
My transition to an Ubuntu workstation - ryannjohnson
https://ryannjohnson.com/writing/my-transition-to-an-ubuntu-workstation/
======
Yizahi
I don't get author's complaint about reinstalling Windows every few months,
imho it is completely insane. Even in the age of Win95/98 I never had a need
to re-install more than once a year maybe and I was in school at that time and
all software was downloaded from shady sources. Now - there is zero need to
re-install at all, I only do it when I change hardware platform completely -
storage, MB etc.

Same with "unsolicited popups". What are you using that does this? Windows
itself shows me reboot needed popup once a few months maybe and that's about
it. Some software can show it's own popup when I launch it and it is often
relevant.

Windows is not perfect and Linux is great (and not perfect too) but really,
some complaints about Windows seems to be straight from late 90s, with custom
virus packaged Win98 distributives on torrents.

~~~
Scarblac
Even with a paid Windows 10 _Pro_ you get ads for games right in the Start
menu. It's insane.

~~~
rhinoceraptor
My favorite Windows feature is how the start menu search is so slow. I hit the
windows key, type the name of the app, hit enter and I get an Edge window with
what I typed as a Bing query.

~~~
icegreentea2
Disable websearch, and just start typing right away.

I agree that a lot of Win10 defaults are derpy. But just tune it a bit and its
reasonably power user friendly. Maybe not what you want to support personally,
but sufficient for professional use.

~~~
Narishma
How do you disable it?

~~~
icegreentea2
Registry >.>
[https://superuser.com/a/1325836](https://superuser.com/a/1325836)

Like I said, maybe not the crap you want to put up with in your personal life,
but as a professional tool... worth tweaking to suit your needs.

(Oh, and in a full professional environment, can also be set by group policy)

------
MarcScott
> Even when I was running Windows, I would wipe my computer every few months.
> I kept a "Backup Image" handy with all my settings already installed. I've
> spent far too many hours trying to undo damage I've done to my systems by
> installing random software from the internet onto my workstation; I've come
> to value the option of resetting my computer to a known, healthy state
> immensely.

I often thought I was the only one. On Windows, macOS and even Ubuntu I was
reinstalling my OS at least three or four times a year. I had install scripts
and GitHub repos designed to reconfigure my machine after each install. The
process always took a full day.

Now I'm on NixOS. I have three .nix text files, .emacs, .bashrc and that's
about all I need to backup in order to clone my environment on any machine.

I've also stopped reinstalling my OS all the time, as I always know my
machine's state, just by looking at those few files.

~~~
Jaruzel
I was puzzled by the article authors statement on this. My main daily machine
is Windows 10. It's been running the same 'copy' of Windows 10 since late
2016, and has gone through all the major updates since then, and has had many
applications installed and removed on it since then. Office has gone from
v2010 thru v2013 to Office 365 (effectively v2019), and I'm always playing
with new software. The machine still runs perfectly fine, with no strange
problems, errors or slowdowns.

To rebuild it to the state it currently is, would take me several days of
installing and configuring, for very little benefit. Imho, there is no reason
to reinstall your OS every few months.

~~~
ch_123
For me, Windows XP was the last version of Windows I found the need to
reinstall regularly. I skipped Vista, and from 7 onwards, I never felt the
need to do a reinstall.

I set up my current desktop with Windows 8.1 more than 5 years ago, upgraded
to Windows 10, and still use the exact same installation to this day. It even
survived a migration to a new SSD when I upgraded the PC a few years back.

The “needs regular reinstalls” meme had merit 10+ years ago. These days, not
as much.

~~~
myhf
I used to update my memes and references every few months, but since Windows
10 came out I haven't needed to reinstall my memebase as often so I am still
running some old memes.

------
BLKNSLVR
The "hardware as commodity" is an ideology that I've been playing with for a
while. I have my personal cloud that I can access via VPN, including a Windows
desktop running in a VM, personal photos and home videos sync'd to a NAS using
SyncThing.

De-coupling the portable device (which, due to its portability, is much more
prone to breakage or theft) from the data that it captures or has access to.

My journey to this ideology was close calls with data loss due to both
hardware failure and theft. Rather than backing up to a central location, have
the data "live" at the central location, then back it up off-site somewhere.

This can also have both negative and positive security implications in the
even of a lost or stolen device, but those scenarios are likely not quite as
bad as if you've got a whole whack of data on the device as well.

This can be done across platforms too, as far as my experience goes. It's
unrelated to the author's transition to Linux / Ubuntu. My stable consists of
android phones, iPads, Chromebooks (which don't really count because they
embody this ideology already), laptops running both Linux and Windows.
Although I'm also most of the way through transitioning away from Windows (but
RDP is just so good for controlling a remote GUI).

~~~
bionicbits
What do you use for your personal cloud?

~~~
BLKNSLVR
It's a mish-mash. A bunch of VMs running on ProxMox, Wireguard is the link
from the outside world, QNAP NAS for document storage and running SyncThing
server for phone photos and videos backup, a couple of Windows VM's we RDP
into for banking and centralised documents and spreadsheets. Also PiHole
running on a VM so my 'roaming' browsing is nice and clean. Also, although
off-topic-ish, ZoneMinder and LMS (lightweight music server - which the author
linked to in comments a week ago or so:
[https://github.com/epoupon/lms](https://github.com/epoupon/lms)) VMs
accessible via the VPN.

Nothing particularly "integrated" like Sandstorm or NextCloud, but I haven't
had the existential need for that level of accessibility.

The QNAP NAS (like Synology) has personal cloud apps, but I don't tend to like
doing things the easy way. Going down that path also locks services into a
particular hardware dependency. VMs are easily backed up and restorable to
ProxMox running on new / different hardware if necessary.

------
rbanffy
> I used to salivate over computers. News of the next most-powerful processor
> or RAM upgrade was irresistible for a period of my life.

I can relate to that. Of course I'd love to have an 8-way Xeon Platinum with a
terabyte of RAM (so I could use Slack) to run Emacs and my terminal sessions,
but I can't really justify that. To say nothing about the noise.

Or build a Cray-2 shaped box with a beefy GPU on each of its 11 lobes immersed
in Novec bubbling like a real Cray 2.

Or a Connection Machines CM-2a-like box with 16 boards hosting 8 RPi-like
boards each with each core/thread lighting up one of 32 LEDs on the front. Or
fewer SBCs on each if I figure out how to light up LEDs based on SIMD usage in
them - 128 nodes is quite a lot.

I deeply admire the art that goes into making a Rome, a POWER9, a 28-core Xeon
or an IBM z15. I designed a stack-based CPU in college and I know how hard it
is to get everything in place. It's just that I have no use for any of that.
Quite frankly, my Xeon tower server is almost 90% idle at any given time, its
memory almost completely deserted, as is my Core i3 and my Celeron laptops.

~~~
neurobashing
I used to be the same way; I'd pore over data sheets and whatever else, I
wanted to optimize _everything_.

Then one day, I dunno, I snapped. I think some minor tweak broke something and
I just gave up. I wanted to not care about it ever again.

As it happens, I ended up buying a Mac, but I imagine you could just as easily
get the same effect with Windows. The trend continued with iPhone and iPad; I
don't care about specs, other than "can this hold my pics and music" or "can
this run the 5 tools I need to work".

I guess I only started caring about specs again when Apple introduced broken-
by-design keyboards and the ridiculous touchbar. Somehow that snapped me,
again. Like suddenly someone put a tack on my comfy seat.

------
davb
I had terrible tearing with my default Ubuntu 19.04 install last week, too.
I'm using an Intel integrated GPU. The solution was to create the file
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf (and the directory, as it didn't already
exist but does get checked by X11 if present) with the following content:

    
    
      Section "Device"
        Identifier "Intel Graphics"
        Driver "intel"
    
        Option "TearFree" "true"
      EndSection
    

No more screen tearing, in my case!

~~~
amiga-workbench
It's quite irritating that these settings aren't sane defaults that the driver
falls back on, but at least it's simple to configure.

~~~
Crinus
One's sanity is another's insanity. I dislike vsync'd desktop (and it is my #1
annoyance with Windows since 8, i just put up with it) so for me the sane
option is the existing default one.

~~~
timvisee
Could you elaborate why?

~~~
Crinus
Due to responsiveness. When i move or resize a window, the UI feels too
sluggish with the window (or its edge) being several frames behind the mouse
cursor (which is composited by the GPU on top of the most recent framebuffer
state).

Without a compositor running (which introduces its own lag due to having to
draw all toplevel windows in its own backbuffer) and v-sync, everything is up-
to-date.

There is tearing, of course, but the only time it bothers me is when i watch a
video - in which case i enable vsync in the video player. But other than that
i prefer the responsiveness.

FWIW it is the same in games too, i always play with vsync disabled and i
always notice when a first person game (where i have direct control of the
camera with the mouse) is rendering behind the current state (some games use
previous game state(s) to keep the GPU busy). And yeah it annoys me when it
happens.

Some people suggest high refreshrate monitors, but to me that feels like a
workaround that lowers the problem's impact, but doesn't make the problem go
away.

~~~
amiga-workbench
Is the real solution here to use a display with adaptive sync?

~~~
vetinari
Adaptive sync is not being used for composited desktop, only for apps that are
fullscreen (i.e. no need to coordinate several different processes to random
intervals).

------
ehnto
> I'm able to focus better. I never get unprompted system popups on my screen
> except during boot.

i3 helped me so much with focus. I can also move around and manage my entire
workspace with my keyboard which feels more concise.

It's not really a time efficiency gain so to speak, more like a mental
headroom gain that lets me be more productive. I'm not flicking between
windows and spaces with alt-tab to try and find what I'm looking for. I'm just
going right to what I want with a keyboard shortcut. It feels a lot more like
working at a purpose built workstation rather than a consumer OS that I've
stuffed software development tools into.

~~~
GGfpc
I tried getting into i3 but having to use the command line for things like
selecting wifi, changing screens and battery saver modes is so cumbersome.

~~~
dce
I had the same issues running i3 on top of Ubuntu, but Manjaro + i3
([https://manjaro.org/download/community/i3/](https://manjaro.org/download/community/i3/))
ships with a nice GUI for managing this stuff.

------
Groxx
> _For instance, if I want to plug in a USB microphone, headphones, and two
> displays to my computer all at once, I 'll have to do some configuration
> through the command line to make them work correctly._

tbh this kind of thing is why I keep leaving linuxes/unixes/etcs. the amount
of background knowledge you need to have to do this without spending hours
each time is _immense_ , and I didn't grow up with it so I don't have it.

~~~
131012
This is something I do regularly and I have no problems on Ubuntu 18.04.
What's the matter exactly?

~~~
brightball
I was wondering the same thing. I've been on Ubuntu for 2 years now and I've
never run into an issue here.

EDIT: I see it now. He's running Ubuntu SERVER with i3 window manager
installed and not the actual desktop distro. Just a guess, but that's the root
of the issue.

~~~
angry_octet
Yeah it beats me why people do this and then complain about Linux as a
desktop.

~~~
snazz
I feel like it's an open problem at this point. I think Sway is the nicest
experience (given that it's very similar to i3, while being more user-friendly
and not hauling all the Xorg cruft), especially with multiple monitors and
stuff like input configuration all centralized.

An idea: Provide a GUI (or web-based with local server, like Fish's
configuration) application that lets you make changes like Wi-Fi, sound,
displays, time and date, basic window manager configuration and all the other
things that you'd need to go into a config file to fix. This could be paired
with Sway or another tiling window manager and made into a distro for people
currently using DEs to inch their way into a tiling WM.

~~~
panpanna
Let's move all that into systemd services and make the DE just a DE that talks
dbus to them :)

------
gen3
I will say, using a more full featured desktop environment can help with the
transition (KDE or Gnome). The issues you had with usb devices requiring you
to drop into a shell go away. Things like external displays just work,
removing the awkward xrandr fiddling before a presentation.

------
freeqaz
For the screen tearing, I noticed you're using i3 which doesn't include a
compositor. If you install Compton, that will fix the tearing issue. :)

~~~
benjiweber
With nvidia's driver and multiple displays I still get tearing with an active
compositor. Took me a long time to discover the "Force Composition Pipeline"
and "Force Full Composition Pipeline" options in nvidia-settings which fix it.

------
rbanffy
> Plus, open source has come a long way in terms of stability and reliability
> over the past 5-10 years

I'd say the same about Windows ;-)

No. Seriously. My Linux environments have been rock solid since the early
2000's.

------
ph2082
Using Ubuntu since 2012 on i5 with 8GB RAM. Eclipse for Java Dev work.
Thunderbird for Mail. Firefox my favourite browser. Skype for Call.

Never regretted anything.

Thing I like about this set up is that it does not come in way of getting
things done.

------
shmerl
Gaming on Linux is fine these days. Surely not a blocker for switching for the
most part (except for some edge cases like some multiplayer games that depend
on some weird anti-cheats).

~~~
CallMeMarc
I've made quite other experiences with my setup. I'm not that experienced but
with my Ubuntu and i3 setup with the standard drivers from Nvidia I couldn't
get playonlinux or wine running. I can't exactly tell what the problem in the
end was, but it definitely is not as easy as on Windows or even Mac imo.

~~~
shmerl
I surely won't recommend Nvidia for anything Linux these days. Get a decent
AMD card. That said, Nvidia should work with Wine too. Most problems with Wine
are caused by missing dependencies, like 32-bit libraries that are often
needed for 32-bit games naturally.

~~~
blaser-waffle
Nvidia with the binary-blob drivers are fine. Not great, but fine. Some
updates broke things and required work but got em fixed.

That said, looking at AMD for the next (linux) build, both in CPU and graphics
card.

~~~
shmerl
I wouldn't call them fine if you consider general progress of the Linux
desktop. Their integration with the whole stack is simply broken, due to
Nvidia refusing to upstream their drivers. It's the reason they for years
couldn't support PRIME (Optimus) and Wayland use cases, and despite their very
slow efforts to address that, a lot of it is still broken for their blob (like
XWayland use case).

Basically, if you care about the progress of the Linux desktop, don't use
Nvidia, since it's only holding it back.

------
ekianjo
Screen tearing is usually a compositor issue. I still find it terrible that
this is not dealt well by default in Ubuntu in 2019.

------
rct42
Something I've appreciated after replacing Windows with Ubuntu on most of my
machines is the ability for me to take its SSD out and put it in another
computer. Really handy for travelling.

While I could get a small laptop for portability, its pretty hard to match the
price/performance of a desktop. Also like how I can put together a desktop
that is really quiet (PC has a NH-D15) even while under high load.

------
proverbialbunny
The problems you mention that you haven't solved are solvable. Are you looking
for advice? I admit, I don't quite understand the reason for the opening post.

~~~
bionicbits
The things I would miss most leaving Mac...

1\. Uploading my Signature in Preview and being able to sign and edit PDF
documents on any of my Apple Devices.

2\. Screen rendering quality, on Mac everything seems to be sharper and more
crisp than Linux on the same device.

3\. Keynote. I so want a cross-platform replacement that is nearly as good.

4\. iMessage integration with phone. I can send sms/iMessages from my Mac.

But I am planning to switch anyways. As all these companies move to a "service
model", I feel like I am only leasing my software, and tools that make the
hardware work. Furthermore, it feels impossible to get under the hood anymore.

Would love any advice or recommendations for the above.

~~~
jcelerier
For 2. That's funny, for me mac screens look like a blurry mess while Linux
are the sharpest thing around with infinality patches.

For 4. There is kde connect (you don't need to run kde to have it). Works only
with android though afaik.

~~~
MarcScott
Also messages.google.com with Android. But with the obvious caveat that you're
giving extra data to Google.

------
jwr
I also tried using Ubuntu with i3 for several months. I went back to an iMac,
for two reasons:

1) a 5K 27" screen means I can have 3 or sometimes even 4 columns of code on
screen in my Emacs at the same time, and there is no way to get 5K with a PC

2) the totally broken clipboard in Linux causes constant annoyance: I want
reliable, predictable copy/paste for text that works the same in every
application, with the same keystrokes, and that does not auto-copy on
selection (this is important, because I often want to paste OVER a selection)

All the other complaints I had were minor: I was able to somehow get the
hardware to work, I did not connect external monitors (which has always been a
disaster in Linux), stuff mostly worked. But these two were showstoppers.

~~~
satanspastaroll
Tangentially related, but I hate by-default enabled middle mouse paste on
Firefox. I use autoscroll (hold middle mouse) to browsing, and it keeps
sending paste on the site. Why is it enabled by default??

At best it's mild inconvenience, at worst it leaks company data to outside
websites that bother to capture it.

~~~
rvense
Because this is how copy-paste always worked on X11.

I'm used to it, so I hate apps that don't respect it. The option to disable it
is an app-specific option to override the environment's default behaviour.

~~~
satanspastaroll
Is there a way to globally disable middle mouse paste on X11? I don't really
use it anywhere, and when i do, it's mostly by accident

------
gambiting
>>Maybe I'm spoiled with Linux, but I like that I can install the OS without
worrying about a license. Windows does this, and I don't know if it's the
financial burden I don't like, the mental overhead of keeping track of where
my licenses are, or perhaps even just the idea that I don't really have full
control of my software.

I don't recall the last time I had to worry about licencing. The licence gets
bound to the particular hardware ID and it activates on its own, you don't
even have to type in the licence code anywhere during installation. Very weird
argument to use against Windows nowadays.

------
sandGorgon
I also highly recommend Fedora. The polish is far higher than Ubuntu.

~~~
rbanffy
And just using a Gnome shell with almost no customization AND NOT WORRYING AT
ALL ABOUT THAT is a huge productivity boost.

If we haven't wasted so many hours writing the perfect WM theme, selecting the
perfect colors, making the perfect icons and backgrounds, we'd be long past
the Singularity and enjoying our superintelligent agents taking care of our
every need.

------
davewasthere
I don't see any problem with re-installing windows though as often as you
like.

By being a little disciplined, you can have a fresh install of windows,
configured with all the apps you need from woah to go in little over a couple
hours.

I like having a scriptable install of windows in case I completely lose a
system while travelling, it's easy for me to completely restore and be
productive again within a few hours (just buy a new laptop).

Choco really helps here too.

    
    
      choco feature enable -n allowGlobalConfirmation
      choco install googlechrome
      choco install firefox 
      choco install 7zip
      choco install vlc 
      choco install git
      choco install paint.net 
      choco install sql-server-management-studio
      choco install vscode 
      choco install visualstudio2019community
    

gets me to 90% of where I need to go.

~~~
jedieaston
Boxstarter makes it even easier, as you can just do Win+R, and type
[https://boxstarter.org/package/nr/{packages](https://boxstarter.org/package/nr/{packages)
from choco separated by commas}. It bootstraps chocolatey and installs
everything, and I can be running on a new system in 10 minutes.

[https://boxstarter.org/](https://boxstarter.org/)

------
rkangel
Related: How do people manage their dotfiles? I have mine in a git repository,
but then I have a hand maintained bash script to make symlinks from the right
paths to those files in the repo.

~~~
anuragsoni
Similar to you I keep mine in a git repository, but I use dotbot[1] to manage
the symlinks to the proper paths.

[1]
[https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot](https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot)

------
luord
I liked the last in point in particular. It's one of the reasons I don't keep
dotfiles around and even my vim configuration is minimal.

I'd rather get used to defaults in case I need to use another computer in a
pinch than getting used to a system and having to google how to do every
little thing when in another system. I picked up that habit, when I had to
work on remote servers nearly every day.

That's probably a bit zealous of me, but I've gotten used to it.

------
GrumpyNl
I switched from win 10 to debian-10 because of incompatibility of docker with
win 10. What a pain is that to install that stuff. Its back to 1990, lets
install all from the command line. Took me over a day just to get my wireless
working on a acer laptop. When that was finally working, had to spend a day to
delete stuff because otherwise it wont update. Sudo became my friend. Its an
insane experiment for 2019.

------
seamyb88
It was maybe three or four hours after switching from Windows to Linux that I
began being the biggest Linux snob in the entire world.

------
tontonius
Is 2019 the year of the Linux desktop?

~~~
crispinb
Microsoft seems to think so.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
When you can get Office on a Linux desktop I'll believe that.

~~~
crispinb
It was a lighthearted remark, but primarily thinking of WSL. Let's face it,
tiling window manager enthusiasts aside, relatively few people use Linux
because of the glories of its GUI. WSL gives most people all the "desktop
linux" they are likely to want.

~~~
Zardoz84
KDE experience is far better that Windows 10

~~~
rbanffy
Gnome Shell is far better than Windows 10 for me.

From time to time I end up needing to figure out why someone's Windows laptop
won't connect to my home wifi (where Linux, Macs, BSDs, Blackberry's and
everything else connects to flawlessly) and I have to dig through the vendor-
specific control panels that vary from vendor to vendor, from Windows to
Windows, from OEM to OEM...

------
wallace_f
What does HN think of storing your backup of your pics on Google Pictures?

It's free and has unlimited storage for typical quality photos. Is there any
downside to this besides privacy concerns?

------
hyfgfh
it might be a good idea try a linux distro

