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This is the beginning of a series of posts of me just yapping about installing Linux on this laptop, and just generally giving Linux a second chance to shine. If you don’t know what laptop I am referring to, it is this piece of shit right here. Of course, I used to keep Linux on this laptop for the most part, until I ended up having some issues with the laptop related with sleep mode, So I just went back to Windows, until of course, I felt the urge to fuck around in Linux again, smh. If you want to read more about the issues that I had with this laptop, you can take a look at these in this post right here.

I guess the real reason of why I went back to Linux on this laptop is probably because Windows 11 kinda makes me sad. The awful flat design just kinda gnaws at me, it gets under my damn skin. I deal with Windows 11 at work, and that shit sucks, and at the end of the work day, I go home and turn on my PC, and what do I see? Windows 11, for fucks sake. And I guess there is also the privacy implications. Even if the Windows 11 LTSC is considered the most ““private”” edition of Windows, I can’t help but feel like I am being watched when I use my computer and laptop. Like who knows what is even happening under the hood of a Windows system. It is like a black box we are supposed to trust with our data, and we are expected to just act this is a good thing apparently, and it is kinda an unsettling feeling. Maybe it is just me being paranoid, but at this point, I don’t know anymore. And finally, there is the consideration of Microsoft’s awesome “30% of code in Windows is now from AI” thing that they been trying to show off, until something critical breaks in the OS, and like, breaks every feature of Windows because of course it did. And even with the fucking LTSC editions of Windows, I still had that one bug with WinRE that made it unusable, which I also talked about it a bit here in this other post here. I think it is insane that Microsoft still continues to charge something like $150 to $200 dollars per license, because the operating system you get is fucking awful, filled with ads, invasive AI, and now, it is a system that barely works at all nowadays. Kinda sad to see, but I guess it is a good excuse to fuck around in Linux then, I suppose.

The distro that I decided to go with was of course Fedora. I really like Fedora and I think it also has the best implementation of KDE Plasma around, it also has some additional security stuff added (it has SELinux set up out of the box, it also has a firewall set up and ready to go), there is also the fact that I got very used to how dnf and yum work, and how Fedora works under the hood, among other things. Recently the Fedora team recently released Fedora 43, which was a great thing to see, really. It seems that Fedora finally replaced that old awful installer they been using for a long time, the one that had a very nonsensical way of like, navigating through the install, and it was replaced with a new one that looked nice and makes installing the OS much more easier. However, the new installer kinda sucks, it is clear that it is kinda under cooked, because I was trying to set a password (for drive encryption or user accounts) and the installer gave me an error for a “password too weak”, so that meant I had to start from the beginning… Eventually I found out if you managed to type out the password you wanted to use, and then just paste it into the password fields, that also manages to work just fine. The install itself was quick and easy, and I was already rebooting into Fedora in less than 20 minutes.

Of course this would not be the end of my Fedora 43 issues. So I finally finish the installation, I go and reboot, put in my password for the disk encryption for Fedora, and the system loads as normal, except it didn’t, and I am met with a frozen screen and a unresponsive system where I basically had to force restart the laptop. After a bunch of restarts, I decided to do two things. The first one was to reinstall Fedora, but skipping Fedora 43, staying on Fedora 42, and the second, would of course be to disable Secure Boot. I forgot I even had Secure Boot on at all, most likely I had it enabled because of like, Windows bullshit, and so I decided to disable it instead, since it seemed to always give me more issues than what its worth. I been told by many forums and subreddits that Secure Boot is supposed to make your computer more secure to use, but like, I am not convinced that Secure Boot actually does anything worthwhile, and like, sure, it protects against evil maid attacks, I don’t think it is a thing to realistically worry about (in my case) if that makes sense. If I really need it, I guess i can re-enable it.

After I disabled Secure Boot, I decided to reinstall Fedora 42 again, and this time it worked as you’d expect it to. Everything was fine, as you’d expect it to be. After a couple of hours I had a working system again, this time, running Linux. I forgot how nice Linux feels, especially without that Mica coat of shit that Windows 11 has on top of everything. Stuff feels like it should, windows open fast, animations are for the most part, smooth, you can drag windows around (no pun intended) without any hint of slowing down… I can pretend it is 2002 again and get my favorite theme and icon pack up and running again, and my god it makes me happy to see this again. I was actually getting so fucking suck of MS’s boring, bland design of Windows 11 that it is actually really refreshing to see something different, something with character, something that isn’t just some flat awful design. Also I like how much faster the file explorer feels on Linux, compared to the new explorer on Windows. I also notice that searching files on Linux is pretty speedy too.

god i love this theme and icon pack combo

Every time I try Linux again, I forget that Musicbee does not run on Linux, which means I am forced to use one of the many mediocre music players on the platform. I complained about this ad infinitum in earlier posts, so I will save you the long winded rant anyways. I do hope that the current surge in Linux popularity will convince someone to work on a music player for Linux that finally doesn’t suck ass, that is even actually usable. Oh well.

I have a lot to still set up. Due to time constraints + lack of motivation, I still have this long ass laundry list of stuff to figure out:

I also do want to try Linux on my main PC again. I want to get a proper NVME SSD for Linux, and maybe some 1 or 2 TB drive for additional Linux stuff. I want a proper NVME SSD because I think one of the many issues that I had on Linux back then on this PC could be due to the fact that it was running it on some DRAM-less SATA SSD, which may be the cause of some of the weirdness I was having on Linux at the time. Other then that, I guess I will continue to use Linux as normal, and just generally continue to tweak it until I reach a state where I am happy with the OS itself.

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