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Migrating Back to Linux

I will be blunt; Windows 11 requiring TPM (trusted platform Managment) and processors that started production after several exploits had been found in x86 architecture is not entirely unreasonable. Microsoft’s handling of this announcement, or rather their sneaking it through and muddying the waters by having conflicting information out and not communicating, is not.

I am not switching to linux out of some grand protest or statement, or belief that microsoft and intel/AMD are somehow in cahoots over the whole scheme to try drumming up PC sales. Sure I can see the argument as having weight, but that’s not why I’m swapping, or rather have already swapped. I’m swapping because my desktop doesn’t have TPM, and I can’t be bothered to figure out if I can make that happen. Why bother when linux already did pretty much everything I wanted over a decade ago other than gaming, and thanks to Valve’s efforts with Proton, gaming is nolonger an issue.

To be absolutely fair though it wasn’t a complete walk in the park. Wifi drivers can be kinda hit and miss, and my preferred wifi dongle had the dreaded realtek chipset. This meant dragging out an older wifi dongle, dealing with the fact it only half worked (in that it gave maybe 50kb/s speeds) to try troubleshooting the other wifi dongle. All while my right eye has an airbubble in it thanks to retina surgery and my left eye has contrast issues and in general doesn’t work well to begin with.

That is to say I bashed my face against the keyboard until I got results.

Thanks to the linux mint forums for the solution. Had I been able to see properly it would have been an easy fix, but see above on my eyesight and mint has a very vision unfriendly color scheme.

Seriously, my poor eyesight is kinda half the reason I’m bothering with Gemini. That and just a general feeling that the platform suits me. Anyway…

With wifi sorted everything else just fell into place. Desktop bluetooth range is still kinda small, which amusesm e considering how far away from my tablet I can go with the tablet in the exact same spot as the desktop, and stil lget signal as I clean house. However the intermittant disconnects I had been suffering on wifi seems to have sorted themselves out post-switchover.

This is all mostly a return to familiarity with me as before windows 10 I had actually been on linux, though Peppermint instead of Linux Mint. The biggest thingI can think, though, is summed up by a single statement.

Why did Microsoft dumb down how it handled it’s low vision options?

Seriously. It used to be from way back in 3.1 (if not before) all the way up to windows 7 yo ucould customize everything from the title bars, buttons, task bars, and every other piece of font and UI element size, color, and so on. Windows 8 onward? Here’s a global zoom function Have Fun.

So returning to linux’s level of UI customization has honestly been rather pleasant on my sore eyeballs. Sure there will be hiccups when it comes to gaming, and I am quite awayre that ‘purists’ will growl at me that ‘oh Linux Mint isn’t ‘real’ linux. It’s a trash ubuntu derivitive.’ And to them? I say OK. It gave me a familiar interface out of the box and lets me do what I want to do. You want to go off on some tiling window manager or some complexity addict disguised as minimalism bend? You do you.

I’m just kinda surprised at how smooth the transition was. Literally everything I had been using in windows? On linux. The only gaff post wifi is ‘oops filezilla opened open office rather than the local Notepad equivilant’ when editing this file.’

It’s not for everyone, but I’m happy.

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