One Year Without Windows

That’s right. I’ve been running Linux on both of my machines full time for a whole year now. I have tested and distrohopped a bit, but I did return to OpenSuse Tumbleweed which is based on Suse Linux, on my main desktop. This month was also a major hardware upgrade, as my mainboard/cpu combo was originally installed in January of 2015. Davey and I went and bought all the stuff at Microcenter in Houston right after they moved to the new location.
I updated to a fast ryzen 5 and new mainboard. QUITE a major step, and I plan on going to a ryzen 9 at the end of the year and move this one into another case and move it down the road or use it as a spare, or something similar.

I like running Tumbleweed because it really just works well, is very visually appealing, and is a very fast rolling release. I like the rolling release model because theoretically I don’t have to reinstall every six months like with Fedora’s release schedule to get all the new features. Steam, Heroic Games Launcher, itch, Lutris, Minigalaxy WINE, Boxtron, Proton GE custom, DXVK, faudio, vkd3d GOverlay, ReplaySorcery, SteamTinkerLaunch, MangoHud, Gamemode and vkBasalt are all installable and work perfectly, either from repos of flatpaks.
It utilizes snapper and BTRFS so the usual gotcha’s of a rolling release are easy to avoid. You can just roll back to your last good config.

I don’t miss Windows. Besides the privacy concerns I think this system runs a lot more efficiently under Linux than it ever has under a MS product. Most of the software I need is open source, anyway, and what isn’t, runs either in Bottles or Wine.

Gamine is excellent due to the advances that Steam/Valve has made with proton, and you can install protonup-qt to install the custom and very good Proton GE from Glorious Eggroll himself. All of the Steam games that I play either have a Linux Native version or run in proton just fine, including War Thunder, Stellaris, Star Trek Online, and Star Wars The Old Republic. Battle.net also runs great, so Diablo III, WoW, and SC2 are also flawless.

All in all, unless you HAVE to run Windows for work, I honestly don’t see much reason to do so any longer.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time.