one year of linux: a personal retrospective
it's been (almost) a year since i started using Linux as my primary OS! i just double checked, and apparently i installed Linux Mint on my laptop at the end of November, not the beginning of November. but i was in the mood to write about it now, so whatever. who cares. it's my blog!!
my laptop shipped with Windows 11, and i was getting increasingly frustrated with it. it felt sluggish and unnecessarily unresponsive, despite the fact that my laptop's specs were "Decidedly Fine". between that, and needing something in my life to obsess over and fixate on, i decided to take the leap and try out Linux.
and, well. about half a year later, i ended up killing my Windows 11 partition altogether, and running Linux Mint full time. there's been pros and cons. i'll get to that.
when people usually write about using Linux, they usually have two kinds of users in mind: hardcore Computer Touchers who are developers/sysadmins/etc, and "normal people" who "just want light Internet browsing and office programs". i am neither. or... somewhere in-between? again, i've been over this - you can't squeeze me into a false dichotomy! i'm nonbinary, it just doesn't work, man!
more seriously: i'm a digital artist, and a mild-to-moderate computer enthusiast who is entirely uninterested in developing or administrating anything. i am probably more tech literate than the average person, but i did not go to school for computer science, and i have never worked in tech. i don't know how programming works, not even in a tongue-in-cheek "ha ha, i'm a self-deprecating developer" way. because i'm not, and it frankly really annoys me when people pull that routine on me.
before last year, the last time i tried using Linux seriously was in 2010. i was a teenager with a netbook, and Windows 7 unsurprisingly didn't run super well on it. my sibling helped me install Ubuntu on a separate partition, and... ehhhh. i was not impressed.
for one: GIMP1 was - and still is - a terrible replacement for image editing programs like Photoshop. don't even try to argue with me on this. the UX is absolutely godawful. people would handwave my complaints about the lack of digital art programs on Linux by saying that GIMP was "good enough" and that i just had to get used to it. or, i could just use Photoshop under Wine, if i was simply willing to deal with bugs and major tablet compatibility problems. yeah, i'll fuckin pass.
between the piss-poor support and attitude from other people, i begrudgingly went back to Windows for a while. not too long after that, i got a Macbook and used that for nearly a decade. i honestly really liked OS X in those days! i wasn't very happy when i went back to a Windows PC for budget reasons!!
anyway, like i already said, Windows 11 made me reconsider Linux as an option. i cross-referenced what programs were and weren't available, out of the applications i regularly used. i don't really do a lot of gaming, and when i do play games, it's usually emulating older titles. not really a big deal to me. i was more concerned about art programs. Aseprite had a native Linux version, so that wasn't not a big issue. Clip Studio, though... mmmm, that was going to be trickier. my research at the time showed that running it under Wine was buggy, outdated, unable to connect to the store for downloaded assets, etc. so i'd have to get used to Krita, since that had ran natively on Linux.
i've written about my feelings on Krita before, but the tl;dr of it is: i like it a lot! i don't miss Clip Studio nearly as much as i thought i would, which honestly shocked me. i love experimenting with different digital art programs, but i am really picky about my "mains". Krita's been great, though. very little complaints there.
however... it did take getting used to!! the UX is MUCH better than something like GIMP, sure. but learning what brushes i liked using, optimizing my program's layout for my workflow, relearning where tools and features were located; all of that still takes time and effort to get used to. and... that sentiment is true for Linux in general!
i'm glad i went with Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop environment over something like Ubuntu and GNOME. a lot of people seem to rec Mint Cinnamon to Windows users, and i totally get why. Cinnamon's interface is pretty Windows-like, so that was pretty easy to get used to. meanwhile, i personally feel like modern GNOME is absolutely bizarre to use. it's like everything i hated about the direction Mac OS was going in, lmfao.
but learning how to use terminal commands... whooooo boy, that was a lot to get used to. for what it's worth, i DO know how to use MS-DOS. it was already falling out of favor when i was young, but my dad works a lot with outdated tech and taught me how to use DOS anyway. so i'm not too intimidated by a command prompt window. but i really think "Hardcore Computer Users" underestimate how intimidating they can be to other people!!!!
for example: i've noticed that a lot of Linux users will swear up and down that casual users do not need to worry about interfacing with the terminal, because they can do everything with the GUI if they have to. maybe that is technically true, but guess what: if someone's running into a problem with their computer and they look up a solution online, they are going to run into threads on Stack Overflow with unfamiliar terminal commands, rude comments, and terms that i still barely understand.
and i've seen Linux users make fun of people for not wanting to "just copy a command to paste into their terminal" and wanting a GUI-based solution instead, but like: are we seriously getting mad at people for hesitating to paste random, arcane-seeming commands that they don't understand into their computer??? i thought that was a GOOD thing to have caution! c'mon. y'all are way too out of touch.
you know what the worst part is, though? i can feel myself getting out of touch. i have to rely on my spouse to keep me humble about computers. i've taken a solemn vow to not be annoying about Linux every time she complains to me about Windows. and even if my own digital art workflow is decent on Linux, it's still hard for plenty of other creative workers. from what other people have told me, audio/video work isn't great on Linux. and from my own personal experience, doing anything with vector design suuuucks. i feel like Inkscape is perpetually unstable. (man i miss Affinity Design.)
even with these complaints... i'm still happy using Linux as my main OS. at my heart, i am a fiddler and a tinkerer. so it's been pretty empowering to learn how to do things in the terminal! and both Cinnamon and KDE are great desktop environments; i wasn't really attached to modern Windows in the first place, but i can't believe how much Cinnamon and KDE make me actively happy to use lmfao. i've always been interested in OS interface design ever since i was a kid, though. (whispering) i was a weird kid.
but, my experiences trying out different Linux distributions given me a lot to think about. figuring out how to make Linux approachable and accessible to different kinds of users seems to be a dilemma as old as the kernel itself. i don't know if i have anything to say about that, but it's on my mind a lot, especially with Windows 11 becoming an increasingly dire problem.
realistically, the best i can do is... help out newer users, and be kind, encouraging, and patient. and to commiserate over the parts that suck. my experiences back in 2010 were miserable, and it made me deeply resentful. when i gave Linux another shot last year and was asking for help on cohost (RIP), i was really surprised by the compassion and patience i was shown by other people. it made me less scared to ask for help, and more eager to learn something new. and that meant a lot to me.
i don't tend to believe in one-size-fits-all solutions. the proselytizing over open-source options is really god damn annoying, actually. not everyone wants to spend a bunch of time and energy overhauling their digital living space. however, if someone ever asks me about alternatives to Windows, i hope to be more helpful than people were to me back in 2010. or at least, much less of a jackass.
re: GIMP - i'm deciding that it's OK for me to type out the deeply unfortunate acronym, because i walk with a cane.↩