New Year, New OS

This year I decided to make a big change and move from Windows to Linux. I wanted to make sure I found the perfect distro to fit my needs, so I tried out several different ones.

I have been using Linux from WSL in Windows as my base when doing development works, but I am feeling stiffled by Windows in may ways. This year I think I will use Linux as my main daily driver and see if I can improve my workflows.

Several Linux distrios that I have tried are VanillaOS https://vanillaos.org/ and https://zorin.com/os/ but I found them not to my liking, the way they are used and done does not work with my flows.

After a lot of research and testing, I eventually settled on KDE Neon and I am very happy with my decision. This distro is based on Ubuntu, so I was able to keep the same user-friendly environment that made Ubuntu so great. Additionally, it also comes with the KDE desktop environment, which provides a huge range of customization options and a great user interface. The base Ubuntu is LTS but the KDE itself is rolling release, I think I like this setups. I do not want to tinker the base OS but I would like to customize the desktop environment to suit my needs.

While moving from Windows to Linux has been a great experience overall, there have been a few bumps in the road. One of the biggest issues I encountered was compatibility with my secondary drive that I formatted when I was using Windows. I found out my partition was Dynamic Disks / Logical Disk Manager (LDM) https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dynamic_disks. My installed Neon cannot seem to mount the partitions in write mode only in read mode. I found out that I need to use ldmtool and also clear up the hibernation configs in this partition. What I did was:

install ldmtool
enable the partition with ldmtool create all
identify where the device is
install ntfsfix
run ntfsfix against to created volume from ldmtool
mount the partition from Dolphin file manager
I also add script to auto create the volume

My references:

I think this is too much hassle for the partition, I plan to backup my data there and reformat the partition to exFAT for easier integration.

Another thing that I was concerned was gaming support in Linux as I usually do some light gaming on Steam. However I found out the recent Steam Deck was on Linux and there is ProtonDB which shows games with good support on Linux. I managed to run some of my game there but have not tried them all, but all things considered I am not seeing any issue on this need.

Overall, moving from Windows to Linux has been an incredibly rewarding experience. KDE Neon has provided me with a great user experience, a wide range of customization options, and a great community to help me out. While there have been a few issues, such as compatibility and the learning curve, these can be easily overcome with a bit of research and tinkering. I am very happy with my decision to move to Linux and I look forward to continuing my journey.