New Year, New OS

Sunday 1 January 2023

This year I decided to make a big change and move from Windows to Linux. I wanted to make sure I found the perfect distro to fit my needs, so I tried out several different ones.

I have been using Linux from WSL in Windows as my base when doing development works, but I am feeling stiffled by Windows in may ways. This year I think I will use Linux as my main daily driver and see if I can improve my workflows.

Several Linux distrios that I have tried are VanillaOS https://vanillaos.org/ and https://zorin.com/os/ but I found them not to my liking, the way they are used and done does not work with my flows.

After a lot of research and testing, I eventually settled on KDE Neon and I am very happy with my decision. This distro is based on Ubuntu, so I was able to keep the same user-friendly environment that made Ubuntu so great. Additionally, it also comes with the KDE desktop environment, which provides a huge range of customization options and a great user interface. The base Ubuntu is LTS but the KDE itself is rolling release, I think I like this setups. I do not want to tinker the base OS but I would like to customize the desktop environment to suit my needs.

While moving from Windows to Linux has been a great experience overall, there have been a few bumps in the road. One of the biggest issues I encountered was compatibility with my secondary drive that I formatted when I was using Windows. I found out my partition was Dynamic Disks / Logical Disk Manager (LDM) https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dynamic_disks. My installed Neon cannot seem to mount the partitions in write mode only in read mode. I found out that I need to use ldmtool and also clear up the hibernation configs in this partition. What I did was:

  • install ldmtool
  • enable the partition with ldmtool create all
  • identify where the device is
  • install ntfsfix
  • run ntfsfix against to created volume from ldmtool
  • mount the partition from Dolphin file manager
  • I also add script to auto create the volume

My references:

I think this is too much hassle for the partition, I plan to backup my data there and reformat the partition to exFAT for easier integration.

Another thing that I was concerned was gaming support in Linux as I usually do some light gaming on Steam. However I found out the recent Steam Deck was on Linux and there is ProtonDB which shows games with good support on Linux. I managed to run some of my game there but have not tried them all, but all things considered I am not seeing any issue on this need.

Overall, moving from Windows to Linux has been an incredibly rewarding experience. KDE Neon has provided me with a great user experience, a wide range of customization options, and a great community to help me out. While there have been a few issues, such as compatibility and the learning curve, these can be easily overcome with a bit of research and tinkering. I am very happy with my decision to move to Linux and I look forward to continuing my journey.