I Took the Red Pill: A Journey to Linux

by tkrn

It's official: I've gone rogue.  I've taken the red pill.

For most of my life, I've used Microsoft-related products.  From the early days of MS-DOS 5.0 up until this year, my primary platform has always been some variant of Windows.  I'm not here to argue whether Microsoft is good or bad, but due to its popularity, ease of use, robust support and ecosystem - Microsoft Windows remains the most widely deployed operating system in the world (as of November 2024), with a 58 point margin over the second most deployed OS, Mac OS X.

This is likely true for many people, considering market share alone.  That being said, even at an early age, I was drawn to the open-source world.  The idealism behind it I identified with, which started as a small flame that eventually grew into a fire.  In my early years, I experimented with Mandrake and Red Hat Enterprise in the early 2000s - when package manifests were printed on paper as thin as the Bible.  In many ways, that manifest was like a Bible - it was the key to knowing which software could run on the platform.

For years, though, the challenge was always the same: not having access to the software that the rest of the world was using for daily productivity.  As an IT professional, I needed to work with Windows-only applications, so it was hard to fully embrace Linux.  However, things started to shift when Mac OS X adoption grew, and Apple's iPhone choices began to influence consumer desktop choices.  We saw the rise of diversity in the desktop world.  Code changes that were made to a new BSD variant helped bridge the gap for companies, making it easier to recompile for Linux.  Over time, mainstream software began supporting not just Windows and OS X, but also Linux.  We saw apps like Teams for Linux, Zoom, Spotify, Discord, FileZilla, Visual Studio Code, and even VPN clients like Atmos making it easier to run essential tools across different operating systems.

Which brings me to the present day.  I reached a point where I was just sick and tired of being sick and tired.  After decades of reinstalling Windows, struggling with the infamous registry, and dealing with new problems, I simply didn't want to deal with another Windows deployment.  The breaking point came when my perfectly modern setup had a laggy keyboard (a known issue) and, after a fresh boot, my memory footprint was already at 75 percent utilization, even with no foreground applications open!  It's a laptop - I can't easily solder new memory chips into my HP Envy, as much as I'd love to.  But even so, there's no excuse for having a laggy keyboard on a modern computer after decades of development experience.

I took a step back and checked the applications I was regularly using.  To my surprise, many of them were already open-source applications compiled for Windows.  So, I took the plunge.  Since it was a corporate laptop, I swapped out the NVMe drive, installed a new one, and set up a LUKS-encrypted Ubuntu system.  I've been running Ubuntu for the past few years on my workbench micro computer with good results.  In my opinion, Ubuntu has the most robust software repository for an end user desktop setup, so it seemed like the best choice.

The experience has been fantastic.  I don't foresee myself ever going back to Windows as my primary workstation.  My system's resource utilization dropped to 40 percent with an idle desktop, even with all my applications and autostart features running.  Sure, I miss a few applications, like the Adobe Suite and some niche Windows-only software.  But for the most part, I've been able to run those with Wine, experiencing no or only minor issues.

There's no better time than now, with the rise of AI, cloud providers, and companies like VMware/Broadcom fueling the interest in open platforms.  If my journey resonates with yours, I urge you to take the leap.