Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Greetings from the year of Linux on my desktop.
In November, I got fed up and said screw it, I’m installing Linux. Since that article was published, I have dealt with one minor catastrophe after another. None of that has anything to do with Linux, mind you. It just meant I didn’t install it on my desktop until Sunday evening.
My goal here is to see how far I can get using Linux as my main OS without spending a ton of time futzing with it — or even much time researching beforehand. I am not looking for more high-maintenance hobbies at this stage. I want to see if Linux is a wingable alternative to Microsoft’s increasingly annoying OS.
Honestly? So far it’s been fine. Many things I expected to be difficult — like getting my Nvidia graphics card working properly — were perfectly straightforward. A few things I thought would be simple weren’t. And I’ve run into one very funny issue with a gaming mouse that only works in games. But I’ve been able to use my Linux setup for work this week, I played exactly one video game, and I even printed something from my accursed printer.
Day one
Spoiler alert: it worked. Screenshot: Nathan Edwards/The Verge
I picked CachyOS rather than a better-known distro like Ubuntu because it’s optimized for modern hardware, and I had heard that it’s easy to install and set up for gaming, which is one of the reasons I’d stuck with Windows for this long. After backing up my Windows image sometime in December (close enough), I follow the installation instructions in the Cachy wiki and download the CachyOS live image to a Ventoy USB drive, plug it into my PC, reboot into the BIOS to disable Secure Boot, reboot again into the Ventoy bootloader, and launch the CachyOS disk image.
First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. I can move the cursor, but can’t click on anything. I try plugging in a mouse (without unplugging the first one), same deal. Not a major issue; I can get around fine with just the keyboard. Maybe this is just an issue with the live image.
I launch the installer and am thrust into analysis paralysis. An operating system needs lots of little pieces to work — stuff you don’t even think of as individual components if you use Mac or Windows. How do you boot into the OS? What runs the desktop environment? How are windows drawn? What’s the file system? Where do you get software updates? In Mac and Windows, all those decisions are made for you. But Linux is fundamentally different: The core of the OS is the kernel, and everything else is kind of up to you. A distro is just somebody’s idea of what pieces to use. Some, like Pop_OS! and Mint, aim for simplicity and make all those choices for you (though you can still change them if you want). But Cachy is based on Arch, a notoriously DIY distro, and before I do anything else, I have to pick one of four bootloaders. I pick Limine, for reasons I can’t recall.
... continue reading