hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4094.txt

Episode: 4094
Title: HPR4094: One year of Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4094/hpr4094.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:32:40

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4194 for Thursday 11 April 2024.
Today's show is entitled One Year of Linux.
It is hosted by Daniel Persson, and is about 17 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, my experience of running Linux full-time for a year.
Hello Hacker's, and welcome to another episode.
And I'm going to talk about my experience of running Linux full-time for a whole year.
And this experience was something that started with me running Windows,
and not being really satisfied with the operation of the Windows.
I was pretty much fed up with how Windows worked, so I said,
OK, I will try Linux for a while and see how that works.
I have already ran Linux in my work environment for many years,
because when it comes to work, you need some system that is snappy,
and can just do the things that you need to do in order to actually accomplish your work,
and don't need any extra bells and whistles and so on.
And I heard that Linux was better now when it comes to gaming.
It was more suited to everyday tasks and so on.
So I thought, OK, I want to try it out, and I want to run it for a year or so,
and see if I like it and if I'm going to continue with it.
So let's go through a couple of pros when it comes to running Linux in your desktop environment.
So the first pro is the speed.
Everything is so much faster.
It boots faster and it's faster to use.
Everything is snappy and it just works.
I run a lot of virtual machines that they boot really quickly in Linux,
and everything is just more in tune to doing work.
And there isn't a bunch of background processes that you need to tune and remove
because a bunch of different software is installing a bunch of stuff
that you don't really have control over.
So being able to actually install what you need
and having a very lean environment and have something that is speedy
is something that I really appreciate.
Next up, we have stability.
And the big thing here is that I can, in some cases, run really long jobs.
So I can run some machine learning tasks.
I might do some OCR.
I might do a bunch of things that will run for a longer time.
And I need the system to be stable and up.
And the biggest problem I have had during the time now
is that I have power outages sometimes.
So my power has been a little bit wonky lately.
So I'm actually going to try to fix that with the UPS for my machine as well
because I'm running these kind of longer tasks sometimes.
And in Windows, it will reboot you without asking any questions.
And you can say, well, I'm a company.
You should ask me at least 30 days in advance.
But when that time is up, it will reboot your machine,
even though you don't want it.
And I think that that kind of sentiment,
that kind of thinking is just not okay.
If I don't want to reboot my machine,
even though there is security updates and everything like that,
I'm behind a firewall and I can make that choice.
I know that some people and some users will never reboot their system
if they are not asked to do so.
And for those kind of people,
I understand that it could be a good thing.
But I should be able to turn it off.
And I haven't found the solution for that in Windows.
So that is a really big complaint when it comes to that.
Next up is simplicity.
I have spent so much time to get my machine learning tasks up and running,
get QDAN installed and working in Windows.
And there have been so much work going into just running basic tasks,
compiling stuff and so on.
And in Linux, everything just works.
You can compile whatever you want, QDAN installed,
your graphics driver, your work,
and everything is just built in and stable,
which is so much easier to work with.
And there is no real hard problem there.
And when I want to work with my other machine,
I could bridge things with SSH and open Windows
and use my environment much more simply.
There is bridging software in Windows,
but PUTT does not do a really good job.
So you really need to figure out a bunch of extra solutions
that you don't really need in Linux to accomplish the same thing.
And one thing that I feel in Windows is that there is an application
for everything, but you need to find it and install it.
But much of the things that you need for the kind of work that I do
is already available in Linux.
So don't really need to hunt them down and figure out how they work.
And it's so much easier to build products.
I've already talked about that.
And we also have a really good native support for Docker
and rounding Docker images.
So that is so much easier when you are testing things for work
and you're building Docker images in order to make them production ready.
You have that built in already.
And the communication with my SEF environments,
I have a SEF file system where I store all my Windows videos
and everything else that I want to do backups for that is rock solid.
There is a Windows implementation and it works sometimes,
but it's not rock solid.
So there again, another really great, really, really great pro
for the Linux environment.
And next up, we have no disturbances.
And that is also extremely important for me.
Because when it comes to the Windows environment,
you have this notification bar.
And I have turned it off so many times.
And every update it turns on again.
And you get a bunch of popups and a bunch of information
all the time that you don't really need or want.
And you get this with the widgets that you need to remove
and everything like that.
And all this extra information that you just don't need.
In Linux, it's one button click.
I'm not going to want to be disturbed.
And everything just disappears.
And you can focus on your work and do what is actually important.
And if you need information, you can hunt it down.
But you don't get hassled with it all the time.
Another thing is that there is no annoying
antivirus that is just removing applications for you
that you are working with and so on.
And one thing that I was trying to do earlier
was download Spinrite in order to run it on my machine.
And Spinrite was so new.
It had this really great license
and everything it was encrypted and everything
was signed and so on from Microsoft.
But it's still flagged it and removed it on my machine.
So I couldn't even download it.
So I have to go into Linux to download the software
in order to install it, which is just so strange.
It's one thing to warn you and quarantine thing
but just don't say that you don't want to download something
that is taking things too far.
So that was a bunch of pros for the Linux environment.
There is, of course, a couple of cons.
And let's go through those now.
So the main con of a Linux environment is the games,
the gaming environment and so on.
It's harder.
I can't say anything else.
It's harder to run games in Linux.
Most of the games are supported out of the box.
Most of the games, the only thing you need to say
that I want to use this in a compatibility mode
and just proton and it will work.
I think you can pretty much forget about anything
that has an online service where a bunch of kids
are cheating all over the place.
Because when it comes to that,
the companies have built strong protections
in these anti-sheet software
and none of them work in Linux.
So when it comes to older games,
when it comes to games that are just normal offline enjoyment,
then it just works for you.
In some cases, you need to look at proton DB
and do some small tweaks.
But I have played a bunch of games,
not the latest games, the games from this year
or something like that.
But I've played Cyberpunk.
I've played Tomb Raider.
I've played Assassin's Creed.
I've played a bunch of different games
and they just work.
So there is not that much problematic
problems to get games working,
but you need to be a little bit more selective
of what you actually play and check up
if it actually works for you.
The next con is video creation.
And it's not really a bad thing.
I can make my videos now.
I'm using OBS and I'm using Davinci Resolve.
Before I used Vmix and Adobe Premiere,
I have changed applications totally
when I went over to Linux.
I think I started using Davinci Resolve
a little bit earlier before I actually made a switch
because Premiere was just so, so expensive
to actually have a license on.
And I really didn't want to pay for it anymore.
And Davinci Resolve is, in my opinion,
a really great software.
Even the free license is really nice.
And I have paid for the pro license as well
because I use it a lot.
But the sad part is Vmix.
They don't have any Linux support.
Vmix is a really cool streaming platform
where you have so much functionality and so on.
And I bought a license for it.
And I bought this perpetual license.
I actually have the license to use it
until I think 10 years from now or even longer.
So I have a really great license
that I could use if I want to for Vmix.
But I don't because I don't have Windows environment anymore.
A little bit sad, but OBS works most of the time
and does most of the work for me.
There have been some glitches in upgrades and so on
and they have the tendency to turn off my mic.
It's very annoying to record a full video without sound
and then have to go back and record it again.
And it happens on every reboot.
And it's, I don't know why.
It's so strange that it's just when I reboot the machine,
it stops working for some other reason.
And another thing is that I can't run Windows native
applications of course.
In some cases I find a really cool applications
that I want to try out.
Can't run it locally so I need to start a virtual machine
and run it there.
And in some cases it doesn't even work there
because it needs some access to particular drivers
that are only available in Windows and so on.
So some small things there have been a little bit annoying.
So not a big, huge thing, but some native applications
I would like to try out and they are only available in Windows.
Next up we have a big one I think
and this is the VR support.
Not everyone has a VR headset.
I have one, play a lot of Beat Saber
and my kids also like to play VR from time to time.
And this is an experience that I want to enable
to my kids because I think that
not perhaps the implementation that I have
but I think that VR will be something
or something similar will be something that is
just an experience you have in the future.
And having that experience early when you can,
I think that is really great.
I have had my headset in four years.
It was present to myself a bunch of years ago.
And so not running the games in Linux is a little bit sad.
I can run Beat Saber but I need to run it
in the old version before they switched over to using
the new engine.
I don't remember if they are which engine they went over to
but the old engine works, the new engine doesn't.
If I want I could probably figure out
how to run the new game as well
but it is a hassle because
VR support is not really there in Linux at the moment.
So currently when my kids want to play
I have to reboot to Windows and go through
all the updates and all the other things
that I will need to do in order to get
a Windows environment that works
when you haven't touched it for six months.
So that's a little bit sad.
Then we have the familiarity con.
And this is something that I'm not really familiar
with Linux at the moment
and with a little bit annoying to find
setting sometimes.
So settings files could be in strange places.
Finding your steam directory was a little bit
of a hassle in the beginning and so on.
So it's not really that it's super hard
it's just that I'm not a Linux native yet.
I think I need a couple of more years
or at least one year before I figure out
where everything is stored and so on.
It's really great that it can change
all the configurations settings everywhere
but sometimes it can be a little bit hard to find them.
And last but not least bugs.
Windows has bugs.
I would not say that it's bug free
but I have found more bugs in Linux.
So I had some unstable updates.
I'm not running a bunch of LTS.
It's long time support.
I'm running it in a way that I'm installing
the latest of every time.
And of course that means that I will get some bugs sometimes.
So it's a little bit unstable in some cases
and it's not really unstable in the way
that applications crash or anything like that.
But after an upgrade I can have some driver issues
and so on.
And I also noticed that my web camera
sometimes bugs out after I've used some application.
So when I come back to a conference call
with my colleagues for instance,
I might be required to turn the camera off
and turn it on again in order for it to be found
in Linux and actually work in that environment.
So this was what I wanted to cover today.
I have talked about my experience of running Linux
for a whole year.
And I hope that you found this interesting.
I hope that you learned something today.
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