noelle's wobbling field

My Year of the Linux Desktop

Linux Mint has been my daily driver for... I'd like to say a month now, but I haven't actually been keeping track. I have been using it so frequently that it feels like a natural part of my everyday now, like I've finally planted my feet in this strange new country.

Which wouldn't be accurate, because I do have some experience with Linux before this. I ran Ubuntu on a virtual machine years ago for a programming course that I eventually got bored with, using terminal commands to make files and folders like a nerd. Not that I really used the OS for much else other than making websites, but it was a cool experience, I guess. Now that I'm using it For Real this time, it's an even cooler experience. With some caveats.

If you're reading this looking for a reason to switch to Linux yourself, I can't give you a convincing one—I'll be honest and say it hasn't been smooth sailing, even if I do really like the desktop experience with Linux Mint. It's still giving me problems even now, and unfortunately my only answer to whether or not you should switch to Linux is an annoying one: it depends.

But this is my personal blog, not a guide. That's as far as I'll be of any help to you as I move on to more self-indulgent recounting of my own experience with the operating system.

Why'd you do it Noelle?

A multitude of reasons, which I know doesn't really make for as strong a rhetorical statement as straightforward condemnation of Windows, but unfortunately nuance is unavoidable when Linux is good, but not so good as to be simple.

I haven't even used Windows 11 yet, but the AI and ads have already trickled down to Windows 10, and of course there are the popups telling you to update, please. While I can turn these things off through Trickery and Cunning (and I have: I still boot into Windows for games, I'll explain in a later section), the fact that they're there in the first place leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

The taste becomes even more astringent when I think about Microsoft in general: their complicity in Israel's ongoing genocide against Palestinians, all the money they've put into the AI death cult, their constant layoffs that have affected thousands, even people I know, and the tons of e-waste they're adding to landfills with Windows 11's strict hardware requirements, all add up to a bubbling broth of disgust that I couldn't stomach any longer...

...well I'd like to say that, but it would be dishonest for me to say I switched to Linux out of moral obligation when I often take practical matters into consideration first—part of living as a normal human is committing the sin of compromise.

I have a Xiaomi phone that has ads built into the package installer, but I deal with it because it's the best phone I could afford. I use Unspecified Peer-to-Peer File Sharing System to obtain Many Things because I can't afford them or don't have access to them. I live in a province so corrupt and dynastic that it may as well be a feudal state. I can stomach unsavory things when my options are limited to them or nothing.

Microsoft is so influential that to a lot of people, they seem like the only option when it comes to computers. I wouldn't go so far as to say that they're a fact of life, but it's worth considering that Microsoft has ingrained itself deeply into society—people aren't necessarily taught how to use computers but how to use Windows and Windows software, specifically. Your work probably forces you to use a machine that runs on Windows or MacOS, maybe, using software that may or may not have good alternatives on Linux. You may simply not have the choice to switch to Linux to begin with.

That said, I did have the choice; I'm not professionally tied to using Windows in any way. I guess I just needed a fire lit under my ass to get going.

What actually gave me the push to switch to Linux is a little less noble and more mundane: my computer broke, and I convinced myself that I probably should just go ahead and become a Linux Girly once I got it fixed. It's been on the back on my mind for a while now in no small part because of how much I love Blender—if it's my primary medium for creating art anyway, then switching to Linux should be relatively painless.

All of this to say that I'm unemployed and thus free to fuck around with Linux all the live long day.

An aside on Linux and freedom with tech

I watched this video recently about how desktop Linux usage is increasing, but people aren't using it for the right reasons. People are migrating to Linux not to pursue personal digital sovereignty but... to pursue handheld gaming, I suppose.

I do care about digital freedom and privacy, but I'm also very cynical about tech as some sort of liberating force: I'm not a cyberpunk, I'm a socialist, and I see technology as we know it today as more of an accelerant to societal forces, not itself a force for social change. As long as capitalists own the infrastructure that the Internet is built upon and the means to produce the electronics to interface with it, every achievement in digital sovereignty will be precarious; hard-fought not through the adoption of certain technological standards, but through political action.

Not that I don't appreciate Linux and free software in general, I'm obviously taking advantage of them right now, but I think expecting people to switch to Linux for high-minded reasons is a little naive. An operating system, a computer, is ultimately just a tool, and people will probably consider the usefulness of their tools first and foremost before entertaining the thought that it will somehow free them.

Well, how is it?

Linux enthusiasts will happily tell you that switching to Linux is so easy that they got their grandma to use it (it's always a grandma), but I'm not their grandmother, and my computer needs are a little more complex than "using Linux as a thing to run an internet browser on." For me, switching to Linux came with some effort and sacrifice.

My most important consideration was being able to use software to make the kind of art I make—I was already all-in with Blender, but was I ready to give up Photoshop? Clip Studio? All the other weird programs I use?

With Photoshop, I wasn't really—right now I'm using a web app called Photopea, and it's basically just Photoshop CS6 but free and on your browser (or a progressive web app, which... is just your browser without the address bar). It's free but not open source, and is monetized through ads and a subscription service that offers cloud storage and "AI Credits," which to me signals that this isn't going to be a permanent fixture in my image editing workflow. Being a web app, it has all the inconveniences you'd expect from one, including performance drops when using lots of layers and not being able to use some convenient mouse actions.

I tried GIMP. The user experience is terrible, but it's sitting in my SSD waiting for the day Photopea suddenly becomes Evil. There's Krita, too, but I haven't had the need to draw something in a while, and I just learned to do my texturing inside Blender (I used to do it in Clip Studio Paint).

Blender, of course, ran exactly like I expected to. The benchmark results for Linux were slightly lower than on Windows, but in practice this isn't noticeable at all. RPG Maker MV seemingly ran okay, but I haven't tested it extensively (and I'm going to learn Godot in the future anyway).

I adjusted my art workflow and made it work on Linux, but I really wouldn't recommend switching to Linux if you're a working artist—the tools just aren't there yet. But if you're just a weird dilettante like me, you can decide for yourself whether or not you can adapt to the inconvenience.

(You may also be worried about driver support if you have a drawing tablet of some kind: I have a Huion display tablet and fortunately Huion does have Linux drivers on their website, and they work really well. I think with Wacom tablets it should just work—the drivers are included in the kernel, and Linux Mint even has a settings app dedicated to Wacom tablets.)

If you take the leap of faith, though, I can at least guarantee that the desktop experience will be fantastic—it was kind of eye-opening how good it was, at least to me.

I'm using Linux Mint at the recommendation of my dear friend Eri, and it's what I would recommend to other people too... though obviously I wouldn't know how it compares to other distros (I've tried Zorin, but the Nvidia driver it came with didn't work and sort of just left my monitor with screen burn for a few hours). It's snappy and fast, and once I got used to the idiosyncrasies of Linux itself, I found it hard to go back to Windows.

There are too many Cool Things about Linux Mint to talk about, like the customization: I think Cinnamon, the desktop environment Linux Mint comes with, actually looks pretty good out of the box. People compare it somewhat unfavorably to Windows 7's look (it looks old so it's bad) but... even if I do like Window's 7s look a lot, Cinnamon also doesn't actually look like that unless you want it to. I at least think it looks pretty sleek out of the box, definitely more pleasing to look at that Windows 10 or 11.

It's easy to download and install themes through the Themes app in the settings (though I just use the default theme but Ourple), and you can further customize the look and functionality of the desktop through Extensions, also found in the settings.

With extensions I made my panels transparent, made my wallpaper sync to my timezone so it changes dynamically as the sun sets, and even stupid little glitch animations for opening and closing windows. You can do so much to change how everything looks and feels compared to Windows.

Crucially, this all took me no real effort to do. I saw a video on ricing Linux once, and it looked like way too much work—Linux Mint customization is fortunately way easier.

Almost every piece of software on Linux is free, and all of it easily accessible through the Software Manager, basically an app store without the burden of commerce. I'm using a note-taking program called Folio to write this blog post, and it functions like a minimal version of something like Notion or Obsidian (which I don't use because they're just Too Much). There are a lot of free and open source software that are only available on Linux that absolutely slap (I particularly like GNOME Circle apps and the like for their simplicity and Beauty).

Again, there's just way too much to talk about the cool things Linux Mint does to put into this section that I'm already bored with writing about. Basically, the desktop experience is extremely good in a way that I can't even adequately condense. If you're only going to use your computer for (and I'm being intentionally vague and broad here) Productivity, Linux Mint will be an amazing experience for you.

What about Gaming, the most important thing

Linux gamers will tell you that gaming on Linux is good now, but for me it's been hit or miss for a variety of reasons. You can partly blame this on my hardware and partly on just what kind of gamer I am: my taste is quite expansive and is biased towards games that are a lot more obscure than what the average gamer, even gamers who are weird enough to use Linux on something that's not a Steam Deck, are familiar with.

I have a GTX 1070 in my machine. It's almost a decade old now, but it's still able to run a lot of games well, especially since I'm not really playing any big AAA games with it. This is true on Windows, but on Linux I feel like I'm rolling the dice every time I install a game and open it for the first time. Will the game run? Even if it does, will it even work?

I think a lot of my problems stem from the fact that any NVIDIA GPU older than the first RTX cards have poor support on Linux—NVIDIA is in fact ending support for my graphics card entirely on both Windows and Linux pretty soon. But even before that happens my performance on Linux is noticeably worse than on Windows. The game Art of Rally, for example, runs perfectly on Windows but hitches on Linux to the point where I see text that it's compiling shaders, like I'm using a damn emulator to play the game (which I guess I am, sort of).

Even beyond pure performance, I get a bunch of annoying bugs on games that severely diminishes the quality of the experience or straight up make them unplayable. Here are some examples:

The visual novel Chrono Jotter works, but has major bugs when running it on Linux. You can only close the game by stopping it on Steam itself—closing the game itself makes the desktop hang, forcing you to restart the computer. The mouse cursor is also way off, making it a chore to even select menu items.

The strategy game Lost Technology works fine, except for some reason none of the music plays. Either that or AN EXTREMELY LOUD NOISE PLAYS and you thank God and your past self that you weren't wearing your headphones at that moment.

The PC version of Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse just... didn't run for me. Granted, I installed a Version Outside Steam, but no matter what version of Proton I used the game refused to open.

These are, of course, games that are unknown to the typical gamer, and thus are not as well tested. But I know that my readers have similarly niche tastes, and I can't wholeheartedly tell them to become Linux Gamers when the state of gaming in the fringes is still kind of dire.

Something that works well on Linux and sometimes even better than on Windows, though, is emulation. I primarily play games from the PS3 era and older on Linux now, specifically with RetroDeck, an all-in-one emulation solution that makes setting things up a breeze and browsing your library Cool.

I do hope my problems with gaming on Linux eventually gets ironed out in the coming years, but for now, I'm still dual booting Windows to play some of my games. I think getting an AMD graphics card will fix some of my issues, but I'm not going to buy a whole new expensive thing when one of the main appeals of Linux is "saving your old hardware."

I will say that if you have a newer graphics card than mine, you'll probably be fine performance-wise. Just make sure not to play the weirdo games that I play.

Noelle you have absolutely put me off switching to Linux now. What the hell.

I'm sorry... I can't really do a wholehearted endorsement of Linux when I've encountered so many problems with it that might put people off (I didn't even get to talk about my multiple monitor refresh rate issue). Even with all that, though, I'm still going to continue using Linux Mint as my main operating system for Work and Stuff from now on. I think it actually is better than Windows in ways that matter to me and, well, I can stomach a little inconvenience for an experience that I like more.

And I do implore you to give Linux Mint a shot if you're even the least bit interested in it. You can actually run it straight from a USB drive (though it will be slower than a proper OS install) to try things out.