Newbie's perspective on Linux after 10 months

Yep, it has now been almost exactly 10 months of using Linux on my laptop. I want to shortly cover what made me switch from Windows 10, how and for what I have used Linux and why I am now using it most of the time.

I must confess that I have tried Linux before, it was maybe 11 years ago on a middle school. My schoolmate was using it and some of my friends too, so I just felt like giving it a try. I installed Gentoo Linux (It was not a good choice for the beginning, now I know) and then I managed to revive our old desktop pc with a 600Mhz Celeron and made it at least usable for web browsing and some basic stuff with DSL - Damn Small Linux. The performance was terrible, even my friend's 200Mhz Pentium was beating it in a game performance although we had a comparable graphics card. It took me almost a week only to get my graphics card properly working under Gentoo. I had issues with other things too and none of the laptops function buttons was working. The situation with drivers was still quite bad 10 years ago, especially for laptops. I considered it merely as a play tool to learn more about Linux, I could not use it for any actual work.

Motivation for change

When I have moved to the university I stopped using Linux completely, I became quite busy and my uni was heavily Windows oriented, so It was just easier and more effective to use only Windows. After getting a new laptop(s) I did not even bother installing Linux on it. What I felt looking back on my Linux attempt was: "Yeah, if your time has no value, then Linux is free". So I would usually quickly chased away any desires to try Linux again. This however changed after I have finished my university and got a regular job. I have purchased a laptop mostly for some entertainment and occasional work for the NGOs YSP and FFWPU where I am involved. It was an HP-430 ProBook laptop with pre-installed Windows 10 and a 1000GB HDD.

Already the very first impression was a disaster. It just did not work. The Windows 10 before the major Creators update worked terribly on a low end 5400 rpm solid drives. I don't understand how could they even sell it in such configuration. As a bonus, some of the pre-installed HP's bloatware had a terrible memory leak. I did not have much money to spare to buy an SSD so I have just decided to give Linux a try hoping it would work better. And it did. So I decided to give Linux a try.

Choosing my distro

I have forgotten most of the things I have learned on Gentoo, and at work, I was using only the command line to check few things on the Linux server from time to time. I just jumped straight on Fedora, because my colleague at work had it and I liked how it looked :-). A bit stupid motivation, I know. My wife was in the 6th month of pregnancy so I still had some time to get the hang of Linux before my son will be born. The first impression was very good, my laptop was finally usable for some basic stuff. Fedora is quite bleeding edge so I run into trouble quite quickly after that and I felt like "No this is not for me, I love hacking around in here but my wife needs me too and I have other important things to do. I don't want to spend sleepless nights just to get the basic stuff running".

After this experience, I decided to research a bit more before deciding which distro is good for me. I have tried Linux Mint, Ubuntu and Zorin live cd and I decided to give Zorin OS a try. For those who don't know it is a distro based on Ubuntu aimed for users transitioning from Windows. I was still quite used to Windows workflow so I felt good with Zorin. A big advantage of Zorin is that most of the things work out of the box. The HW buttons on my laptop, sound, it's easy to add different keyboard layouts etc. With preinstalled Play on Linux, I could even get the Office 2013 running. They were showing it on the Zorin promo, but after installing I have found out that it's more suited for an emergency use, it's definitely not for everyday work. So distro devs if you are going to present your distro, pls don't tell noobs that they can run MS software on Linux. They can but it's mostly not good enough for everyday work. I felt a bit deceived here.

After few months I realize I am not feeling completely comfortable with Zorin and I would perhaps like to customize stuff a bit more and try something more advanced. I was formatting my PC because I have finally bought new SSD so I have started a new clean install with Lubuntu. I liked the idea of LxQt, everything is quite light-weight and functional. One big caveat was that it's quite hard to make LxQt look good in dual monitor setup and on my laptop's HiDPI screen. I struggle with it for a while and then tried to install Cinnamon desktop which is now my main environment. Sometimes I use awesomewm because I like the idea of tiling managers and how you can use it very efficiently without a mouse. I have also tried to play around with Openbox (I am using it at work on Cygwin because it is very lightweight and fast) but I always come back to Cinnamon for the ordinary stuff I do at home.

Why I finally switched to Linux

Fedora worked quite well and Zorin worked like Charm. The configuration that was totally unusable on Windows 10 was lighting fast with Zorin or Lubuntu. Microsoft somehow managed to fix the HDD performance with one of the big updates this year but at that time I was already getting more and more enchanted by Linux. Once I challenged myself with creating a big graphics banner only with open source tools (Inkscape and Scribus). It was a struggle but I succeeded. For a professional work I would still pick Illustrator and InDesign, but for my stuff, it did the job. After some time I just realized I have not booted windows for more than a week :-)

I can write blog articles without a hassle on Linux, same goes for watching Netflix, answering emails, reading news or researching something on the web etc. So I boot Windows only when I want to play some game from time to time or do some work on the PowerPoint presentations. There is still one pain when I compare Ubuntu/Cinnamon with my dual-booted Windows 10 and that is dynamic scaling for dual monitor setup. On Windows, this works quite well for most of the applications. The desktop is scaled properly too. However, on Linux, it either looks good on my widescreen which is 1920x1080 and too small on my 1920x1080 laptop or vice-versa. I have found few Xrandr hacks but I was never able to reach crisp and clear appearance with it.

Well, that's about it, this was my journey back to Linux. To summarize everything I would like to finish this article with a list of pros and cons of using Linux desktop from my perspective. If you have other points or you disagree with some of them, feel free to express yourself in the comments below:

Pros:

• Incredible customizability of the system.
• Lower hardware requirements than Windows.
• Users are in charge - most of the Linux distros allow you to reject any update you are receiving and you will not get surprised by a stupid update that takes 1+ hour when you just want to reboot your pc.
• System keeps you informed - There is a trend in Windows to hide advanced info away and just show something like glowing sign "Getting Windows ready, do not turn off your computer". You'd like to know why it already takes 4 hours? Is it stuck, does it need more time? Too bad, you can only guess. Most of the Linux distros enable you to click on Details and see what's happening during the update/upgrade.
• Easy software installation via package application or using few commands in the terminal.
• Better security Linux too has flaws and holes that can be exploited, but because most of the people use Windows the malware is targeted to work on Microsoft systems.
• New distros are now much closer to Windows experience (although still not enough for some users). If you are not comfy with Ubuntu, try Zorin or Linux Mint. Elementary OS might please you if you prefer MacOS - like desktop.

Cons:

• Hardware compatibility issues. This improved severely in the last 10 years but you might have trouble with some printers and other special devices (drawing tablets etc.).
• Compatibility with MS Office. Open office and Libre office made huge progress incompatibility but if you exchange files with Microsoft Office users on a daily basis it can be a nightmare. Especially advanced formatting breaks quite often and .pptx presentation are sometimes totally messed up.
• Running multi-monitor setup is not very comfortable and doesn't work well out of the box. I think that total beginner has no chance to make this work well, especially if you have HiDPI laptop.
• Steep learning curve Ubuntu made big progress in making Linux more "human-friendly" but some things are still quite hard to configure, especially for total IT analphabets.