2021, the year Linux finally made it.

The first time I ever used Linux, I had a stack of 3.5" floppy disks. The year was 1996, and I had gone through the trouble of downloading the Slackware distro; complete with kernel, build tools, utilities. It came out to be at least fifteen disks. I wiped my PC hard drive and installed it. It was awful. Nothing worked out of the box. The GUI was total crap, and there were no applications worth anything.

Needless to say, I reinstalled Windows 3.11 on that machine shortly thereafter, and went back to using my Amiga 500 as my main machine.

I’ve tried using Linux as my main desktop OS many times since then, but have found the experience to be lackluster. It always ends up being my second machine, or a ‘ssh to remote server in a terminal’ kind of experience.

This year it’s been different. I have a pretty nice desktop PC I use, and while it can dual boot to Windows 10 I haven’t even used that feature once since I started using Linux as my desktop. I still have my Windows PC laptop sharing the keyboard and mouse (Synergy is awesome), but for every day-to-day task I now work fully in Linux.

Everything works better. All of my coding tools run better. My browser runs faster. I can run Steam and a large chunk of my games. I don’t have to hack around and use WSL or cygwin to get to a bash terminal. No more windows memory leaks, or applications that do mysterious things in the background. I finally have full control over my environment, and it’s just a really nice, slick experience. I even like it more than my MacOS environment I had on my Macbook.

Kudos Linux, glad to see you finally made it. Vive la revolution.

In other news, I crossed the 10:00 min/mile today at 9m 57s!