This feels like a "big boy programmer" laptop.

If you're on the fence, I can't recommend enough to at least try it out (which Ubuntu has an option to do with an install usb you can create yourself).