I’m going to dual boot openSUSE Tumbleweed (with Plasma) and Windows–a change long coming.

Why Swap?

I don’t really like Windows. There are some nice features, of course

There are plenty of good reasons for why one should swap to Linux of some flavor, but I’m not going to try to convince you that you should; here are my reasons for doing so, though.

• Developing in Windows is kinda icky

  I get ticked off every time I type ll and Powershell says:

  ll : The term 'll' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.
  At line:1 char:1
  + ll
  + ~~
      + CategoryInfo          : ObjectNotFound: (ll:String) [], CommandNotFoundException
      + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException

  Ok fine I could alias ll to ls or something but I don’t want to. What’s worse is:

  touch : The term 'touch' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.
  At line:1 char:1
  + touch .config
  + ~~~~~
      + CategoryInfo          : ObjectNotFound: (touch:String) [], CommandNotFoundException
      + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException

  I have to use New-Item? With a hyphen and capitalization? Pshaw what is that?

  Basic commands seem to have some weird PowerShell syntax that I can’t be bothered to learn. Part of that is wholly on me. But bash/zsh/fish/$YOUR_FAVORITE_SHELL are just so much nicer–fish especially. Things make more sense to me in Linux, at least whenever I use Ubuntu systems (WSL2, clusters, etc.), and everything I’m going to remote into is going to be running Linux and using bash. It would be very nice to have the same commands work the same way on every computer I use.

• Software As an extension of my prior point, there is some software exclusive to Linux that I want to use.

• Privacy/FOSS My OS is one of the last non FOSS portions of my tech stack, and it is a big one. Obviously, swapping away from Microsoft would be nice

• Customizability Plasma looks quite pretty, and extremely customizable. I’m sure I’ll have a lot of fun messing around with it.

Why Dual Boot?

So I like the idea of using Linux, at least–I’ll try it soon enough and be able to make a stronger statement then. But as I mentioned on the onset, I’m planning on dual booting. I need Windows for some things, still. Some software works better on Windows–e.g. games. Also, I don’t want to backup and move all my files so I’ll just have both and only use Windows when I must. The next PC I build (probably “for” grad school) will have Linux as a first class citizen and Windows languishing on an extra drive. I don’t think I’ll really need to swap into Windows too often anyway.

Programs

Windows Only

• Positron I was a touch surprised to see Positron only supports Debian & Red Hat. There’s an issue tracking a flatpak/snap release, but till then I wouldn’t have my IDE which is a major pain. I might wait till this happens to swap proper, or I’ll suffer through VSCodium or try something else new. This is the biggest thing holding me back from swapping right now, as I use Positron for everything–it’s one of my current favorite applications.

• GitHub Desktop Entirely expected, not entirely missed. GHD is nice only because GUIs can be nice, especially since I don’t do anything fancy with Git. However, I’m trying out jujutsu which doesn’t have a snazzy GUI to go along with it (yet?) so I might as well learn Git through the CLI proper. I know how to do most of the things I need to (checkout branches, push/pull, etc.) but I’m just out of practice.

• PowerToys (viz. Run and Mouse Without Borders) I’m sure there are plenty of good alternatives to Run (e.g. Walker–or maybe even as part of Plasma?), but I’m a bit less sure about MWB. I’m planning on leaving my laptop on Windows, so I want something that works cross-platform. Input Leap might work.

• Musicbee I have some downloaded songs that I like to through Musicbee. I looked a little bit but haven’t found anything as full featured as Musicbee which is still aesthetically pleasing. Strawberry is the closest I’ve seen in terms of functionality, so I’ll probably try that. I know there are a few KDE music player apps so I’ll check those out too. I might need to use a few apps to cover all the things I usually do with just Musicbee, but that’s fine.

Linux Only

• fish I really like Fish when I’ve used it. Julia Evans also speaks highly of it, and that’s enough for me. Having an actually good shell might be the number one thing I’m excited for.

• ghostty Similarly, ghostty looks quite pretty. Windows terminal isn’t bad at all, but I’d like to swap just for kicks.

• Zed I’m not super big on “AI” autocomplete and get bugged evn by bad, unprompted “normal” code completion, so I don’t know if I am the target audience for Zed. That being said, it seems quite nice even forgoing the AI features so I might give it a whirl.

Both

This whole post was beget by a quick list I wrote up of all the software I use and their (lack of) Linux support. As I expected, most things I use are distributed on Linux somehow. There appear to be a number of ways to install software on Linux, and I think the hierarchy is Native > AppImage > Flat/Snap? That’s what I’m planning on trying, at least. I have a lot of programs that I currently use which I’ll just have to re-install and configure, which is nice.

Sioyek
Librewolf
Firefox
Mullvad
Chromium
Thunderbird
Spotify
Bitwarden
Helix
Okular
Anki
GIMP
Darktable
Localsend
MiKTeX
KDE Connect

Chromium is there just when websites complain about Gecko. I use Firefox as my softest browser, and use it for things like School (Canvas) and such. Librewolf is setup to be stricter, but I still sign in to things, have cookies, whatever. I should be mostly using Mullvad for general, random, internet queries but I’ve been bad at doing so.

I have a few KDE apps already, so it’ll be nice to be on their native platform.

I might swap MikTeX to some other TeX distribution, don’t know if it really matters or not to be honest. I’ll probably read up on that before re-installing.

Helix is fun! It’s taking some time to get used to the keybinds though. I’m not great with Vim motions, but I’m somewhat used to them so I get thrown for a loop a little with Helix. I just need to sit down and do the tutor.

Conclusion

My main goal for this post was to list my thoughts out so I don’t forget what I planned on doing when I eventually swap. I’ll probably slot in a new drive and install Tumbleweed on that, so as to not have to really deal with partitions. I think I’ll also need to find a flash drive somewhere? I haven’t used one in ages and don’t think I have one on me. I haven’t read too much into how exactly one dual boots yet, but I get the general gist. You somehow install this other OS, go into BIOS, change boot order, bam–you’re in. It’s the installing part that I nede to figure out, but not for a while since I don’t have a drive to install to, yet.

I’m also thinking of installing Aeon instead of Tumbleweed, but I think I’ll enjoy the tinkering so will probably end up staying with Tumbleweed.

I’m excited to proper use Linux! It’s been a long time coming. I dream of ghostty + fish.