Why I moved over to Linux (part 2)

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It's nearly the end of April and I've been working from home for over a month, using the laptop running Ubuntu Studio as my daily driver. So what have I been using it for and how has it performed?

I've thrown quite a lot of random stuff at the thing over that last 4 months and particularly the last 4 weeks of home working. I've been editing videos for the wife with a few different packages (I think I've settled on Kdenlive for now), trying my hand at music scoring using MuseScore, a lot of work in Google Chrome: email, GDocs, etc. I've been on Slack a lot, and Zoom (as, it seems, has most of the population). I've been developing in various systems and languages: C++ in Visual Studio Code, PHP in Atom and VS Code, Arduino stuff in Arduino IDE, some C# in MonoDevelop, some Kotlin in AndroidStudio.

Given the small screen, I've mainly been sitting on the sofa with the laptop plugged into the telly and using Bluetooth mouse and keyboard for remote operation. Not what you'd call a standard setup, but it works.

So, how has it performed? Pretty darn well as it happens. Only 3 issues so far:

  • Initially, Bluetooth didn't want to connect to the mouse and keyboard: for some reason they didn't show up in the list of available devices. I had to fool it into listing these devices by putting my mobile into pairing mode too, then they showed up and paired fine. Strange one that;
  • Bluetooth stops working occasionally; and
  • Very rarely it gets the screen resolution wrong when mirroring the display to the telly.

That's it. Nothing has crashed, no blue screens of death (and I was doing some horrible programming with memory pointers the other day)

It's been great, reliable, easy to use, and there's a huge amount of software available. Ok, it may not always be as polished as PC or Mac software, but I can live with that. The only non-Linux software I really use are Family Tree Maker and Adobe Cloud. There are options on Linux for the latter, but I'm not sure about FTM. To be honest, I'm not missing either of them enough at the minute. I also tend to rip CDs and DVD to my local media server, but I'm pretty sure there is Linux software to cover that.

The old Dell remains on Windows for now, but the wife has even used the laptop for some Zoom calls, so is being eased slowly into the world of Linux. I'll update the Dell to 1909 soon and if it breaks, it'll be goodnight Microsoft on that computer too.

So, will the laptop return to Windows when 11 comes out? No chance.

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