Windows 10 End-of-Life (EoL) is approaching quickly. And I’m really not a fan of Windows 11, for personal use. Hell, I wasn’t a fan of many things that Windows 10 did either, with regards to telemetry/data collection and the splintering of the old-school Control Panel into the half-complete Settings menu (which left much to be desired from a power user perspective), and while the Control Panel is still (at the time of writing) an option, I needed an exit strategy.
Enter, for the umpteenth time, the ‘Year of the Linux Desktop’.
It started with Bazzite, an attempt to recreate the OS powering the Steam Deck. Games have always been a difficult point for me leaving Windows; though I’ve tried several times in the past it always wound up that something I wanted to play didn’t have a Linux port available. But Bazzite put that out of mind, as the inclusion of Proton (and an immense amount of progress on that project by some very talented people) made playing games without a native port feasible.
So I made a backup of my Windows OS, fired up the ol’ Rufus, and created a bootable drive, with the intent to dual boot to test the waters.
This turned into a rabbit hole, as I had errors when trying to install. Ultimately, I had to reduce my RAM clockspeed in order to get a stable installation, but it was successful, and I was able to raise the XMP profile back to advertised speeds once the install was complete, and I started to feel out my new environment.
Firefox was present out of the box, which is wonderful. I am not and will likely never again be a fan of the Chromium-based browsers. Steam also being preinstalled was a good sign: this is, after all, a gaming-focused OS. The biggest initial objective of mine was to install Counter-Strike 2 and see how it would behave with my peripherals, a house-brand mechanical keyboard from Micro Center and a Glorious Model D- Wireless mouse. My onboard setup on the mouse was previously configured in Windows, so no changes to be made there, and the keyboard is a simple affair without third party software necessary. The game ran smoothly, and I was pleased. Cue installing more games, testing, fooling with Proton a bit, and learning more.
I haven’t run anything *Nix-based (for the extra-pedantic out there, GNU/Linux) in a long time. Like, I’ve fooled around here and there, and I’ve tried to main other distros before, but it was always casual and never a necessity. With the state of Windows 11, I began to feel it was a necessity, and the ever-approaching EoL date of Windows 10 created a degree of pressure. So, the goal was to not return to Windows for anything, though I was still keeping it as a dual boot setup so that I could if things really got hairy. So one day when I couldn’t install games on an additional SSD, the dive began. It turns out that if you have an external NTFS drive, you cannot use it as a Steam Library drive in Linux. Guess we’re wiping that to format as EXT4. Oh, all that NAS storage? Need to figure out configuring Samba so that I can reach it, as it’s an SMB share. OneDrive is also still in play, so I had to get a little creative there, and utilize the NAS’ software solution for OneDrive syncing. So far so good, though I’ve been doing some hacky workarounds.
Speaking of hacky workarounds, I had to do some disgusting things with the terminal to make backing up Stepmania screenshots work. I played a lot when I was younger, and have started again as a way to stay in shape, pad and all. I still have the simfiles (think of them as ‘levels’ for Stepmania) from when I was young, my habit of decent backups goes back quite a way. Also, I’ll typically screenshot particularly good scores as a way to track my progress/improvement, and to share with friends who also play. I wrote a script to copy all these screenshots to the NAS for backup purposes, which are then additionally backed up to OneDrive. This means even if things go south, I can still see how my play was at any given time period, and use it as reference data.
Then the biggest hurdle I’ve dealt with so far (and I’m not certain how much I’ve actually dealt with it). I’ve been running an all-AMD build for a couple years now, since 2020. It started with a R7-3700X and 5700XT, and is currently a R7-5700X and a 6950XT. The issue arose when I returned from work and went to fire up the PC one day, and was greeted with a black screen. No display output, no ability to use a shell to see what was going on, nothing. Well, fuck. That can’t be good. Cue some minor troubleshooting, and I’ve got POST. I’ve got a bootloader. Good place to start, it’s not totally borked. But remember when I said I hadn’t run a Linux OS in a while? I made a cardinal mistake: I didn’t have separate partitions for /, /boot, swap, and /home. So when I worked out that I couldn’t get the GPU driver to cooperate and had to wipe, it was 100% a start from scratch affair. Not that I had customized a ton of stuff, but it was still a hurdle to overcome.
I believe it was three more attempts before I finally disabled the GPU driver update. I’ll have to go back and find out if it has been rectified in a more recent update, but for the time being, everything works and that’s the most important thing. So back at it again. Learning to make my way around the GNU Image Manipulation Program instead of Photoshop, making use of Steam’s Proton capability to play some more games, and just generally settling back into my typical workflow.
With all of that achieved, the next projects are rolling out some projects with Docker, and getting our networking solution better-sorted. I’d like to get us bumped over to a 172.16.0.0/16 for organization reasons, and get a redundant Pi-Hole solution rolled out in the event of a hardware failure. I detest ads, and I believe a container might be a bit more of a robust solution than the present Raspberry Pi 3B+.
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