quartz/content/Essays/on-linux.md

---
title: The Linux Experience
tags:
  - linux
  - cloud
  - advanced
  - seedling
  - essay
date: 2023-08-23
lastmod: 2024-09-01
---
> [!hint]  This page documents my many adventures with Linux and why I enjoy it.
> If you're looking to get involved with Linux, feel free to browse the [[Resources/learning-linux|resources for that purpose]] that I've compiled.

## 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|Resources 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|-> 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. Also had a signature in it, so I got some happy random messages on Discord a few times in the 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 in mid-2023 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
This has been my favorite part of my journey. Unrestrained, Linux is...surprisingly good, actually. 

First, I decided that I wanted a low-distractions notetaker and coding machine for my last year of undergrad. Linux Mint worked great for that task! Due to my issues with Cinnamon before, I decided to go with XFCE.
- Sidebar: Dear lord, that was an awful choice. It was low-overhead, but it looked horrible even when themed and its scaling was nightmarish. I'm on a Framework; 1x was unbearable and 2x was gigantic. I would not go anywhere near it for something different than a 1080p or 4K screen now. Even then, why? 
To my surprise, I started using it as much more than a notetaker, and almost all of my projects and computing time were spent on this Mint install!

Unfortunately, I had to abandon this, as the kernel and drivers weren't in a state that they could support my eGPU with yet. I still really like the wallpaper I made for it:

![[Attachments/MCM.png]]

I tried my best to make do with the WSL for my actual Linux needs after that. Any productivity tasks were relegated to PowerShell, which is...lacking, to say the least.
- This was broken up by a few attempts to get my eGPU working in external-drive installs of Fedora and Endeavour. Eventually, one worked.

Having to deal with subpar systems after my taste of how convenient Linux made things resulted in a growing distaste for Windows. Once I'd made enough progress on my dealbreaker issues to have a working system that I could replicate, I shrank my Windows partition as small as I could comfortably take it and installed Fedora! I've been happily driving it ever since. 

$\downarrow$ **Here's how that's going**: { WIP }
### 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](https://github.com/CachyOS/linux-cachyos).
- Fedora has a copr, and it's available on basically every Arch distro. Sorry debian/ubuntu users.
### Animosity towards Windows
I've had to retain a Windows dual-boot in order to use the exam software required by my law school. I could probably virtualize it since its protections are laughable (it won't boot if you have a second monitor or have a vmware workstation *host* installed, but the fact that Windows is running as a Hyper-V *guest* isn't an issue), but I don't want to risk being falsely flagged as academically dishonest until after my final 3L exams when it literally doesn't matter. Regardless, every time I boot it back up I'm presented with many of the reasons I swapped to Linux in the first place.

First, the startup. Windows has quite a few non-privacy, non-furtive idiosyncrasies, but by far the most infuriating is how the system hitches for 3-4 minutes during and after login from a shutdown or reboot.
### Jumping Ship to Arch
I started playing around with Arch on my 1TB expansion card when Fedora announced they were considering dropping X11 a few months ago. Interestingly, I ended up wanting to use Wayland with Arch anyway. This turned out to be a mistake.
#### Digital Extremes and Wonky Macros (DEs/WMs)
I first tried Hyprland with a random sensible config I found on YouTube, and once I stripped out Kitty for Alacritty I quite liked it. The only issue was that toolbars on things like Firefox and Dolphin take up way too much screen real estate.
- Kitty and Hyprland have maintainers that are not reflective of the community that uses Linux. Kitty’s is just opinionated, but for the latter I would follow the sentiment of the Freedesktop community (who banned the creator of the WM, leaving the project without any support from the Wayland side) and **avoid Hyprland.** Alternatives are [River](https://codeberg.org/river/river) and the [[Garden/Programs I Like/home#Suckless software|suckless]] project [dwm](https://dwm.suckless.org/).

Then, I added gnome and the gnome apps, was fun to try the newest gnome and see how well integrated with Wayland it was.

And finally, I booted this expansion card back up once Plasma 6 dropped. Honestly, it's the first Plasma desktop that's actually looked good to me. Wayland was also great, but Plasma was less fault-tolerant than GNOME: I had to **enable kernel mode setting to get Plasma to work with Wayland NVIDIA multi-monitor.** 1.75x scaling on the Framework internal monitor and 1x on the 1080p worked like a charm.

I may also try [Niri](https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri) and [Karousel](https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel) soon if I upgrade to an ultrawide monitor.

### Arch BTW
Once I started encountering dependency hell on Fedora, I backed up my files and installed Arch. It's definitely a lengthier process than any other Linux install, and I'd forgotten everything from the two times I've installed it previously (once on a VM, once on my expansion card).

I started on Plasma Wayland again. Here's the timeline:
1. Plasma Wayland has some odd quirks, so I research workarounds to make it behave more like GNOME.
2. Wayland has massive performance issues which I was unable to solve, so **Wayland is not yet usable for NVIDIA** { *last attempt at NVIDIA Wayland: September 2024, and we're close!* }. I swap to X11.
	- Info at [[Projects/nvidia-linux#Wayland|NVIDIA On Linux#Wayland]].
3. X11 Plasma reveals some more usability issues with Plasma. It has a massively degraded experience when I'm using my laptop undocked for notes etc. I start using Wayland on the go and X11 at my desktop.
4. Swapping between X11 and Wayland on logout has instability issues, probably due to something in SDDM (because I'm still using Plasma). I realize that I'm only having to deal with these issues because I'm holding on to plasma.
5. I revert to X11 GNOME. All is right with the world, I only need the workarounds that make my eGPU work, and it's more familiar because I've already used it for almost a year.

But aside from that roundabout, I've been navigating Arch just fine. I went into it knowing how to negate the most complained pitfall of Arch: that upgrading on a bleeding distro will break your system. To avoid this, I use BTRFS, which I can take snapshots of at any time that I can roll back to using `snapper`. And to make the process easier, I use `snap-pac`, which will automatically take those snapshots when running a `pacman` operation. Finally, to access these when my system is unbootable, `grub-btrfs` allows me to boot into a snapshot directly from the bootloader instead of having to try to mount it from an external OS. I've not yet had breakage, but it's good to have when a problem arises!
- The only thing this doesn't really prevent is [grubpocalypse](https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=280246), but hopefully I don't ever run into a problem like that.

Overall, Arch has been a great experience for me. ==ABOUT: how the AUR makes you a more careful package installer== 
#### Other Fun Times
I really like my expansion card for installing toy OSes to. Having an installed OS that you can throw anything on without regard to breakage has been great for messing with whatever catches my fancy. This is actually where I experimented with (wip) [[Projects/vfio-pci|GPU passthrough to a Windows VM]].

I've also been doing some Rust toolchain witchery on here but I'm not ready to write about it yet.

### What's Next?
I'm tracking [SerpentOS](https://serpentos.com/). It looks to be a ground-up attempt at incorporating advantages of unbreakable/immutable distros into the typical rolling-release model. This would take away the need for my workaround on Arch like snapshots, because that feature is baked into their package manager `moss` in a performant feature called 'transactions'. It's from the creator of Solus, so it's guaranteed to be good. Once they have maintainers and a 1.0 release, I'll try it out!