this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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My move to Linux (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 day ago by o1o12o21@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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This is a 12 year dream. I have always run a Windows workstation along side a Debian laptop. I am no stranger to Debian. I have a 12 year association with it. I am not a Linux wizard yet but have been adept with it.

Why not use Debian daily then? My personal computing usage unfortunately centered around consumption rather than creation. I watched videos, listened to podcasts, read technical articles, and browsed social media. On top of this, inertia and great software like Visual Studio, Notepad++, Excel, OneDrive held me back.

Visual Studio is an absolute must-have for all .NET developers. I built small pieces of complex web projects only occasionally. VS Code on Linux is decent for .NET development but it is not the same. Though Jetbrains Rider existed along-side, it is unthinkable to drop Visual Studio. At least for dark matter developers.

Notepad++ is a fabulous software program that had no complete alternatives on Linux. I used it for scripting, text manipulation, note taking, dumping and editing thoughts. Scintilla-based equivalents Geany, SciTE exist, but do not come close.

MS-Office Excel is another remarkable software program with no real alternatives in other ecosystems. It is worth the 5K INR per year. Organizing data, life planning, and creating simple reports are a few of its greatest capabilities. Also, the formulas system is amazing. OneDrive is another great and a utilitarian software program from the Microsoft stable.

So, why now? I had the most fun and growth when I built things. I love the independence that comes with the experience of building things. As far as I can remember, I was always a tinkerer, thinker, builder, doer and explorer. After a decade or so of inaction, I needed a change. A few things fell into place recently.

  • Windows is about to get a whole lot more annoying. An increase in ads, baked-in Copilot, and a suffocating push to outlook user-linked usage.
  • Jetbrains Rider became formidable now for CLI and web app development.
  • I learnt enough of apt-pinning, backports and makedeb repository.
  • The last straw is from an unexpected experience. I set up a Win 11 VM recently using the KVM+QEMU route. I noticed that the VM's performance was quite responsive. KVM+QEMU despite all the pain felt worthy. I cannot recommend it enough.

Immediately I decided to remove Windows, install Debian with a Windows VM inside. I will write about various experiments and experiences over the next year. These are some of the sub-projects on my mind in no particular order.

  • Write about this setup
  • Implement a nice 3-2-1 backup strategy
  • Write about significant alternatives
  • Write about significant issues
  • Linking to phone
  • Configure monitoring, notifications and alerts
  • Configure auto dark mode
  • Find a way to play an old strategy game on Linux
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[–] mypasswordis1234@lemmy.world 1 points 31 minutes ago

For phone linking you can use KDE Connect (and GSConnect if you use GNOME)

[–] beliquititious@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Aw half the fun of linux is all the weird janky software some nerds felt strongly enough about to release.

Npp can be replaced by several different linux tools. You just have to like using the terminal a bit. Personally I get it. I know awk and sed and all those crunchy tools the olds made exist, but it's not a crime to have it all in one place in a gui. That said it npp 1000% works under wine. Sublime Text has a linux version and all the plugins you could ever want if you're willing to learn new ways of doing stuff you've already figured out. Vscodium is also a decent npp replacement. It's fast, has a cli, and a great plugin ecosystem.

Excel is all hype. Unless you're a data analyst or numbers nerd LibreOffice Calc has all the things. It's not as performant as excel with large datasets, but it has formulas, pivot tables (though somewhat weird), and macros. It's just ugly installed from the debian repo. Also if you're paying for office you can probably still use excel in the browser.

OneDrive sucks, unless you are committed to the Microsoft ecosystem. If you find a suitable replacement for excel, you could always cancel your office subscription and setup a nextcloud instance. You can have it all hosted for you through nextcloud and they have web based office tools using LibreOffice. Their syncing app works on everything so you've got options. Or you can try to self-host it. I have a raspberry pi with an external hard drive attached running nextcloud, and a vpn. Reasonably stable, if slow.

I hope that outside of Visual Studio, you can completely free yourself of the windows ecosystem.

[–] CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 7 points 19 hours ago

Aw half the fun of linux is all the weird janky software some nerds felt strongly enough about to release.

My favourites are the ones that just have a Github with absolutely no explanation of what the software does at all. It'll just be like "After two years, blurplr has been refactored to use the updated flerb library instead of flerbp, which is deprecated" and then just a link to a tarball.

[–] JOMusic@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I've also recently switched to Linux Mint as my daily driver. Linux + Open-Source is finally in a really good spot. I tell people that switching OSes always takes new learning, but a step-by-step approach is a sustainable one.

Whenever I go back to Windows and see news and ads popping up in my Start Menu, etc, I realize how much shit we were putting up with even pre-Copilot. That's not even including Microsoft Edge forcing itself back as a default program with each major update. It's like the word "consent" doesn't exist to those people.

[–] o1o12o21@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago

Yes, great times for us. It takes time to get up to speed, but the important thing is to keep at it.

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 35 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I just don't get the love for notepad++

I started using it as my main back in 2006ish, I then switched to sublime text about 2011, then about 5-6 years ago to VSCode. All the time using vim for any in-terminal quick edits.

Notepad++ is easily my least favourite editor of the lot, by several miles, it just seems so rigid and clunky without even going into how it's windows only. Every editor I've used since has been a huge improvement over the one prior IMO

[–] jollyrogue@lemmy.ml 1 points 8 hours ago

Agreed.

Vim/Neovim and Spacemacs (Emacs) are so much more addictive than NPP.

That’s cool if NPP is OP’s thing, but there are quite a few text editors which check those boxes in the *nix world.

[–] o1o12o21@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Agree on all counts about Notepad++ "oldness"

  • slower when we have 100 files open
  • clunky
  • rigid
  • old GUI paradigms ( settings modal, find modal etc)
  • inflexible and less customizable UI chrome area

Few things I like about Notepad++ enough to actually keep on using it on work workstations:

  • Plugins ecosystem. I am too entrenched into it.
    • PoormansSqlFormatter
    • Tidy2
    • JSTool
    • XML Tools
    • ComparePlus
    • TextFx2
  • great built-in editing operations Edit > EOL
  • great bookmarking operations
  • Very active development
  • Way faster than VS Code for text manipulation tasks

Geany with Plugins with is great but misses out on the above stuff

Sublime is the only one and I could use it for a serious amount of time. I only went back because I could not often get it installed in some enterprises.

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Cheers for the response, I appreciate it!

I'm curious about the plugins as obviously I'm not gonna be familiar with the notepad++ plugin ecosystem now—what's special about the ones you listed?

Assuming edit EOL is just changing the line termination characters, all editors have that don't they? Or does this not do what I think?

Intrigued about VSCode being slow for text manipulation too—I remember this being a big reason I dropped notepad++ for sublime and IMO VSCode and sublime more or less have parity on that front, particularly with vim bindings

[–] o1o12o21@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

VS Code has gotten really fast recently but it is more of a combination of having the right plugin (TextFX in this case) and the general fastness. Someone should ideally just port that TextFX. I thought about doing that a lot of times, but it was a lack of time + lack of skill issue :)

Again I do use VS Code for the occasional frontend work. It is great but for all heavy duty manipulation sometime really is off in VS Code. It could be that I haven't out of inertia tried too much.

I don't know if I can qualifiedly explain what it is about the plugins, they work well and have sane defaults. Notepad++ with all its custom panels, that plugins create a quite a clunkiness in there, but having those separate panels sometimes gives it a unique and flexible usage experience.

About the edit thing, there are just so many options that sometimes I forget that TextFx plugin exists. There are 100 or so options in that edit menu neatly categorized into sub menus like Insert, Copy, Indent, Line Operations, Blank Operations, Auto-completion, Paste Special, On Selection, Multi-select All, etc each having 5 to 7 operations.

Line Operations for example has these:

Duplicate Current Line
Remove Duplicate Lines
Remove Consecutives Duplicate Lines
Split Lines
Join Lines
...
Reverse Lines
Randomize Lines
...
Sort Lines Lexicographically Ascendlng

and 10 or more

Another great thing is the whole design and the options around managing bookmarks while searching. I should write a blog post on it :)

[–] fl42v@lemmy.ml 3 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Given those options, you may want to try vim :) It's a bit different in how you interact with it (pressing stuff on the keyboard instead of clicking stuff in menus, plus it's more of an imperative vs declarative approach, i.e. you tell vim how to do stuff instead of what you need to be done; the good part is being independent of what sb thought you may need to do, the bad -- having to learn editing primitives and stuff), but it can certainly do stuff you've mentioned, sometimes with some help from external programs:

  • dupcicate current line - yyp [(yy)ank_curren and (p)aste];
  • join lines depends on how you want to join them, in the simplest case it's J or gJ to join current line with the one below with or without space as a separator respectively. You can also combine it with :g or :v and norm or macros to make this edit on lines matching (g) or not (v) a specific regex (e.g. :g/join me/norm J will join all lines containing "join me" with that below). Splitting also depends;
  • reverse, randomize and sorting can be done via calling external stuff: v10j:.!tac will reverse 11 lines, including the one with the cursor, via calling (!) tac on the selection (v) of the current line and 10 below (10j) and pasting its output in the file you're editing (.) (it'll replace stuff you've selected). Replace tac with shuf or sort for the other options mentioned. Removing duplicates without sorting - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11532157/remove-duplicate-lines-without-sorting#11532197

Bonus: neovim integrates with vscode quite well, and on itself it handles reasonably huge files without an issue.

[–] o1o12o21@lemmy.ml 2 points 15 hours ago

Whoa, thank you for the elaboration. As I said in another comment, I was vim user for a short time but it may take a long time to use it again. I don't rule out vim from my OSS life. Who knows what will transpire :)

[–] Feyd@programming.dev 7 points 1 day ago

I never used npp as my code editor but as a secondary program that i kept notes in and would paste text in to manipulate then move back into code editor. It had a rich plugin ecosystem way before that was common. I use Kate for those purposes instead now

[–] zelifcam@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

I couldn’t agree more. I had a foot in both the MacOS and Microsoft Windows worlds at the time and can appreciate what a game changer notepad++ became. Having used BBEdit on the Mac since around the mid 90s, it was kinda more like “it’s about time” a decade later when notepad++ was released. I’m not necessarily comparing them feature to feature, but it was a much needed piece of software for Windows. I still have memories of opening up text files and being like … damn someone f’d this txt file up on a windows machine.. again.

[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Hello there!

It's funny, I just made the switch this Monday. I got fed up with Microsoft's bullshit being shoved down my throat. I was going to keep Windows 10 for as long as possible, but a recent update that installed Copilot on my machine was the last straw. I have been a Linux user since 2000 and have been using Ubuntu (and switching flavours) since 2004.

I had a big conversation on the Linux Gaming community about choosing a new distribution as a daily driver. You can see it here.

I wanted to get people's opinion and it started a big thread with lots of responses. It led me to try many distributions to see which ones would be the best fit and read a lot about people's experiences with them as well. In the end, I decided to stick with Kubuntu which was already installed as a dual boot on my system even though I didn't use it much except to tinker from time to time and it was doing a great job. Gaming on it was also working fantastically well. And I knew that every time I booted into it it would always work unless I really started messing with system files and didn't know what I was doing.

So Monday I had a day off and did the jump. Backed up my system, downloaded Kubuntu 24.04.1, booted off the USB stick and wiped the whole system clean.

But I learned something about Kubuntu (and Ubuntu in general) during that experience that made me regret keeping that distro. I knew that Canonical had developed their own sandboxed package system like Flatpak: Snaps. They were already available in 22.04, which I was running, but I didn't really pay attention. Upon installing Kubuntu 24.04, I realized just how much Canonical insisted that Snaps be used. Some software is now exclusively available as Snaps and nothing else. This unacceptable for me.

To be fair, Snaps aren't THAT bad. It's pretty comparable to Flatpak in general in terms of features except for the fact that they are stored locally in their compressed form while Flatpaks are uncompressed. So the startup time of Snaps is slower. But they both offer sandboxing and therefore an added layer of security. This is great for apps like internet clients (browsers, email, etc.) or even servers or any kind of software, especially in an immutable system meant for IoT. Baeldung's website explains the differences pretty well.

I'd probably use snaps for certain scenarios, but I think Canonical is pushing the limit by forcing people to use them. And also they've said they wouldn't support Flatpak in future releases, even though it has become very popular and is being adopted much more than Snaps by third party software providers. I'm fairly certain Snaps are going to go the same way as Bazaar and Unity over time. In any case, I've been able to get around Snaps enough that it's tolerable for the moment.

So now I've been considering starting over with Debian stable instead. I'm already used to Apt and .deb packages and the Debian way of doing things. I'm looking for stability over having the latest and greatest software and honestly, a 2 year release cycle is not that bad. Plus there's backports as well. Almost everyone is saying "Debian is too far behind! Packages are too old!" but what's "old" anyway? 6 months??? Honestly that's not a big deal for me. I just want my system to boot and be very confident that it'll work and won't break during my next apt-get upgrade. Debian offers this peace of mind. But, after using Ubuntu for so long with all its quality of life improvements, Debian looks pretty rough around the edges in comparison.

I think I'll stick with my Kubuntu for a bit and see how it goes and if I really get frustrated at Snaps, I'll switch to Debian. But, right now I've spent enough time setting up my system that I feel too lazy to switch.

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 4 points 1 day ago

“Debian is too far behind! Packages are too old!”

The best rule of thumb I've ever heard regarding Debian Stable is that if the kernel in stable's default repo fully supports ALL your hardware, and the software in stable's default repos fully support your workflows, it's fine.

If those are NOT true, then you probably don't want to use Stable, because you'll either end up fighting it via manually compiled and installed software, or you'll venture into so many 3rd party repos for updated packages that updating it later becomes problematic and prone to making the whole system catch fire and burn down.

[–] o1o12o21@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Thank you for sharing your experience. I never distro-hopped much, but still got to try Ubuntu a few times while always using Debian Testing. After a point, I had all the things I needed on Debian Stable and the few that I needed, I learnt how to use backports or makedeb etc. Kubuntu is pretty great. My own Debian journey was probably like Lubuntu > Mint > Debian Testing for a long time > Debian Stable rest of the life. If it works for you Kubuntu is still great. No need to switch to Debian unless there is a strong reason.

As for flatpak and snap, I have my reservations. I go out of my way to avoid them and find either packaged version or try the source install. However, I am not completely averse to them. I still think if someday I need flatpak only software in my workflow, I would have no qualms to use it.

[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 2 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

I felt the same way about the flatpaks and snap. But having used flatpaks a bit I realized how great it is for desktop apps.

What I like the most is that you don't have to pull in a ton of dependencies for them to run. For example, when using a Gnome app in KDE.

I also appreciate the sandboxing. Especially for web clients like Firefox and Discord for example. I'm using Flatseal to configure the app permissions like you would Android apps. And the Flathub acts like an app store. The software there is often more recent than what's in the repo.

I highly recommend it.

[–] o1o12o21@lemmy.ml 2 points 14 hours ago

Glad to know your experience. Once I have the stable resilient setup I will definitely explore flatpaks. Thank you again!

[–] halm@leminal.space 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Welcome to the resistance! 😄

I did pretty much similar as you, but about a decade ago. Was it really Windows 8 at the time? 7 perhaps? Even then the OS was becoming increasingly bloated, and crudely implementing channels for Microsoft to milk data from users.

For me it wasn't so much editors and development environment that kept me around, but the Adobe suite — specifically the lack of CMYK support in FLOSS alternatives. In the end I was quite happy to just find workarounds for the few print jobs I would have to do.

Quite often I think people are less resisting a new OS environment than the software available. "I couldn't use the same shortcuts in [FLOSS package] as in [proprietary software], so I went back to Windows"...

I'm not exactly a hardcore Excel user myself, but I'd be interested to hear how your transition to LibreOffice (I guess the most viable alternative?) will work out.

[–] o1o12o21@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Thank you for the welcome :)

My rationalization for LibreOffice Calc is — As I see it, I have never used too many formulas and the complex reporting, but for organizing data. For example, I had a sheet called large-purchases where I had listed down all the things I want to buy, and then tracked things estimated price, actually price, total amount remaining, etc. If you see, it is just a database table with a fancy entry and some calculations. So Calc can do all that simply and for something more, I can either learn more of Calc and/or just use a db and turn it into simple personal app.

[–] halm@leminal.space 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, that was my thinking — that for most purposes LibreOffice will replace Microsoft Office fairly well. But I'm always keen to hear what bumps people run into when they switch from the latter. For you it seems there haven't been any worth mentioning?

Glad to hear it's gone so smoothly!

[–] o1o12o21@lemmy.ml 2 points 23 hours ago

Yeah, my usage was not particularly deep. It would take while to see any issue, if at all. I would certwinly post here if there are any major troubles.

[–] nek0d3r@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This has been a dream of mine and one of my friend's as well. There's a small handful of blockers that I've slowly been transitioning but the upcoming windows pain points you mentioned are definitely recent motivators for me. I'm glad you made it and I hope the rest of us can too! I look forward to reading more about your experience.

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[–] MrCamel999@programming.dev 8 points 1 day ago

If you absolutely need functionality of some Windows only applications on Linux, it's a bit clunky, but a solution exists to use a VM to integrate the Windows apps into your Linux environment. It's called winapps, and I use it to run the latest version of Excel, which I do need for some things. Here's their GitHub: https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 11 points 1 day ago (9 children)

Many many years ago I switched from OS X back to Linux and had to find alternatives: https://jeena.net/why-i-switchedfrom-osx-to-linux

For the three software you point as a must have there are alternatives, even those you'd not think of:

  • Visual Studio - Stop writing .NET web applications, there are so many other web frameworks around you don't really need .NET
  • Notepad++ - It's a steep learning curve but Vim and Emacs give you all and more freedom than Notepad++
  • Excel - You can use the 365 version in the browser, that is what I do at work
  • OneDrive works through the browser again, but there are alternatives like Nextcloud, Syncthing, Seafile
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[–] AndrasKrigare@beehaw.org 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Also made the switch not too long ago, only using Manjaro. Steam's proton had gotten extremely good at playing Windows games, so there's a good chance that it could run your old strategy game.

You might already have this on your set-up, but having wine auto-launch for Windows executables has been fantastic. I regularly pull and run Windows executables without really giving it a second thought, and so far it's generally "just worked."

[–] communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Manjaro

I highly recommend avoiding manjaro like the plague, their team is incredibly incompetent (see: https://manjarno.pages.dev/ ), I say this as someone who has given people manjaro for years and regretted it, I was also their it person, manjaro regularly broke every few months and gave people a very bad taste of linux

for example, why are kernels given version numbers in packages? This caused 3 separate peoples computers to break multiple times. Everything good about manjaro comes from arch, everything bad about manjaro comes from the manjaro team.

Y’know how it’s not rolling release because they delay packages by 2 weeks? They actually do no testing in this time. How do I know this? They pushed an update that caused steam to uninstall your desktop environment. Famously covered by linus tech tips… this is something that should have easily been caught, and yet the two week window did absolutely nothing.

the truth is for manjaro there is no real usecase, there’s no set of desires that align with manjaro being the best choice for you. I am not asking you to switch away from manjaro, but I do not think we should ever recommend it to anyone, and on your next machine, I recommend trying the arch installer.

But if what you’re looking for is an easy pre-setup arch, use endeavoros

If you want something simple and up to date, use fedora kinoite

If you’re a power user and want to configure every little thing about their system, use arch or nixos

If you don’t care at all about updates and want the most rock solid system possible, debian.

[–] n2burns@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I agree with your reservation about Manjaro. However, you did get one thing wrong:

They pushed an update that caused steam to uninstall your desktop environment. Famously covered by linus tech tips…

That was Pop!_OS (unless it happened a second time??)

[–] communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 3 points 1 day ago

You're right, my bad, I misremembered!

[–] o1o12o21@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It is a steam game, so I know that it should technically work. I haven't gotten around to actually installing steam yet. Some day in a year or so ;)

[–] pbjamm@beehaw.org 2 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Installing Steam is easy-peasy and well worth it. The only issues I have had so far with Proton is that the convoluted file structure makes it hard to remember where to put manually installed gamed mods for BeamNG.

[–] o1o12o21@lemmy.ml 1 points 14 hours ago

Thank you for the vote of confidence. Glad to know it is easy. I play it at a glacial pace, probably once or twice a year, so I have many months before I embark on that journey.

[–] foster@lemmy.fosterhangdaan.com 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (12 children)

Notepad++ is a fabulous software program that had no complete alternatives on Linux. I used it for scripting, text manipulation, note taking, dumping and editing thoughts. Scintilla-based equivalents Geany, SciTE exist, but do not come close.

Really? No alternatives on Linux? Have you tried Emacs? I think Emacs with Org mode blows Notepad++ out of the water in all the uses you just mentioned.

[–] zenharbinger@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Not free, but I love sublime text.

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