The computer stopped being fun, so I went back to Linux
I have run Linux most of my life, just not on the laptop in front of me. I moved my daily machine back and gave it six months.
For as long as I can remember I’ve been running Linux on my servers, but on the desktop only ever in short bursts. My main laptop has been a Mac for twenty years, and I don’t have a grievance story about it. What happened was slower than that: the machine got heavy. An M1 Pro with 32 GB of memory is a workhorse, and it still felt like it was carrying something I could never point at, which was hard to square with a workload that is mostly a browser and a terminal. On top of that, whenever I wanted to change how something behaved, the answer was more often that I could not.
So I decided to give Linux a real try. I got a ThinkPad X1 Carbon, twelfth generation i7, 32 GB, matching the Mac’s memory deliberately so I would find out whether the heaviness was the operating system or me. Fedora went on it. I tried COSMIC first and liked it, but it was buggy enough that I would have spent a month fighting my desktop while relearning everything else.
It feels cheerful and fast. Windows appear when I ask for them, and I can try things I had no way to try before. I had budgeted for trading polish away to get control back, and the trade turned out smaller than I expected.
What I miss is that on a Mac, software is supported or it isn’t and you know in ten seconds. On Linux, “works on Linux” needs a follow up question. Does it work on my distro? Will it work with my hardware, and will it look like the rest of the apps on my machine?
The experiment runs at least six months before I decide anything. Two weeks is a honeymoon and every two week review reads the same. Six months is long enough to travel with it, to hit the thing that only breaks quarterly, and to need it badly on a bad day. Will report back.