Linux

Just wanted to share my experience moving to Linux from MacOS. Very satisfying, but of course not at first. I think my patience has improved a lot too lol.

I started out trying live bootables on my 2012 MBA. 4GB RAM, 60GB HDD. Not a beast really, but it is my only computer. I obviously couldn't risk ending up without a working OS, so the only option was dual boot from an external drive. Bought an SSD connected via USB and started trying to install distros. Initially Fedora Workstation. Was a mess. Slow, wifi was not working well, odd crashes etc.. Decided to start over with something lighter, but all other installers crashed halfway through. I kid you not I shot my back again bent over my small laptop i without working peripherals trying to install different distros. My doctor was not happy when I came back and told her I fucked up my back again because of my posture lol. Apparently, a shitty USB leads to crashes on most installers. I knew Anaconda worked tho, so I went back to a lighter DE with Fedora, XFCE. Set up an install on the SSD with a shared partition I could access from both MacOS and fedora. No big permission issues yet.

Then fixing network drivers. There is a lot of info about what chip needs what driver, a lot of which is incorrect apparently, because my chip which was supposed to work with bcma needed broadcom-wl. The joy when I remembered USB tethering was a thing.. For a laptop with no ethernet plug this was a godsend. Got the drivers, got wifi.

And since then, many "issues" I encountered where simply things that generally happened behind the scenes on MacOS I didn't even know where happening. Learning about these things has been very gratifying, and gives a lot of respect for a polished OS that just works like magic. Eventually, an issue on MacOS I could not solve due to it being a walled garden made me switch to Linux as a daily driver, and once I got over CMD and CTRL being swapped it sped up my workflows and runs better overall. More tweaking tho of course.

There are odd quirks but I found fun solutions for some, and began planning and learning to remedy others. Mostly, everything is working really well. I am having a lot of fun!

My tip for anyone struggling with getting started with linux, set up a log function so you can easily log any relevant changes you make, and have it accessible from somewhere else (like a shared partition or external drive for example). This way you know what you have done and can use that to fix whatever you fuck up. Also, make a knowledge base with the sources you find useful. I have a small kb in UpNote now so I can look up how some things were done instead of having to search and find the right guides over and over.