Five years ago I bought a TUXEDO Computers laptop and finished my migration to Linux completely, without ever looking back.
The whole migration process was a planned, much longer process, one that started almost two years before, when I lost patience with Apple and its shenanigans.
I documented most of the aspects of the migration in this blog.
I started working as a professional software engineer in 1997 using a desktop computer running Windows 95, writing ASP pages in VBScript and running websites on Windows NT and SQL Server 6.5. Then at some point during the 2000s I migrated to the Apple galaxy, mostly to write iOS applications. And these days I spend my time with Linux kernels, containers, and OpenShift clusters.
Putting all of those experiences in the linear scale of time, I found these to be the proportions I spent in each galaxy so far:
- 39% Windows
- 42% Mac
- 19% (and growing) Linux
In the past 5 years I have used Linux exclusively, both at work and for my own personal computing needs and projects. I’ve dived into Linux as much as I could: trying out various package managers, switching from Ubuntu to Fedora, backing up my system with Restic, playing with GNOME extensions, doing some video production on it even if it sucks, and even opening Microsoft Access databases with it.
Was it worth it? Yes, totally. Linux is a solid, stable, simple operating system where most things just work. It’s not annoying nor hypocrite as their commercial counterparts, and it doesn’t stand in my way to get things done. Does it crash? Yes, as much as macOS and Windows. Does it annoy me? It’s far from perfect, but it doesn’t even come closer to what I had to endure with macOS and Windows.
To put it in simple terms, it underpromises and overdelivers.