Really enjoyed this article about switching to Linux from The Verge. I’m no expert, but I’ve run Linux systems to various degrees since about 2009, when I had an old e-Machine Celeron system I was trying to get some extra life out of. Windows and some dubious filesharing downloads had made it borderline unusable.

I’ve always been surprised by how well Linux sort of works off a fresh install. It’s definitely come a long way when it comes to graphics drivers and Wi-Fi support. It used to be very hazardous to install Linux on a laptop without checking what wireless chip you had in there. My mom’s old HP AMD Turion laptop had many perilous Linux and BSD installs (I think at one point she tried to boot it up and asked me, “What is GhostBSD?”. But if your needs were a browser, a basic office suite, and mail, Linux has been viable for a long time.

It really seems that the bigger push for people to try out Linux of late has been Microsoft’s apathy toward user experience rather than prioritizing AI integration. That and having a really bad answer for Steam Deck-like portable gaming. It’s still remarkable to me that the layers of kludge required to get Windows game running on a Steam Deck can create a dramatically more compelling product than just natively running Windows on that hardware. And yet it does.

Like I found when I installed Ubuntu on my Surface Go, even using fairly niche hardware tends to work well with the major distributions. I used to have the Linux evangelist mindset of trying to convert people to the OS. But given that most of what people want and need is a web browser, it almost doesn’t matter. What gets me excited the most these days with Linux is giving new life (and security updates) to otherwise abandoned hardware. As budgets get tighter, I can see that being another major factor for checking it out.