Guess I’m a Linux guy now

Moving away from Windows OS has been on the cards for a while now. Microsoft are a prominent fixture on the BDS consumer boycott list, for one. They’re also major players in the ongoing insane genAI / data centre arms race, that joyous economic bubble and source of negative ecological impact at precisely the historic juncture where human civilisation needs it least. Even from a base consumer perspective, they’ve been blasting themselves in the foot with both barrels for some time, between the strategic decisions with their Xbox gaming division and their closure of beloved, sometimes only recently acquired, games studios (they are not the worst offenders in the M&A insanities of the past decade in the games industry, though this is a low bar). 

There’s also the small issue that my PC, which has been happily running Windows 10 for some years, does not and cannot support Windows 11. Another of Microsoft’s strategic decisions has been to cut support for Windows 10 earlier than they have for any other OS with its market share. Thanks, dickheads. And it’s not as if I was keen on Win11 anyway, as it looks like a bloated, AI-infested, data-harvesting, always-online, MS-account-centred cesspit. 

Many factors were pushing me to jump ship and try something else. And there are only three games in town: Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. Only one of these was a viable alternatively, but fortunately Linux is a thousand ferrets in a trench coat.

I’d previously dabbled with Ubuntu, Mint, OpenSUSE and a few other distros, but that was over a decade ago. I liked them, but back then there was a general lack of parity with what you could do on Windows, particularly for gaming, so I never used them as more than a novelty. Today it’s a different story. Valve/Steam and a robust community have been driving Linux compatibility en masse via Proton, ArchOS and other avenues. Many of the distros that have been around for years are significantly more mature now. There are plenty of new distros too, including some focused around specific ‘consumer types’. 

I primarily use my PC for normal web-usage stuff, for writing, for a variety of different desktop applications, and heavily for gaming. I was attracted by the buzz I’d seen around a distro called Bazzite. It’s specifically aimed at gamers, and is an ‘immutable’ distro, which essentially means that it is running an image of the OS that the user can (generally) not do much with – they can mostly install and run applications in self-contained ‘flatpaks’. This de-risks the common scenario where a user who doesn’t really know what they are doing breaks the OS. I’m not a complete Linux scrub, but I’m inexperienced and rusty, and so I appreciated the idea of these guard rails. 

Of course those guard rails did not protect me from my first, and biggest, mistake. 

I wrote the Bazzite installer image to a thumb drive and booted from it, and after a few reboots to double-check some drive labels, I picked an empty SSD to install the OS to, and went for a run. By the time I was done the OS was installed, so I booted into it and started noodling around. It looked great! It was stylish, clean, fast, and I was immediately comfortable playing around with its included software, installing a few more applications from its ‘Bazaar’ (a Store-style frontend for various flatpak applications), and installing some games from Steam and Heroic (a bundled but unassociated launcher for GOG, Epic and Steam on Linux). 

Then I booted back into Windows to play Helldivers 2 with friends, and… I could not. Uh-oh. 

I’ll skip past the subsequent evening of creeping cold sweat, the realisation that I’d been rather stupid, and efforts to troubleshoot, investigate and fix the issue. In short the ‘empty’ SSD must have had an EFI boot partition on it necessary to tell the system to launch a Windows install on a different NVME drive, and I had blithely wiped that when installing Bazzite. The Windows drive was absolutely fine, but nothing I tried could restore it as a bootable OS. I had intended to run both OS in parallel while I got used to Bazzite, and to let me wipe it and try other distros, but that was not to be. 

My plan to slowly migrate over to Linux had been dramatically accelered. I guess I was a Linux guy now. 

Once the feeling of being a colossal idiot faded, after I spent more time setting up everything I wanted and needed on Bazzite, after I bought some new drives so I could retrieve data from my old Windows drive… I found that I was happy with the new OS.

The process of setting everything up was in almost every case much easier than I suspected it would be. It was pretty easy to get to 95% parity with the old system, and some stuff just worked better – I play Stellaris, for example, and it loads twice as fast on Linux than it did on Windows.

Not everything was super easy, and for complete Linux newcomers I am sure there will be some pitfalls and challenges. So in a follow-up post, I will share some personal experiences in the hopes that they might be useful, and encouraging, to others tempted to jump ship from Windows and try something new.

[Part two is up…]