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Linux Desktop Usability

I know a lot of people use Linux as their desktop OS for "free software reasons", but it's my daily driver because I simply find it more useable than the alternatives.

I ran Debian + KDE sometime in the mid-2000s on a computer I rescued from a dumpster, and while I was very fond of that rig, I remember getting exasperated with it after awhile. I picked up a Mac the following year, and was an OSX convert for close to a decade.

Sometime around 2017, I vaguely remember starting to feel like I was tolerating OSX more than enjoying it. I used Windows 10 for gaming, and that was fine for that purpose, but I didn't like it for much beyond that. (Strangely, I really loved the Windows Phone OSes, but I didn't really carry that love over when their design principles were ported to the desktop.)

In 2019, I picked up a Dell XPS 13" and put Linux Mint on it. I was immediately surprised at how straightforward it was to use. Especially heartwarming was the simplicity of launching programs (via the windows key + freetext search.) I'd also underestimated how much Docker made my life on Linux easier (because I could now confine programming-specific package installs to containers, which kept my host dependencies pretty simple.)

I was happy with Mint, and then sometime in 2021 had an urge to tinker. I'd been strangely curious about Zorin—Mint has this huge, helpful community, and I'd frequently see Zorin mentioned as a plug-and-play alternative to Mint. I found very little community around Zorin, and the bulk of what I could learn about it came from the Zorin website and some youtube videos. I installed it on a whim, assuming I'd switch back to Mint in a few days.

I never did. Zorin just works for me. I don't know much about the folks who make it, or about the folks who run it at home, which is substantially different than my Mint experience. I had hoped that Zorin would solve the one issue I had with Mint, which was this terrible feeling of input lag. Turns out that switching to a more desktop-friendly kernel configuration (I chose Xanmod) did the trick, and would have likely done the trick on Mint as well. Whenever I go back to Mac (for work) or to Windows (for gaming) now, I find myself low-grade frustrated at the UX. I'm not claiming that this is going to be remotely true for most people, but it is for me, and that makes me happy.

I know Zorin has some forums and maybe a Mastodon server or something, but I haven't felt much of an urge to see what they're up to out there. I'm just grateful it exists.