Linux as a Daily Driver

I've been dual booting my desktop between Windows and Linux for a while. Despite this, more often than not I booted into Windows, primarily for gaming. It often didn't even matter though since I would still spend more time on my MacBook Pro as my primary machine. That hasn't been the case of late though. Enter Linux Mint.

I'm not entirely sure when I installed Linux Mint 22.2 on my desktop. Based on some timestamps on files, I'd roughly guess maybe sometime in October? I can't say for certain, other than it's been several months. Performance-wise, I have no complaints. The machine and system are speedy and snappy. From a "I want to get stuff done" perspective, it's been mostly fine.

Speed Bumps Mostly

Most of the issues I've dealt with have been more like speed bumps. The first issue I ran into was getting Wine and World of Warcraft to play nice together. I remember having constant issues with it back in the mid-to-late 2000s and never getting it to work properly. After doing some reading, it looks like it had gotten a lot better, as has gaming on Linux as a whole. I still had some trouble getting Wine, Lutris and WoW up and running. I had given up on it for a while until I came back at it and with a little more troubleshooting, got it working. The only frustrating part (maybe?) is that I'm still not quite sure what I did differently before when it wasn't working. Oh well, it's installed and running, as is Steam and a few other games.

The other issue I dealt with was getting .NET 10 running. I'm thinking that part of my issue was that I installed .NET 9 through Linux Mint's package manager which set up some environmental variables that conflicted with the updated way of installing the .NET SDK. I was able to get it working after a little troubleshooting, wrote about it, and am now in good shape.

Smooth Sailing Otherwise

Outside of those two issues and speed bumps, I've been very happy with Linux Mint. I'm able to work on my side projects just fine. I have .NET, Node.js and NPM all running without issue. The primary applications I use all have Linux versions or good alternatives.

I've now been using it far more often than my MacBook when I'm working at my desk. I'm definitely not in the market for a new laptop, but it's given me something to think about when the time comes.

I still don't think it'll get wide adoption as Windows and MacOS tend to be more user-friendly for non-technical folks, but it's nice to see it come along as well as it has.