My Adventures in Linux or How I Learned to Love Breaking Things
In my pursuit of moving away from tech monopolies and shitty AI practices, I have recently been experimenting with Linux, with varying degrees of success.
I had been using an old laptop and testing out various flavors, from Linux Mint to Ubuntu to Zorin. No matter what flavor I tried, the wifi drivers were a problem. I went through numerous forums and Reddits to try to find the solution, but no matter what I did, the wifi speed was utterly terrible (about 3% of the overall network speed, when normally wifi is about 50% the speed of a wired connection).
Since the laptop does have an ethernet port, that experiment ended with it becoming an Ubuntu server for my (eventual) storage setup experiment. SHOCKINGLY (heavy sarcasm), I had some troubles initially, but it's now sitting in the corner with my network equipment, waiting for me to have the money for some hard drives to connect to it to be a storage server.
After that, I decided to make another older PC (an HP 6300 SFF) into a Linux daily driver. Since I am currently out of work (IT is fun, but not when you work for a poorly managed MSP), I have the time to futz.
My first choice was Linux Mint. I decided to try dual boot with Win 10. I got everything set up, including the Nvidia graphics drivers, only to have one of my 2 displays decide to weird out on me and just..stop showing anything on the screen. In the process of "fixing" the issue, I created another issue, which resulted in NEITHER monitor being properly recognized, even at boot. How do you fix a monitor issue when you cannot even manage to see the boot screen? It took me a while.
I have an Nvidia Quadro P400 (low-profile) that I bought for when I was streaming on Twitch. It uses mini-Display port. That card wasn't being recognized at all. I tried the onboard Display Port and VGA connections, also to no avail. I was vexed.
At this point it was obvious that I couldn't even access Windows since I couldn't see the boot screen or any options at all. So I decided to see if I could wipe it all and re-install Mint. Well, again, you have to be able to see the screen to get to the Boot menu, so that didn't work either.
After several hours of beating my head against a wall, I tried Ubuntu Server. I am assuming that there was some default graphics driver that helped this time, because the install process came up without any troubles and I could see to install it.
From there I could then use the Command Line to reboot directly into the Boot Menu to reinstall Mint and LA DEE DA it finally fucking worked.
This time I chose the newer version of the Nvidia driver and as of yesterday it was working okay. It does do some strange refreshing where it blacks out for a moment, but at that time it was still coming back. We shall see what happens on day 2 (which is when the problem reared its head the last time).
Having spent the last 2.5 years as an IT technician, I know better than most just how many issues Windows-based PC setups have, which is why I was willing to take the chance on Linux. That said, the thing I have always maintained is that Linux is its own kind of fiddly, and that continues to bear out in my experience with it.
I am not afraid to mess with things and go through the processes of fixing them, but I can still understand why Linux is lags behind in adoption when it comes to capturing your basic user. With both of these computers, the troubleshooting has been laborious and frustrating as hell.
The only reason I was willing to go through it is because I know that Windows will continue to get worse because their direction is obviously more useless AI shoved into everything and likely more use of vibe coding which means even shittier products with more and more bugs to deal with. So it becomes the devil you know (and who you know is the devil) versus the little finicky nerd who wants to be your friend but he's got some issues, maaan.
Anyways, now it's onto the fun stuff like customizing the shit out of it and seeing what I can do. More stories to come after I manage to break that, too!
Addendum: Ugh, the second monitor issue continues. It either blinks off and on repeatedly or just goes blank. And now everything freezes on me every once in a while: wired keyboard, mouse clicks...nothing will work for a few seconds and then it comes back. Sigh. More troubleshooting adventures ahead.