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| title | tags | date | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| On Linux |
|
9-08-23 |
This page documents my many adventures with Linux and why I enjoy it.
Virtualization
Virtualization is a great way to get acquainted with Linux. If you're a student, check if your university has VMware (also see for-students in general).
I started messing with Linux in a virtual machine, and testing to see if I'd be able to daily drive it. My experiments with Ubuntu went pretty well, but it didn't feel good to use in a normal-computer sense. I tried again with Linux Mint, and ended up liking it a lot more. However, the Cinnamon DE was a bit too unstable for my liking. More on that in #Bare Metal.
Single-Purpose Computing
At the time of my experiments with Linux, I was part of a professional organization with its own club room at my undergraduate institution. In this club room was a big plywood monstrosity with a TV up top and a tower PC underneath, shaped like an arcade cabinet. Complete with buttons and joysticks, this cab was the ultimate 4-player emulation machine.
The problem: Everything was broken, and nobody could fix it. It ran Ubuntu 16 and had mountains of emulators and games, but none of the emulators would load. I asked around and apparently it had been sitting like that since before some of the seniors had started undergrad.
As such, I took it upon myself to troubleshoot and fix the cab so that everyone could enjoy it. A few driver updates and fixed file paths later, it could run games again!
It did need some special setup to run RetroArch, so I created a script and left a text file tutorial on the desktop to make sure that people could run it in future.
The response I got was amazing! Everyone in the organization was extremely grateful, and I'm so happy I undertook that project.
Unfortunately, the cabinet was scrapped earlier this year due to space requirements and a shifting purpose for the room, but it did end up being used actively for a few years, so I don't regret the project at all.
Bare Metal
Kernel
For the love of god, don't ever use the default kernel when daily driving. A custom kernel will squeeze every ounce of performance out of your hardware the way Windows would. I recommend the CachyOS Kernel.