Linux.

2024/07/10

My life is now officially all on Linux.

I still maintain a Windows partition on my personal rig, but that's purely for the games and simulators that don't provide any Linux support. That being said, I haven't booted that up in a good while as I try and do everything I can on Linux first, before falling back to that. At the time of writing, this has been the case for ~3 months.

My work requires that I run a Linux machine, so that's where most of the driving force has come from. Through using that, I've fallen in love with the system that you can build around the Linux kernel. It can be however you want, with almost limitless possibilities.

For work I'm running Ubuntu which is solid but not my favourite. For my personal rig however, I've gone with EndeavourOS [1] which is based on Arch but without all the hassle.

It's been absolutely flawless! So far. Annoyingly that's something you _still_ have to take into consideration even in 2024, there's certainly a non-zero chance that something is going to go wrong. My interpretation was that Arch, given its rolling-release nature, would become rather unstable fairly quickly. But, even though I manually run `yay` every time I log in, I've seen no such instability. I'm very close to having the expectation that the PC will turn on and boot without issues 100% of the time (which is my expectation with Windows).

A huge part of my life is gaming, and I blame the Steamdeck for the extremely rapid progression in the Gaming on Linux space. I frequent r/linux_gaming [2], as there are some very helpful folk over there who can be the silver bullet required to get a game running if it's not cooperating. However, if you look at the ProtonDB [3] stats, you'll see that there is a very good coverage of the Steam inventory for games that will either _just work_ or run very close to that.

For example, I'm currently doing my first play through of Elden Ring (base game) and that runs, as a single player game, without any issues. Multiplayer doesn't work at the moment, and FromSoft are looking to fix that, but I'm not worried about that.

This certainly isn't an advertisement for wiping your hard drive and installing a Linux distribution, but it's certainly a suggestion that if you were thinking about taking the plunge, at least dual-boot and have a play around. There are obviously going to be tools that simply don't have Linux support, because the user-base isn't there. But, I think you'll be surprised as to just how much you can achieve if you seek out the Linux alternative to software that you use on a daily basis.

---

[1] EndeavourOS https://endeavouros.com/

[2] Linux Gaming Subreddit https://reddit.com/r/gaming_linux

[3] ProtonDB https://www.protondb.com/