In January I finally made good on my threat/promise to install Linux on my desktop. I wanted to see how far I could get using a Linux PC as my main computer without doing a bunch of research beforehand or troubleshooting afterwards. Since then I have booted into Windows exactly twice: once to scan a multipage document that wasn’t scanning right in Linux, and once to print a photo for my kids’ school on extremely short notice. There’s a reason it’s taken me three months to write the next installment in my Linux diary: nothing has gone horribly wrong.
It didn’t take long for my Linux install to stop feeling new and exciting and start feeling like, well, my computer. It’s not exactly like a less annoying version of Windows, though it is less annoying than Windows, but it’s been a much easier transition than I thought it would be. There are a few extra steps sometimes in finding and installing apps — usually it’s easier than in Windows, and occasionally it’s harder. And there are a few apps I still haven’t been able to replicate in Linux. I’ve also had a smattering of fun bugs, and a few genuinely frustrating moments, but the overall experience is a lot calmer and more robust than I expected. Even troubleshooting is (mostly) satisfying in a weird way.
Fortunately, everything that’s gone wrong so far has only gone slightly wrong, like a gaming mouse that only works in games, and most of it has been pretty funny, like a gaming mouse that only works in games. Some of it has to do with specific hardware I’m using, or specific choices I made. (Keeping my nemesis, the HP OfficeJet 8720 printer, for one.) Some of it has to do with the fact that I deliberately chose a relatively new rolling distribution based on Arch Linux rather than a more mainstream distribution with a predictable release cycle, like Ubuntu.
Here’s my favorite fix so far. CachyOS comes with Snapper, a built-in imaging service that stores snapshots of the OS before you install or update a program, so you can roll back if something goes wrong. It defaults to saving 50 snapshots, which are stored in the boot partition. When I installed CachyOS, I went with the recommended size for that partition, which was 2GB. That filled up pretty quickly, and after a few weeks Snapper started warning me that it had run out of space and wouldn’t be taking any more snapshots (It defaults to 50, but didn’t have room to store 50 snapshots). CachyOS has since changed its installer to default to a 4GB partition, but it was too late to help me. There was only one thing to do: boot back into the live image, shrink my rightmost partition by 2GB, and slide every volume on the disk to the right of the boot partition over by 2GB, one at a time, to make room to expand the boot partition. It’s silly that I had to do that but it was easy enough, and kinda satisfying in a tactile way.
In January, I noticed I couldn’t get an IP address from my router on my ethernet connection after waking from sleep unless I first connected to Wi-Fi. This drove me up the goddamn wall. Fortunately, I could keep using the computer while troubleshooting because I do have both Wi-Fi and ethernet, but I prefer ethernet, so I had to fix it. I learned the default driver that the Linux kernel uses for my particular ethernet card doesn’t always work well, so I installed a new driver. I turned off ipv6, then turned it back on again. I made sure my wired and wireless connections identified themselves as different devices to the router, though that didn’t help. I set a static IP on both the router and computer side. I extended my DHCP lease timeout. Finally I found the actual culprit.
Several years ago, in an effort to get my multigenerational Sonos speakers to play nicely with my Unifi router (it’s a whole thing), I followed some advice on a forum and enabled STP — an older port-scanning protocol — on my networking switch. This was fine for my Windows PC, but in Linux it made getting an IP address from the router take so long every time that the ethernet card gave up. Disabling it fixed the problem with my desktop and finally got the Era 100 in my kitchen showing up consistently in the Sonos app. Figuring out how to solve a problem on an OS I’d used for a few weeks fortuitously solved a problem I’d created trying to solve a different problem on a different OS a few years ago. We learn by doing!
My current gremlin is that the mic on my Logitech Brio webcam doesn’t always transmit sound. Sometimes nobody can hear me from the get-go; other times it stops working in between one meeting and the next, and lately it’s been cutting out mid-sentence. This is probably because I installed EasyEffects, but I’m not sure yet. I have another microphone — and also other computers, if really necessary. If I didn’t, I would probably be more annoyed. Maybe annoyed enough to fix it.
On the other hand, sometimes problems solve themselves if you wait. I wanted to find a way to add text extraction to the screenshot utility in KDE Plasma — a feature I missed from other operating systems. The solution was to wait a week until Cachy updated to Plasma 6.6, which added that feature. Score another point for laziness.
When I last wrote about my experience with CachyOS, I bemoaned the absence of the Arc browser. Several readers pointed me to Zen, which is basically Arc but open-source and built on Firefox, and it is indeed good enough. Thank you, readers. I also grabbed a Spotify client from the Arch User Repository. I set up git and finally recompiled the ZMK firmware for my number pad. I even got ZMK Studio — a GUI keymap editor — working. In lieu of Photoshop, I’ve been using the Photopea web app. It’s probably not load-bearing if I have to edit a bunch of photos, but so far I haven’t had to.
I didn’t end up installing howdy for webcam facial-recognition unlocking because it doesn’t seem to be as secure as Windows Hello. Windows Hello uses infrared 3D face mapping; by the developer’s own admission, howdy can apparently be fooled by a photo. I’m not worried about my kids printing photos of me so they can run sudo commands on my computer, but for now I’m typing my password every time. Microsoft and Apple have put a lot of money into nailing biometric authentication, and the Linux approach of “hoping someone volunteers to make this” really does put the ecosystem at a disadvantage. Fingerprint authentication seems to work fine, but my desktop doesn’t have a fingerprint reader.
Cachy is working fine for gaming, with the caveat that I am still not playing competitive multiplayer games or anything requiring anti-cheat — or anything that’s really pushing my RTX 4070 Super, for that matter. I got Minecraft: Bedrock Edition working with MCPE Launcher; all I had to do was enable remote login and disable vibrant visuals. My kids kind of fell off of Minecraft but we had a few good weeks there. I’ve also played a bit of Hardspace: Shipbreaker, Esoteric Ebb (great game), Caves of Qud (live and drink), and Baldur’s Gate 3 (just a little). They’ve all run fine. I played Hardspace through the Heroic Games Launcher, and the rest through Steam.
Last time, I mentioned a weird bug where my ancient gaming mouse only worked in games, and not outside of them. It is apparently fixable, but I replaced it anyway with a Keychron M5 vertical mouse, which has been great both in and out of game and has largely replaced my trackball, to my surprise.
Current regret level: still zero
You might ask: why would I put up with a computer that I had to cajole into getting its wired ethernet working, that sometimes completely forgets about the mic on my webcam, that refuses to sleep for unknown reasons at unpredictable intervals? It’s because those are outliers. It mostly just works, and figuring out how to fix the things that don’t is fun.
I was happy on Windows until I wasn’t. I liked Windows! I have been using it since I was a kid, and I’ve been building my own desktops for close to 20 years. I wasn’t the one who decided to ruin the Start menu by making it search Bing instead of my files; I didn’t break indexing; I didn’t rename the app that launches Office documents so many times the computer forgot how to open Word documents. I didn’t opt in to any of that. My choices didn’t make Windows worse. It’s not fun to fix Windows when it breaks because Microsoft is shipping its org chart.
But if my browser in Linux can’t find my webcam mic because I installed EasyEffects without bothering to read the docs, brother, that’s on me. Similarly, if half my operating system is in French all of a sudden, c’est parce que j’ai l’ajouté. I opted in to this situation; it wasn’t foisted on me. It’s the difference between running because you want to go for a run and running because you’re late for the train.
Linux is built on the Unix philosophy: it’s made up of lots of little pieces of modular software that each do one thing well, rather than huge monolithic programs that try to do everything for everyone. It’s like a box of Lego, rather than an action figure. I’m having a great time with metaphors today. The skills I build by figuring out how to install a spellchecker, or change drivers, or add a software repository, or configure git, are transferable to the rest of the OS and a lot of the software as well. I think that’s neat.
I have not totally gone away from Windows. My laptop still runs on Windows for now, and I do have to hand it to Microsoft: the Surface Pro is a great tablet computer. Of course, it would be even better if Windows were less annoying, but Microsoft is aware. And I need to be current with Windows for my job. But it turns out I don’t need to run Windows on my desktop, and I’m having more fun with Linux, so I’m gonna keep at it.
