The Linux Experiment — One year later
Hi again! It's been a full year (+ some days as I'm writing this) since I switched (back) to Linux. I wanted to give a quick update, in case anyone is curious (more than likely not 😅).
But first: behold my current desktop configuration with some neat Conky stats running on the right. Kinda like them. Note the unusual wallpaper; most of the time I have landscapes (mountains etc.) back there! Still running Linux Mint, of course.
So, all sunshine and rainbows, then? Well no, not entirely. But I am still really happy I made the switch. As a side-effect I've grown to dislike Windows even more, funny how that goes. Guessing I've spent ~98% of the yearly PC usage in Linux. So yes, I do like it. 😄
"I picked a mid-tier GPU (NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti OC 16 GB), but of course now that I have played more (games), should have picked a 4070.. Or a Radeon, rather, for Linux purposes. Maybe I'll switch some day."
As you might remember from earlier (or from the quote above), I did have an NVIDIA GPU. While I had my fair share of issues with it, NVIDIA in Linux is far from unusable, contrary to what many people claim. Nevertheless, during the Black Week sales I grabbed a Radeon RX 9070 XT, so now I'm team red all the way! 🤘 AMD has been fairly pain-free, although I did have some GPU freezes during gaming, but they are likely related to my GPU undervolting (I've been adjusting my undervolts gradually, now it seems stable — time will tell 🤔). As a nifty bonus: finally got GPU video decoding in browsers working. In order to get the 9070 XT working in Mint, I needed to install newer kernel (6.14, now running 6.17) and upgrade my Mesa drivers and amdgpu firmware. Not a big deal, but worth mentioning. On more "bleeding-edge" distros that's not required.
I also disabled Secure Boot to get fan control working (with CoolerControl), which is nice. And Windows still boots when I need to venture to the other side. (Speaking of which: as of writing this, I'll actually need to spend a few days in Windows for work purposes, as painful as it is... 😰)
What else? I've been able to do most of the work related tasks on Linux no problem, although the Unity editor is still lacking compared to its Windows counterpart. But it is what it is. 🤷♂️ For gaming: no big issues, some minor tweaking required depending on the game, but never had to boot into Windows to play games. For example I played through Cyberpunk 2077 + Phantom Liberty and had a blast. Performance was quite good on 9070 XT, although I opted to only use ray-traced reflections. With pure raster rendering I reckon I'd get the full 180 FPS of my monitor, now I capped the game to 120 Hz.
As for problems, I still get some occasional issues with system suspend/resume or USB-devices. (Plus the GPU freezes I mentioned, but they are probably caused by my GPU tunings.) One suspend issue was related to Unity running adb that somehow got stuck querying my USB-devices or something, and subsequently prevented the PC from suspending. I added a script to kill the adb-process upon suspend that seemed to fix that particular issue, but I still don't trust the suspend/resume 100%. A minor niggle in the grand scheme of things and certainly not enough to drive me back to Windows. 😛
The best part is still (no pun intended) the calmness of it all: no forced updates & reboots, no AI pushing, no dodging ads or spyware left and right. 🥳 To be honest I didn't want to give up on Notepad++ though, so I'm running it through Wine.. 😅️
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TLDR: Still really happy I switched, no big grievances (that I could not solve). Some tinkering required here and there, but that's to be expected really.
5/5, would switch again! 👍️ 😄
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