Further on my Linux journey: Ubuntu on a laptop

First, I decided to switch to Linux. I have to tell you: I’m so glad I did. It’s not just the sheer relief from the knowledge that I’m not being monitored by Microsoft or carefully controlled by Apple. I’ll admit, that’s probably the biggest advantage to Linux for me. But I really, truly find Linux Ubuntu (that’s the distro I’m using) running the Gnome desktop environment (this is actually the thing that has 80% of the “look-and-feel” we associate with operating systems) to be significantly easier to use (and faster, and less frustrating). Of course, we’re all different and your mileage may vary.

But after having used it some more, and having also installed another distro, I’m not sure Linux is quite ready for grandma yet—not unless she’s rather technical, is eager to commit a fair bit of new stuff to memory, or has easy and quick sources of help. I do stand by my claim that Linux is ready for prime time, but only if you use one of the more user-friendly distros. If you’re a “power user,” i.e., if you are not necessarily a programmer but do know your way around a computer pretty well, if following technical instructions to solve problems doesn’t bother you too much, then you should really seriously consider trying out Mint or Ubuntu. The cool thing is that you can try it out before you take the leap, either with a live boot (i.e., it lives on a thumb drive; this is probably easier) or a virtual machine.

Then when I went on some trips and a month ago I had a serious moment of disgust with my Apple laptop. I mean, ugh, there were so many things I have come to dislike about the Apple scene, but after enjoying daily life with Ubuntu, when I switched to Apple while on the road, I just could not get over how damned clunky the thing is. It looks pretty and costs too much, but god, so much about it is, in the vernacular of my teen years, totally bogus.

So then I decided, OK, I’m going to dual boot on my MacBook Pro, too, i.e., run both OS X and Linux on the same machine, in different partitions. I had it narrowed down to distros like Arch, Manjaro, and openSUSE; I wanted to try something that wasn’t Ubuntu, just for the experience.

Well, last week, I finally bit the bullet and put Manjaro on the machine. (This time I insisted on doing most of the hard work, instead of leaving it to my 12-year-old son, who has been using Linux daily for longer than I have.) Installing wasn’t that hard, actually; it really wasn’t significantly harder than installing Ubuntu. While most things worked, I ran into a series of problems I won’t bore you with; suffice it to say that I ended up installing Manjaro twice and rebooted it endless times while trying different drivers and Grub parameters and stuff. I worked very diligently until an experienced Linux user told me that I shouldn’t even try to put any Linux distro on a new MacBook (mine is from 2018) because so many of the device drivers are simply unsupported. That was a huge let-down. Even my Linux geek son couldn’t figure out the issues. I told my wife I’d just sell it, but she said to give it to the boys since the old laptop they’re sharing (another old one of mine) has a screen that often didn’t work properly.

By then, I had also decided I didn’t like Manjaro much (or maybe it was the XFCE desktop environment). In any event, I had enough hours on Manjaro to have learned that mastering two different flavors of Linux at once was going to be a serious pain without any compensatory advantage.

So I ended up shopping around and getting a decent Windows machine, a Samsung Notepad 9, and did a clean install (i.e., wiped Windows entirely) of Ubuntu again. I mean, if I’m going to learn Linux properly, might as well do it completely in one distro before branching out too much. The installation process was pretty painless—seriously, so much easier and more pleasant than setting up a new Windows machine.

So now I’m 100% Linux (and 100% Ubuntu with Gnome), and I’m not looking back. I’m so done with Windows and Mac. Now I’m just looking forward to implementing yet more ways to lock down my cyber-life.

(Wait…100% except for my phone and tablet. At present there is no non-heroic way to own a Linux phone, but I’m still keeping an eye on the Purism Librem 5 and might well take the plunge…)