linux
August 11, 2025
i am facing an unpleasant dilemma.
windows 10 is 10 years old now, apparently, and is rapidly approaching the end of its life. i do not want windows 11. i think the GUI is ugly, i never really liked the "windows as a live service" shit to begin with, and all the AI and surveillance shit is unsurprising but still distressing. with every new iteration of the windows OS they get further and further away from what actually made it appealing to use in the first place. i'm probably going to use win10 until i literally can't anymore, but i figured it's probably time i give linux another try.
i have historically had a bit of a hateboner for linux, admittedly mostly because i think linux users are annoying, but also because my first impression of it was that it's mostly for programmers and people who use their computers for the internet and nothing else. ATP though... sometimes our environment forces us to adapt
i got recommended mint by someone in a neopets discord server.
i first tried installing it when i was high on sativa, and ended up not actually installing it because it pissed me off. i went back the next day when i was sober and installed it for real
i meant to install it on a partition i had prepared, and i thought that was what i was doing, but apparently it was installed to the same drive i run windows on. which is not a big deal, but still kind of annoying.
here's what it looks like
i haven't fucked around with it a ton yet. i have a few main concerns / gripes:
- i don't know if my drawing tablet will work with it
- can't run exe files by default, you need to have wine installed, and even then im not sure what the... probability of encountering errors is when using wine. so i don't know if SAI will work, obviously no more MS paint 💔 don't know if any of my emulators will work, don't know if any of the shit i use for homebrew / managing my save files will work, don't know what percentage of my games & steam library will run, don't know if the stupid last.fm scrobbler thing will work, etc. ive heard good things about libreoffice and surely there must be a text editor so im not super worried about my pdfs / text files / html files etc but like. basically everything else i've ever used a computer for
- no wmp, no foobar. can use VLC, which i like enough, but i'll have to redo all my playlists & shit. i'm actually not entirely sure what the full extent of vlc's functionality is bc i only really ever used it to convert audio files & play dvds
- apparently i can't just import my firefox profile so i have to redo ALL OF MY FUCKING SETTINGS
- this is not linux's fault, it sucks that microsoft has a monopoly on everything PC related, but a lot of people just. do not make programs to work with linux so that's its own thing
my feelings at this time are that anyone who seriously thinks this has a fighting chance at replacing windows is deluded but let's put that theory to the test ig
i'm a little sad at the prospect of abandoning windows mostly bc i paid real life money for this stupid fucking program to make it look like winXP
