Curated RSS Brief
After three months on Linux, I don’t miss Windows at all
Tech Close Tech Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Tech Linux Close Linux Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Linux Microsoft Close Microsoft Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Microsoft After three months on Linux, I don’t miss Windows at all I regret nothing I regret nothing by Nathan Edwards Close Nathan Edwards Senior Reviews Editor Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Nathan Edwards Apr 26, 2026, 1:00 PM UTC Link Share Gift If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Some relevant reading. Nathan Edwards Close Nathan Edwards Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Nathan Edwards is a senior reviews editor who’s been testing tech since 2007. Previously at Wirecutter and Maximum PC . Current fixations: keyboards, DIY tech, and the smart home. In January I finally made good on my threat/promise to install Linux on my desktop . I wanted to see how far I could get using a Linux PC as my main computer without doing a bunch of research beforehand or troubleshooting afterwards. Since then I have booted into Windows exactly twice: once to scan a multipage document that wasn’t scanning right in Linux, and once to print a photo for my kids’ school on extremely short notice. There’s a reason it’s taken me three months to write the next installment in my Linux diary: nothing has gone horribly wrong. It didn’t take long for my Linux install to stop feeling new and exciting and start feeling like, well, my computer. It’s not exactly like a less annoying version of Windows, though it is less annoying than Windows, but it’s been a much easier transition than I thought it would be. There are a few extra steps sometimes in finding and installing apps — usually it’s easier than in Windows, and occasionally it’s harder. And there are a few apps I still haven’t been able to replicate in Linux. I’ve also had a smattering of fun bugs, and a few genuinely frustrating moments, but the overall experience is a lot calmer and more robust than I expected. Even troubleshooting is (mostly) satisfying in a weird way. Related I replaced Windows with Linux and everything’s going great I saved a doomed Windows laptop by embracing Linux I went back to Linux and it was a mistake Getting fiddly Fortunately, everything that’s gone wrong so far has only gone slightly wrong, like a gaming mouse that only works in games, and most of it has been pretty funny, like a gaming mouse that only works in games. Some of it has to do with specific hardware I’m using, or specific choices I made. (Keeping my nemesis, the HP OfficeJet 8720 printer , for one.) Some of it has to do with the fact that I deliberately chose a relatively new rolling distribution based on Arch Linux rather than a more mainstream distribution with a predictable release cycle, like Ubuntu. Here’s my favorite fix so far. CachyOS comes with Snapper , a built-in imaging service that stores snapshots of the OS before you install or update a program, so you can roll back if something goes wrong. It defaults to saving 50 snapshots, which are stored in the boot partition. When I installed CachyOS, I went with the recommended size for that partition, which was 2GB. That filled up pretty quickly, and after a few weeks Snapper started warning me that it had run out of space and wouldn’t be taking any more snapshots (It defaults to 50, but didn’t have room to store 50 snapshots). CachyOS has since changed its installer to default to a 4GB partition, but it was too late to help me. There was only one thing to do: boot back into the live image, shrink my rightmost partition by 2GB, and slide every volume on the disk to the right of the boot partition over by 2GB, one at a time, to make room to expand the boot partition. It’s silly that I had to do that but it was easy enough, and kinda satisfying in a tactile way. When I say “slide every volume on the drive to the right” I’m not kidding. In January, I noticed I couldn’t get an IP address from my router on my ethernet connection after waking from sleep unless I first connected to Wi-Fi. This drove me up the goddamn wall . Fortunately, I could keep using the computer while troubleshooting because I do have both Wi-Fi and ethernet, but I prefer ethernet, so I had to fix it. I learned the default driver that the Linux kernel uses for my particular ethernet card doesn’t always work well, so I installed a new driver. I turned off ipv6, then turned it back on again. I made sure my wired and wireless connections identified themselves as different devices to the router, though that didn’t help. I set a static IP on both the router and
- Tech Close Tech Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
- Follow Follow See All Tech Linux Close Linux Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
- Follow Follow See All Linux Microsoft Close Microsoft Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
- Follow Follow See All by Nathan Edwards Apr 26, 2026, 1:00 PM UTC Link Share Gift If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission.
If you want the exact wording, examples, or full context from the publisher, open the original source article.
Open Original Article
Comments
Post a Comment