Escaping to Linux Mint
Sam Bent (aka DoingFedTime) recently posted an article strongly advising his readers to abandon the Windows platform. I can’t help but agree, but for additional reasons to the ones mentioned by Sam in his article.
What’s Happening?
Windows 10 is hitting end-of-life (EOL) on October 14th 2025, no matter the flavour you’re on, unless you’re some sort of special IoT customer of Microsoft’s, where you have a get out of jail free card until the early 2030’s in some regard. What this means is that a high percentage of Windows computers (and pretty much every single personal PC and laptop) will be vulnerable to new security vulnerability and critical bugs from October 14th onwards.
Speaking amongst to my own non-techie friends, very few of them were even aware that Windows 10 had an EOL date.
My Thoughts
Indeed, for an OS that was reported to be the “last version” or “as a service” from then on, this feels like a bit of a stab in the back. Being stabbed tends to also give you perspective, it makes your look at things differently as it were. For myself, this involved looking at Windows as an OS as a whole and made me realise there were very few things I liked about it. Slow UI, unstable under high duress, power cycling issues (e.g. slow to turn off), forced updates, among many other things. Sure Windows 11 improved on some of the shortcomings of it’s predecessor but it still feels like a shiny new bridge built on rotten foundations. Especially when there’s no shortage of stupidity to go around sigh.
And all this is for what? Nearly everything I need to run on my PC runs as well or better on a Linux host. There are also equivalent software packages for common Windows only programs. Valve (gods bless you Gabe) has made gaming on Linux incredibly easy thanks to their Proton engine. I really don’t have any reasons to stay on such a dodgy OS…so I didn’t. I made the move to Linux Mint this week.
A Minty Move
I would love to say the migration was smooth and I was chill about it but honestly, I was shitting myself. My PC doesn’t hold any critical data, all that has long been backed up to the cloud, but it is still a several thousand pound piece of plastic and metal that I really didn’t want to brick. So I started slow.
Back it up Sal!
So, of course, I backed up what I could. SSH keys, config files for filezilla and git, local tooling installs and states, browser states, virtual machines, everything I could. Filen made this easy but some stuff I moved onto an external SSD I had for addtional disk space. If that SSD could speak, it would have probably been offended at me treating it like some common HDD but needs must.
Once that was done, just to be doubly sure I wasn’t going to miss anything when I reinstalled, I created a restore point and exported my entire home directory to my external SDD. If something was going to go wrong, I at least wanted the ability to quickly moved any application states over to a new Windows install.
A minty breath of fresh air
I had already created an installation USB disk so once I was sure I had everything I needed, I booted into my UEFI and loaded up the Linux Mint Trial OS on the USB stick.
It felt sleek and quick. I didn’t have any issues finding any settings I needed and it didn’t appear to install itself with a shit ton of bloatware. I was happy enough to run the install.
There were some issues. For instance, I took the install wizard too literally and missed the option to enable full disk encryption option the first time. Duh, read shit next time idiot. I also somehow broke the install of my 3060 Ti GPU’s drivers, which required a full re-install. TimeShift was also very broken at first on my external SSD (probably cause it’s a FAT32 file system, I really need to get around to re-formatting that).
Final Thoughts
Generally though, I’m very happy with my setup. The UI is snappy, games run relatively well and I have a lot less blue-screens due to heat issues now. Technical stuff such as GOAD, which I couldn’t even run on Windows 10, can now run directly on my host as opposed to my homelab. This may seem counterintuitive but for now, the only machine in my house that has a dedicated GPU and high performance CPU is my PC and it also cuts down on the faff of having to SSH and then RDP into my homelab server.
Some things just won’t be able to be ported over instantly, and that’s ok. For example, I’m still struggling to work out how to bring my saved Stellaris games over, and don’t get me started on how much I hate not having a WhatsApp desktop app. But generally, I love it and would encourage anyone who’s Windows 10 machine is expiring to embrace the penguin.