Linux No More: A Labor of Love

 Hi all.

This is a brief story about a labor of love. It is the story of my new PC. Feel free to ignore if you're not particularly interested; however, I have some feelings about everything that's transpired since I got this new computer, and wanted to write about it here. Some of the following is going to be technical and/or very boring if you're not deeply into computing, so if you're not -- look, I get it. It's okay. 

Shortly after Christmas, in late December 2021, I finally purchased the refurbished machine I'd had my eye on for a while. What that machine is, is a refurbished and updated Dell Optiplex 9010. It is the replacement for my old Acer machine that spectacularly died on me last fall, and was chosen because I use a smaller, simpler (I guess) Dell Optiplex 9020 for work -- the 9020 is the machine my company issued me when I needed to replace my old HP work machine last year.

As you know if you've been following this blog for a while, I did purchase and had been using, up until recently, a slightly more beefed up version of the same HP machine I had for work -- which I purchased as a backup machine for about $140 or so. It ended up becoming my primary machine when repairs on the Acer failed. More on that below. For now, back to the main story.

This is a brief, partially inaccurate rundown of what my new machine has in it:

My PC has the i5 processor, Windows 10, and 16GB RAM. It does include a DVD-RW, but not a Blu-ray writer. And, the hard drive is 2TB, not 1TB. 

The 9010 came in a number of different configurations upon manufacture -- there were two small form-factor versions (a small and an "ultra-small"), a desktop, a mini-tower, and an AIO (all-in-one, where everything is one unit, including the monitor -- plug in a keyboard and mouse and go). I have the "mini-tower," which is the largest of all of the units. I did this on purpose -- I want the machine to be upgradable and I want to be able to easily swap out drives if/as necessary, as well as have room inside the machine to move my hands around, easily be able to plug in another 16GB RAM stick or what have you. Keep in mind that I have another 2TB HDD from the Acer that is just taking up space and has been fully wiped clean, so I may add that in for extra storage eventually...or I may end up just putting it into an enclosure and attaching it to my PS4, who knows.

Anyway.

I ordered the PC from Amazon in the end of December. I did so because the HP I had been using as my "backup" machine had become my primary machine, and even with Linux on it, it was dreadfully slow. It was loud, it took forever to load programs, sites, videos, its network card seemed more than a little wonky (it would just randomly drop internet connection, for no reason, and would need me to unplug/replug in the wifi extender to reset and re-obtain a connection multiple times per week, and sometimes multiple times per day). It was the very definition of a backup computer -- use it in a pinch until you can get something better and then put it into storage, because it's not built for anything but the most basic of computing needs.

Well, that was always the plan from the day I purchased that machine. My life is spent on the computer and on the internet. You could say, and be mostly accurate, that my life at this juncture is irrevocably entwined with being online, and that it would be very difficult to function without a computer that could meet my needs. There was no way I could just not have a fully functional, working computer that I could use without worrying whether or not it was going to fail catastrophically on me, as the Acer did. Add to this that in the few weeks leading up to Christmas, the HP had been freezing/crashing a fair amount for unknown reasons and with unknown causes -- it would just randomly freeze up and decide it didn't want to do anything. I had similar issues on my old, old HP Pavilion about twenty years ago now too, and it turned out that was the motherboard slowly dying on me. Eventually, it just blew out. This was absolutely not an experience I wanted to deal with again. 

The new Dell was about $200, give or take -- professionally refurbished and with a fresh installation of Windows 10 Professional included. Remember this, it'll be important later. $200 is not an insignificant purchase for me, especially for one singular item, but it did give me the baseline of what I needed to get back to the sort of computing I was used to -- namely all the RAM I'd need for daily use and a 2TB HDD for my storage needs. It came with a generic $5 keyboard and $5 wired optical mouse, the latter of which I accidentally broke into a million cheap plastic pieces when I was unpackaging the giant box this new PC came in Oops. It doesn't matter, I have a fancy LED-backlit mechanical keyboard and wired, LED-color-changing optical gaming mouse anyhow, but it's nice to have spares, I guess. I have another similar gaming mouse in a box behind my television too, in the event that my current one dies or what-have-you. I have options and I come prepared. 

My first step upon its arrival was to back up everything I had on the HP to my external HDD, so that I would not lose a single, solitary file. This was a long, arduous process on that old HP -- while the Acer backed up stuff/copied files relatively quickly, my external HDD is eight years old, and it's a disk -- it's not solid state or anything like that. So, a slow machine moving files to a slow, old drive was an incredibly ponderous process that would legitimately take hours -- just my 200GB podcasts folder alone usually took about 4 hours or more to copy over. Everything else would take, on average, about three hours to move. 

Keep in mind that I didn't trust the HP at all, so I was doing these backups weekly -- usually every Friday or Saturday night -- over the course of the several months I used the machine as my primary computer. 

In the interim, I had gone out and fetched the latest Ubuntu Linux distro and burned it to a DVD, as well as making a second copy on a blank bootable USB drive. I also went to our linen closet and grabbed a spare pillowcase (from my Star Trek: The Next Generation sheet set, if you can believe that) -- this will also be important later. 

The new versions of Ubuntu are very...feature heavy? I guess you could say? They're bloated with a lot of stuff that most users don't want and will never use, along with a few different atrocious "desktop environments" to choose from that are either stupid-looking, hard to use and unlike anything Windows/Mac has to offer, or both. I always used the GNOME desktop environment on my Linux distributions, simply because it was more like a traditional Windows/Mac environment -- top and/or bottom bars, easily accessible menus, desktop icons, the ability to pin things to bars or to menus, etc. As that GNOME got "upgraded" over the years, it also got more bloated and difficult to use/configure properly, and eventually became something completely different than what it originally was supposed to be. Frequently, I would have to go back out and re-download it back onto my machine after an OS upgrade and reconfigure it by hand, which was not something I was a fan of doing, as it eventually got dropped completely in favor of another desktop environment called Unity. 

It got a little easier when after some outcry, a few years ago they released "GNOME Classic," which more accurately mimicked the systems that all of us had used for many years -- but it was far from perfect and not anywhere near as customizable or useful as it looked like it would be (or as old-school Linux users were used to). And really, that was the big part of what I liked about Ubuntu Linux from 2006 to around 2019 or so -- you could really make it your own system, make the tweaks and upgrades you wanted, have it look and operate the way you wanted it to, and not sacrifice functionality. Sure, it was a little more complex to use and if you were a novice to how it ran, you'd be lost until you learned the basics -- but I had many years of Linux experience under my belt and the extra effort was worth it to me to say that I had a lightweight, free-to-own-and-use, open-source operating system with a community of dedicated users supporting it and continually upgrading it.

After a while though, especially from around 2019 forward, that began to change. Once Ubuntu began reaching the 20.xx versions, it began to get slower and less compatible. Programs I'd install and run -- that were said to have full Linux functionality -- would freeze or crash, even though I far surpassed the technical specs needed to run them. It became less customizable and you were more or less forced to use the desktop environments the way the developers wanted them to be. Different media file types stopped being supported, despite the proper codecs being installed and tweaks being applied. One of the system upgrades even broke my default display drivers and forced me to go in on the command line to manually switch to some sort of universal display driver -- something that a novice computer user would never have the patience for or knowledge of how to do. Certain software packages couldn't be disabled or removed or it would break the entire system, but if you didn't have them on your machine and configured properly from a previous legacy upgrade, the machine would also become mostly unusable. I had the Acer configured to work mostly how I wanted it after several OS upgrades and my own personal tweaks over the years, as I'd owned it since 2017, and it did mostly everything I wanted it to -- but every year I would become increasingly more jaded at Linux with each new major upgrade. I still believed in the concept and overall goals of the Ubuntu project, but it felt hollow. I wasn't really enjoying using it anymore. I felt constrained by what it used to be able to do but could no longer do, and truth be told, I'd lost the excitement in making things work the way I wanted them to work -- I just wanted everything to function properly without needing to manually reconfigure every time something changed. It all became so damn tiresome. 

So, all of this being said, I did some research into how to seriously dual-boot with Windows 10 -- meaning, taking a computer with an existing Windows 10 installation on it, and installing Ubuntu Linux alongside it with the choice of which one to load into at boot. There are a few ways to do this, though it used to be far, far easier to do with the much older Ubuntu releases, as well as with earlier Windows releases. Basically, you have to create a partition on the hard drive to hold the Ubuntu OS, blank it out (for lack of a better term) and then when you boot from the Ubuntu DVD or USB stick, install it to that partition. You also have to make sure a secure-boot setting is disabled and check a few other tweaks as well in order to make the machine let you select which OS you want to boot into upon startup. It was simple enough and seemed pretty straightforward, so once I set up the new Dell -- which included fully setting up and customizing Windows 10 a bit -- I made the necessary tweaks and was ready to give it a try.

I'd like to pause here for a moment to say that outside of work, or for a few minutes messing around with Daisy's laptop, I've never had any real experience with any Windows OS past Windows XP 20 years ago. Even my experience with Windows 10 was limited to what my work PC would allow me to access and do on it, which is shockingly little -- IT has all of those machines locked down to do nothing but the minimum of what the company will allow its employees to do on them. All settings/updates/performance tweaks and enhancements are locked up like a vault at the bank. The system runs fine for our work uses, but as a user you don't get a feel for what Windows 10 is or what it can do -- it is as barebones as it gets for our work PCs, with almost everything disabled or removed from the OS itself. When I started at my job, all of the machines had Vista on them. This was updated to 7 for everyone, and then to 10 about 2-3 years ago -- shortly before Covid hit and we all migrated to work from home. All three operating systems were locked down, and 10 has so far been locked down far more than the others were.

As for Windows XP -- the last version of Windows I really used before I started on Ubuntu in 2006 with version 6.06, I loved that operating system. I was a Windows fan in college; it did everything I needed it to do quickly and efficiently, it allowed me to play almost any game I wanted (mind you, games from 20 years ago were a lot less hardware-intensive than they are now) and my Computer Science 101 course at WVU was literally nothing but Office XP. I mastered a great deal of Windows XP and only moved to Ubuntu in 2006 because my computer was quite literally dying and I needed something lightweight to squeeze another few years of useful life out of it. Ubuntu fit that bill and worked wonderfully on my aging PC, allowing me to use it until 2010 when it would've otherwise been completely obsolete by around 2007 or 2008. After that I put Ubuntu on all of my machines from the get-go, completely wiping whatever version of Windows it came with. 

This time around, however, I did not want that to be the case with my new Dell. I wanted options, I wanted to be able to be happy with the PC that I'd just spent $200 on. With Ubuntu becoming increasingly bloated and more restrictive, I wanted the ability to say "today I want to use Windows and boot up a game that wouldn't run in Linux because it's unsupported" and other days, say "today I want to use Linux and do everything I'm used to the old way."

This. Did not happen.

Though the .ISO disk image of the new Ubuntu burned flawlessly, and the new Dell booted into it from the DVD drive, it errored out spectacularly upon loading -- giving me dozens of pages of random failed code scrolling down my screen. 

I switched the options on it, upon boot, to a "graphics safe" install (meaning, mostly text-only) -- it sat on my screen and tried to load for fifteen minutes before hanging up and again displaying crazy-long lines of failed code. 

I thought perhaps I'd just burned an old/failed DVD, or that the disk image itself was corrupted somehow. I grabbed the last install DVD I'd made, when I got the HP and was setting it up, and instead stuck that one in. It was an OS-upgrade older, but it would still work -- I'd just have to perform a system upgrade once installed. It also failed. 

Okay, I thought, maybe this machine doesn't want to boot properly from the optical drive. I rebooted the Dell again with the USB stick plugged in, so it would recognize and boot from that -- it also failed. It wouldn't recognize the bootable USB no matter what I did. 

Hm. 

I reassessed the situation. I could either see if the DVD would do a live-install, as the older Ubuntu OSes did, I could get a much older version of Ubuntu off the online archives (like, ten years old or more) that I knew would work, I could go in and mess with a bunch of the configurations in Windows to see if I could get it working -- without knowing exactly what I was doing or if it would break my machine, or.....I could just figure it out later and use Windows for the time being, as theoretically I already had all the parts in place to install Ubuntu alongside Windows basically any time I wanted, whatever version I wanted -- I could go get an old one and configure it all the way I wanted it to run, then carefully upgrade multiple times to make sure it didn't get rid of my configurations (this option would take the better part of a few weeks, likely, of a few hours every day of mindlessly watching an OS download and install, knowing any failure would likely be catastrophic for my data). 

So I made the hard decision to, for the time being, let Linux go and embrace Windows 10. It was, indeed, a difficult decision and one I didn't take lightly. I just no longer had the infinite patience to fuck around with trying to get Linux to install properly and configure it from scratch on yet another machine, or risk deleting/wiping yet another perfectly good Windows installation just to say that I'm still "the guy who uses nothing but Linux no matter what."

What I found was surprising. Windows 10 is...delightful.

Now, mind you, I am far from a Microsoft shill. I don't really like any big corporations for much of anything, and try to stay out of the mainstream on a lot of big corporate tech -- the only real exception being that I've owned three different iPhones over the course of the past eight years. As long as I can remain an iPhone guy, I will always be an iPhone guy. But I am...very impressed with Windows 10. Like, far more than I expected to be. 

After downloading multiple large updates (apparently my PC had a fresh install that had never been updated whatsoever) and changing around some of the options and startup stuff, I had an incredibly functional computer that, honestly, seemed like it could/would do anything I wanted it to do. I immediately started adding software to fit my needs:

1. LibreOffice -- the open-source, free office suite I used on Linux, to get around needing to get/use Office 365 or something similar. I've used LibreOffice for years. I know its settings. I know its tweaks. All of my documents -- from about 2010 forward -- are formatted for LibreOffice. 
   
   
2. Windows CleanUp! -- terribly outdated (I don't think it's had a new version since 2005 or so) but the best program out there to wipe out old data, clear caches and cookies, delete old registry BS, as well as a bunch of other things that'll clog up your hard drive. I've used it since I had XP on any and all Windows machines I've ever touched, including my work machine. Unfortunately, I had to leap through four or five mirrors until I actually found an install file that Edge would let me download securely, since the program is so old. Speaking of that --
   
   
3. Microsoft Edge -- wow, what a browser. I'm not kidding. I've been a Firefox or Chrome guy quite literally since the early '00s, and I'm highly impressed with what Edge does. Microsoft may have, honestly, perfected the browser here. I do not say this lightly. I've used a lot of different browsers on all of my machines, from Netscape 1.1 and Internet Explorer 2.0 in 1996 to Firebird (the precursor to Firefox) and Opera, all the way up through the newest versions of Firefox and Chrome. Edge is really nice.
   
   
4. Google Chrome -- because even though apparently Edge runs off the same Chrome framework, I still want Chrome on my machine as a completely separate entity. I'll likely eventually install Firefox as well.
   
   
5. Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds. It is a 20-year-old computer game that has been on every PC I've ever owned since the game's release, and has been my go-to game to zone out/decompress/release some stress ever since I purchased it back when I was in college. I do not expect this to change anytime soon.
   
   
6. PCSX2 -- I don't know if all of you folks have heard of this, but many of you likely have. PCSX2 is the best PlayStation 2 emulator available. Since I can't pop a PS2 disc into my PS4 and actually play the game (sadly, there's no backwards compatibility) I needed another option. PCSX2 allows me to put the game disc into my computer's optical drive, plug in a USB controller, and play it as if I were playing the game on my actual PS2 system. It'll play downloaded games too (I don't have any of those) and upon testing it last weekend with Star Wars Battlefront II, it seems to work really well. I'll now be able to put my PS2 systems into storage and keep a handful of games around in my office for when I want to play them. 

There's a lot of other stuff I should be able to do in my free time pertaining to gaming as well -- this new PC should be able to run stuff like Magic: The Gathering Arena and Star Trek Online flawlessly and natively in Windows, and I do still have my caches of NES, Super NES, Game Boy/Color/Advance, and Sega Genesis emulators and ROMs as well, some of them dating back to the 90s when I originally downloaded them. I'm purposely not installing all of this stuff yet because, frankly, I don't have the amazing amount of time it takes to play games all day/night on my days off. I could put Steam on this machine too, as I do have an account for it (as Steam did/does have some Linux compatibility) but, again, time.

Overall, I'm rather satisfied with my new machine. There's some stuff it could do better, but a lot that it could do worse. Here's a few of its more glaring drawbacks, though:

1. This particular machine is not compatible/capable to upgrade to Windows 11. My processor apparently isn't fast enough, per Windows itself. All of my other specs are fine.
   
   
2. Because so many versions of the Optiplex 9010 were built, unless all of them run off the same motherboard architecture (overall unlikely, especially for a PC I bought secondhand and professionally refurbished), it's going to be a nightmare to figure out what kind of RAM I need if I wanted to put another stick or two into it to max it out. 
   
   
3. Device drivers are likely going to become a pain again at some point in the future.
   
   
4. I do, once more, have to worry about antivirus and the like, which for Linux is not a thing that exists.
   
   
5. Windows is still Windows -- meaning yes, it's going to have painfully long updates that make me reboot my PC over and over for some of them.
   
   
6. A few programs I loved in Linux are either not compatible or don't exist for Windows 10, and the ones that do the same things generally cost actual money for the Windows versions.

So, all, there you have it. I've been running this machine for the better part of a month now on Windows only, and have been really satisfied with it thus far. I'll let you know if that changes, of course, but apparently I'm a Windows guy now. Again.

Oh, and since I mentioned the pillowcase earlier -- in the event this new machine does die or blow a major part, I slipped the old backup HP into the pillowcase -- protecting it from dust/dirt/vape residue, etc -- and it is now in "storage" next to me at the side of my desk. If I need to use it again, I will, but it can finally get some well-deserved, much-earned rest.