There are more than a billion PCs in use and, according to StatCounter, only 71 percent of them run Windows. Among the rest, about 4 percent run Linux. That’s tens of millions of people with Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, etc as their desktop operating system. I envy them.
Windows 11 has become more annoying lately as it shoves ads for XBox Game Pass in my face, pushes AI features no one asked for and demands that I reconsider the choices I made during installation on a regular basis. Plus, it just isn’t that attractive.
I’m ready to try joining that industrious four percent and installing Linux on my computers to use as my main OS, at least for a week. I’ll blog about the experience here.
It’s hard to give up Windows forever because so many applications only run in Microsoft’s OS. For example, the peripheral software that runs with many keyboards and mice isn’t available for Linux. Lots of games will not run under Linux. So I think it’s likely I’ll be using Windows again, at least some of the time, after this week is through.
However, for now, I’m going to give Linux a very serious audition and document the experience.
This is very similar to my experience, including the sleep battery drain issue on my laptop which I did eventually find a fix for (bios setting, had to disable ‘deep sleep’ mode of all things), why it works fine in windows but not in linux with that setting enabled I don’t know. The battery drain is still substantially higher in sleep but it at least lasts a few days instead of being dead over night.
My desktop is still on Windows because hardware compatibility just isn’t there yet, after waking from sleep I can’t click on anything or type letters, but moving the mouse cursor works, as does the windows key, tab, etc… It’s fixed by reconnecting both KB/Mouse but that’s a PITA. And the other is my audio interface only partially works, the 1st output is fine, but the 2nd output is very quiet even with volume at 100%.
A more minor thing that still bugs me a lot is it takes absolutely forever to resume from sleep mode, sometimes 30+ seconds before the screen comes on.
The problem is these just aren’t easy bugs to solve, searching for help is tough because they’re such weird ones, and I don’t really have the time to spend trying a bunch of random potential fixes.
Yeah, you gotta have Linux compatible hardware from the start. I’ve always had Linux in dual boot for the last 25 years, so I’m used to it lol.