Moving Back to Desktop Linux

Desktop Linux

This is going to be a bit of an odd post. If you went back through brightblack.net for a while, there’d be a lot of hits on the term ‘Linux’. I’ve been a keen Linux and other open source user since the mid-1990s due to the rather unsexy reason that I couldn’t afford Windows and other pay-for software at the time.

I’m actually writing another post on my history with Linux, so I’m not going to rehash that here. I’m sure I’ll post that in the next decade or two.

Long story short, towards the end of 2024 I had the opportunity to move from Windows 11 to Linux on my desktop machine. Bear in mind also I’d been using Linux on my laptop for a long time. There are reasons; not much value in going into them, let’s just get into the Linux.

Which Linux?

There are so many Linux distros, and I wonder sometimes if it puts people off. Maybe we should have a cull at regular intervals.

For me, I went with Mint Linux with the Cinnamon desktop. Second choices would have been Ubuntu or PopOS!. This was mainly because I wanted something which wouldn’t move on too quickly. My laptop runs EndeavourOS, which is Arch based, and that’s been running fine for almost three years and a part of my fondness for that distro is that I do love running updates regularly, but for this desktop, I was happy with something a little slower and more tested.

Preparation

Firstly, lots of backups as I’d be moving data around and changing the various file systems.

This wasn’t too difficult as I have a 4TB Seagate Red drive I could buffer all the data through for fast local data moves. I also had a new 1TB T500 Crucial NVMe drive for OS and /home, which meant I could just swap the old Windows NVMe out (which eventually would land in my laptop). I also had a new 2TB NVMe for the family photos and videos, as the old 1TB SSD was simply full! That got repurposed though.

Set Up and Data

As I mentioned above, a fairly standard Linux install - OS on / and my stuff on /home on that new Crucial 1TB NVMe. All on the ext4 format; I toyed with the idea of btrfs as all the other storage drives were that, but I stuck with the tried and tested for this as I’d seen some people have issues with btrfs for a boot drive and there wouldn’t be that much benefit for me.

All the other drives wwre set up as btrfs using the @ Ubuntu style system for snapshots, and data all moved back. THere followed the traditional fun in fstab of setting up all the mounting points.

Nowadays this is all very blah blah and easy, and let’s face it, file storage, access and serving is bread and butter stuff for any Linux machine.

Applications

Of course the main thing is applications, and some would be new (because Linux not Windows) and some would be very familiar, albeit with a little twist in a few cases which I’ll go into in each case. Of course lot of these I’ve already been using on the laptop, so there’s already muscle memory.

Davinci Resolve

Blackmagic do make a Linux native version of their excellent video editing Studio, which is great, but it’s mainly built around a CentOS version which is the distro they officially support. However, there’s a great little utility called MakeResolveDeb which basically takes the BlackMagic package and repackages it for Debian based distros including Mint, and so far it’s been flawless.

One odd thing about the Linux version is that it doesn’t handle AAC audio! Irritating, but I wrote a small script to convert all the audio on my video files. It’s not a huge issue, it’s just odd.

Music Player

On Windows, for years I’ve like Foobar2000. It’s small, simple and yet still maintains a couple of weird UI conventions, which seems to be a tradition in the music playing app game, going back all the way to WinAmp.

On Linux though, I really like MusikCube, which is a common line based music player. Yes, I know that sounds odd, but go and take a look at it. I find it a real pleasure to use, and if you’ve become used to iTunes, or the interfaces of the music streaming services, it’s a massive hit of fresh oxygen.

Games

Of course we’d be getting to gaming at some point. Obviously Steam is on Linux, and thanks to Proton and the SteamDeck, a lot of games actually work fine on Linux these days. The only games I play which really don’t, which need a Windows partition somewhere are: Helldivers 2 (and some other games which use extensive anti cheat), Biohazard 2 (not sure why) and Minecraft. For that last one, you can shoe-horn in the mobile version but I’m really thinking about full versions. That’s Steam, but what else? As I’ve discovered, there’s also the Heroic Game Launcher which helps with GoG and other game stores as well as interfacing with Steam’s Proton, WINE and other layers.

Other Applications

A lot of apps I’d already been using - Syncthing, Obsidian, VS Code, LosslessCut, Reaper and others which I was using on Windows and have Linux versions so there was zero differece. Surprisingly, there’s also a MakeMKV build for Linux, which I didn’t know about, available on FlatHub.

So How’s it Going

It’s been almost six months, and it’s pretty much been going as expected.

I’ve been using Linux as a desktop in some way, shape or form for such a long time, on second desktops, then in VMs and then on laptops so I knew where my problems would be, and I’m impressed how few there are these days.

Aside from the games mentioned, there’s not real reason to go into Windows or run something in WINE. Mint, as the specific Linux, has been fine. It’s pretty stable, supports Debian packages of course, and also FlatPaks out of the box - not Snaps - meaning for those smaller apps, you can often find them on Flathub.

Would I recommend this to anyone? If you don’t game, and just need an internet box, then yes, it’s fine. Otherwise you might want to list up the apps you use, and then see how they’ll work and what your alternatives are. In my case, despite using Linux for a long old time, it did expose me to some new and much better solutions, so it shook the tree in that case.