2023 - The Year Of The Linux Desktop?

It’s been said once or twice that this is the year of the Linux desktop. While it certainly hasn’t happened yet, the Linux desktop experience has definitely changed for the better since I started using Slackware in the mid 90s. Hell, you don’t even need to know how to compile your own kernel anymore in order to get a good experience out of the box. So, progress!

Over the years, I’ve often felt the urge to install a new distribution and see how things have changed. Normally, these tend to be pretty short-lived experiments. I’ve always hit a wall of some sort, whether it’s the lack of a certain piece of software that I consider indispensable (normally a game of some sort), or the configuration of the desktop gets a bit too awkward (too many config files leading to instability). The only exceptions to this have been my trusty laptop of the last few years, which has been running Ubuntu happily since I got it, and the myriad of Raspberry Pis I have floating around the house doing all sorts of random things.

Time For A Change⌗

So clearly, given that I’m writing a post about this, something happened that made me reconsider my choice of OS. What could have driven me to such a thing? There are two main factors. The first reason is one that I’m going to go into in another post, but TL;DR - games generally take more effort to get working properly on Linux (which is amusing, given the reason I listed above for stopping using Linux in the past!).

The second is the oft-reported Windows 11 future that looms before us Windows users. Unlike a lot of long-standing (read: older) techies, I don’t have a particular problem with Windows or Microsoft. I don’t call them M$, or call it Windoze. I do sometimes use the term Internet Exploder though because that’s just funny. But their tools and operating systems have always been pretty good. Perfect? Fuck no. And we should do our best to wipe Windows 8 from the memory of mankind.

But their stuff has nearly always been a damn sight better than the other options when it comes to usability and ergonomics. Visual Studio has always been miles ahead of other IDEs, particularly when it comes to Intellisense and debugging. Some people may like working with toolchains and editors that are literally decades old, and that’s fine, but it certainly doesn’t mean that Microsoft products are all shit.

Windows 11 is changing that though. The apparent constant stream of ads in the OS itself (you know, the one you paid for)? Unacceptable. Constantly nagging to change browsers to theirs (if they even bother asking you in the first place)? They paid a lof of money in fines for that behaviour a long time ago, and it hasn’t aged well since then. Plus the taskbar weirdness is just one big WTF. It seems they’re so determined to shove a particular paradigm down our throats that they’re at risk of running an Apple-style walled garden. Yes, I know they’re fixing it, but for a long time, the only option was to run a 3rd-party hack bit of software to revert it to how it used to look - much like changing your desktop environment in Linux.

So with these things in mind, I felt it was time to go through the (potential) pain of an OS change. Again.

Picking A Distribution⌗

But of course, it’s not that simple in Linux-land. Because while there’s only one Linux, there’s about 592,142 different Linux distributions and desktop environments (DEs). Ubuntu is probably the most widely-known distro for desktop use. It also happens to be the distro that I use on my laptop, running the Gnome DE. There are plenty of other options though, so I wanted to do a bit of research before diving into one.

Having used KDE before, I wanted to stay away from it, as I’d had a bad run in with some config files basically borking the whole DE. While I liked the look and feel of Gnome, there’s a long history of the Gnome devs screwing over their users and having a lousy attitude (a quick Kagi brings up a bunch of hits, this is left as an exercise for the reader), so I wanted to avoid a pure Gnome DE. Pop OS seems kind of cute, but the one that jumped out from my original evening’s worth of reading was Mint’s Cinnamon DE.

Yes, I know, I said I wanted to avoid Gnome, but this one looks pretty nice and it’s actually forked from Gnome, so not subject to the same things happening (I hope to $DEITY that that’s true!). It looks similar to the normal Windows DE that I’m used to, so not too much of a learning curve there. Mint seems to not be universally hated, so, armed with a 32GB USB stick and a downloaded distro ISO, off I went!

First Impressions⌗

Ignoring how long it took me to work out how to enable USB-booting in my BIOS (an embarrassingly long time as it turns out), the first thing that sprang to mind was “holy shit, this is fast”. I’m running a reasonably decent bit of kit, but even so, the time to get to the main desktop screen is impressive. This is off the USB drive too, so there’s no mucking around. A positive first sign.

The DE itself is pretty uncluttered when you first start - a couple of pinned icons on the taskbar, a couple of system-tray panel icons in the lower right, and for the rest, just a nice clean desktop¹. Firefox is installed by default, and springs into action quickly to get things up and moving. A quick play around with some of the settings to see what’s there (including fractional scaling, yay), and it was enough to convince me that this was definitely worth moving forward with.

Installation - Full Speed Ahead⌗

Whenever I try out a new Linux distro, I always put it on a completely separate drive so that the bootloader doesn’t end up clobbering what Microsoft have got in place on the main Windows C: drive. I can then switch the boot drive in the BIOS to point to the Linux drive with GRUB on it, and if I ever need to roll it all back, just switch the boot disk back again in the BIOS. All very neat and tidy².

The Mint installation is pretty pain free. It asks the usual questions about time zones, default user name, keyboard layout, and a few other vital things. The most important is the hard drive partition, but being lazy, I just let it do what it needed to with the whole of the 1TB I’d allocated for the installation. GRUB was installed onto the same drive as outlined above.

Within a couple of minutes, the new OS was installed. A quick reboot later, and…. everything’s just there. Working. No issues or anything. It’s found the printer on the network, and is taking me through some basic setup steps. I adjust a couple of settings to my liking, then download all the latest updates.

Another reboot and all is still well. I go a step further and try to install a couple of key bits of software that I use regularly in my Windows daily workflow. The App Store throws up the first challenge - should I use FlatPaks or not? Having encountered some odd bits of behaviour with Canonical Snaps, I’m a bit reluctant at first, but then take the plunge anyway. This is all a bit of an experiment, so in for a penny, etcetc.

Soon, I’ve got nearly all of it going nicely. Syncthing is syncing away, I have some IDEs setup (with settings synced between the old Windows install and the new one), I’ve adjusted the terminal to my liking, picking Tilix as my weapon of choice. It’s all looking great! Apart from a weird bit of flickering at the top of the screen sometimes…

All The Small Things⌗

There’s always a few things that go wrong with a new Linux installation. The real things to consider though are a) how many things went wrong, and b) how seriously did they fuck things up?

First up, the screen flickering. It wasn’t terrible, but enough that I’d sometimes notice it from the corner of my eye. The cause? The latest NVidia drivers have some kind of bug in them. Reverting to an older version got rid of the problem, and since I’m not gaming on this beast, I’m happy enough to wait until it’s fixed before upgrading. So not a biggie at all.

Next, how do I get hold of my Windows files? There’s a lot of stuff on a pair of mirrored spinning disks, including music and photos. There’s not enough room for them on the new SSD, so I need to dredge up how to mount the mirror properly. This kind of thing is always a bit hard to find out about, but once you know how it works, it’s pretty straightforward. It certainly isn’t a deal-breaker, but if Linux wants to capture disgruntled Windows users, they should find a way to make this even easier.

The last thing is arguably the most annoying. Some bits of software still don’t have Linux equivalents. This is, on balance, altogether unsurprising, given the market share that the Linux desktop has. In my case, the two main offenders were the Adobe Creative Products (for mangling editing photos) and Media Monkey 5 (managing my music collection and syncing Bandcamp purchases to my iPod). Of course, a quick Kagi reveals that many enterprising people have managed to get these working via Wine, so maybe all hope is not lost yet. But this is something to do at my leisure.

All in all, a few minor annoyances, but nothing too dramatic.

All’s Well That Ends⌗

So after a couple of days of setting things up just the way I like, I’ve got a fully functional Linux desktop environment, and it’s actually working. Part of me still can’t actually quite believe it, given the first experience I had of it all back in the Slackware days. For years, I conditioned myself to believe that it just couldn’t ever work properly, there were always issues, you’d need to hack the kernel yourself, and every time you got a new graphics card, you’d have to wait months before you could get it working properly.

Those days are long gone though from what I can see. I’ve typed this post up completely from the new DE with not a care in the world. In fact, as noted above, it feels very responsive, much better than I ever could have hoped for. Being the grumpy bastard that I am, a decent chunk of me is still expecting things to fall over at some point in the next few weeks, forcing me to turn tail and head back to the Land of Redmond. But for the first time in, literally, decades, I’m also equally confident that things will keep working properly, a genuinely good outcome after years of waiting.

Does that mean that 2023 or 2024 will be the year of the Linux Desktop? I fucking doubt it, but stranger things have happened…

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1. It’s so very nearly empty! Just one icon that will install the distro if you double-click it. Go on, you know you want to! ↩︎

2. I used to go even further and unplug the Windows drive when just installing Linux, I was paranoid that I’d accidentally wipe out the wrong drive and install Linux over the top of Windows! ↩︎