For the first time in about 25 years I’m running a Linux desktop. It’s great!

I used to use Linux all the time. But even back in the early ’00s all I was running for work was ssh terminals and a web browser and Windows did that just fine. And for gaming you had to have Windows. I had a few years of using a Mac, then switched back to Windows once WSL got good enough to have a local Unix.

But I liked to try Linux out every couple of years. Last month I installed Bazzite on an external drive to test it out. I liked it so much I’m now converting entirely. I even bought a new computer and monitor for it.

A key factor in switching is that Bazzite is a particularly well-engineered consumer product. It installs simply with a bunch of codecs and drivers so that my fancy HDR monitor simply worked. Bazzite is a gaming-oriented OS and it only exists because Valve put a lot of effort into making Linux gaming work with the Proton compatibility layer. These days Linux plays most games better than Windows itself does and thanks to the success of the SteamDeck, a lot of devs are testing on Linux.

KDE Plasma is another key part of my good experience. It took 27 years but Linux finally has a pretty usable desktop environment out of the box. Multiple monitors work, display scaling works, HDR even works! There’s still some rough edges but all in all it’s pretty good. A lot of things work better than they do on Windows.

I’ve been having a lot of fun tinkering with stuff. Quieting fan noise, getting wake-on-LAN working, streaming Plexamp to my Sonos... Some of these things are probably doable in Windows too but it’s sure a pleasure figuring it out in Linux. Having AIs to ask questions of is a big help too, I wouldn’t have found this so easy two years ago.

Bazzite was a great first date but I’ve since switched to Nobara Linux. They’re very similar, both Fedora variants. Bazzite is an immutable OS which is great for an appliance like a TV PC but not so good for tinkering. Nobara is a more traditional “install what you want” setup. I could also just use Fedora directly but the extra customizations and drivers add enough value add I am glad to have it.