This is a 12 year dream. I have always run a Windows workstation along side a Debian laptop. I am no stranger to Debian. I have a 12 year association with it. I am not a Linux wizard yet but have been adept with it.

Why not use Debian daily then? My personal computing usage unfortunately centered around consumption rather than creation. I watched videos, listened to podcasts, read technical articles, and browsed social media. On top of this, inertia and great software like Visual Studio, Notepad++, Excel, OneDrive held me back.

Visual Studio is an absolute must-have for all .NET developers. I built small pieces of complex web projects only occasionally. VS Code on Linux is decent for .NET development but it is not the same. Though Jetbrains Rider existed along-side, it is unthinkable to drop Visual Studio. At least for dark matter developers.

Notepad++ is a fabulous software program that had no complete alternatives on Linux. I used it for scripting, text manipulation, note taking, dumping and editing thoughts. Scintilla-based equivalents Geany, SciTE exist, but do not come close.

MS-Office Excel is another remarkable software program with no real alternatives in other ecosystems. It is worth the 5K INR per year. Organizing data, life planning, and creating simple reports are a few of its greatest capabilities. Also, the formulas system is amazing. OneDrive is another great and a utilitarian software program from the Microsoft stable.

So, why now? I had the most fun and growth when I built things. I love the independence that comes with the experience of building things. As far as I can remember, I was always a tinkerer, thinker, builder, doer and explorer. After a decade or so of inaction, I needed a change. A few things fell into place recently.

  • Windows is about to get a whole lot more annoying. An increase in ads, baked-in Copilot, and a suffocating push to outlook user-linked usage.
  • Jetbrains Rider became formidable now for CLI and web app development.
  • I learnt enough of apt-pinning, backports and makedeb repository.
  • The last straw is from an unexpected experience. I set up a Win 11 VM recently using the KVM+QEMU route. I noticed that the VM’s performance was quite responsive. KVM+QEMU despite all the pain felt worthy. I cannot recommend it enough.

Immediately I decided to remove Windows, install Debian with a Windows VM inside. I will write about various experiments and experiences over the next year. These are some of the sub-projects on my mind in no particular order.

  • Write about this setup
  • Implement a nice 3-2-1 backup strategy
  • Write about significant alternatives
  • Write about significant issues
  • Linking to phone
  • Configure monitoring, notifications and alerts
  • Configure auto dark mode
  • Find a way to play an old strategy game on Linux
  • @9point6
    40•3 months ago

    I just don’t get the love for notepad++

    I started using it as my main back in 2006ish, I then switched to sublime text about 2011, then about 5-6 years ago to VSCode. All the time using vim for any in-terminal quick edits.

    Notepad++ is easily my least favourite editor of the lot, by several miles, it just seems so rigid and clunky without even going into how it’s windows only. Every editor I’ve used since has been a huge improvement over the one prior IMO

    • DebianGuyOP
      14•3 months ago

      Agree on all counts about Notepad++ “oldness”

      • slower when we have 100 files open
      • clunky
      • rigid
      • old GUI paradigms ( settings modal, find modal etc)
      • inflexible and less customizable UI chrome area

      Few things I like about Notepad++ enough to actually keep on using it on work workstations:

      • Plugins ecosystem. I am too entrenched into it.
        • PoormansSqlFormatter
        • Tidy2
        • JSTool
        • XML Tools
        • ComparePlus
        • TextFx2
      • great built-in editing operations Edit > EOL
      • great bookmarking operations
      • Very active development
      • Way faster than VS Code for text manipulation tasks

      Geany with Plugins with is great but misses out on the above stuff

      Sublime is the only one and I could use it for a serious amount of time. I only went back because I could not often get it installed in some enterprises.

      • @9point6
        13•3 months ago

        Cheers for the response, I appreciate it!

        I’m curious about the plugins as obviously I’m not gonna be familiar with the notepad++ plugin ecosystem now—what’s special about the ones you listed?

        Assuming edit EOL is just changing the line termination characters, all editors have that don’t they? Or does this not do what I think?

        Intrigued about VSCode being slow for text manipulation too—I remember this being a big reason I dropped notepad++ for sublime and IMO VSCode and sublime more or less have parity on that front, particularly with vim bindings

        • DebianGuyOP
          2•3 months ago

          VS Code has gotten really fast recently but it is more of a combination of having the right plugin (TextFX in this case) and the general fastness. Someone should ideally just port that TextFX. I thought about doing that a lot of times, but it was a lack of time + lack of skill issue :)

          Again I do use VS Code for the occasional frontend work. It is great but for all heavy duty manipulation sometime really is off in VS Code. It could be that I haven’t out of inertia tried too much.

          I don’t know if I can qualifiedly explain what it is about the plugins, they work well and have sane defaults. Notepad++ with all its custom panels, that plugins create a quite a clunkiness in there, but having those separate panels sometimes gives it a unique and flexible usage experience.

          About the edit thing, there are just so many options that sometimes I forget that TextFx plugin exists. There are 100 or so options in that edit menu neatly categorized into sub menus like Insert, Copy, Indent, Line Operations, Blank Operations, Auto-completion, Paste Special, On Selection, Multi-select All, etc each having 5 to 7 operations.

          Line Operations for example has these:

          Duplicate Current Line
Remove Duplicate Lines
Remove Consecutives Duplicate Lines
Split Lines
Join Lines
...
Reverse Lines
Randomize Lines
...
Sort Lines Lexicographically Ascendlng

and 10 or more

          Another great thing is the whole design and the options around managing bookmarks while searching. I should write a blog post on it :)

          • @[email protected]
            4•3 months ago

            Given those options, you may want to try vim :) It’s a bit different in how you interact with it (pressing stuff on the keyboard instead of clicking stuff in menus, plus it’s more of an imperative vs declarative approach, i.e. you tell vim how to do stuff instead of what you need to be done; the good part is being independent of what sb thought you may need to do, the bad – having to learn editing primitives and stuff), but it can certainly do stuff you’ve mentioned, sometimes with some help from external programs:

            • dupcicate current line - yyp [(yy)ank_curren and (p)aste];
            • join lines depends on how you want to join them, in the simplest case it’s J or gJ to join current line with the one below with or without space as a separator respectively. You can also combine it with :g or :v and norm or macros to make this edit on lines matching (g) or not (v) a specific regex (e.g. :g/join me/norm J will join all lines containing “join me” with that below). Splitting also depends;
            • reverse, randomize and sorting can be done via calling external stuff: v10j:.!tac will reverse 11 lines, including the one with the cursor, via calling (!) tac on the selection (v) of the current line and 10 below (10j) and pasting its output in the file you’re editing (.) (it’ll replace stuff you’ve selected). Replace tac with shuf or sort for the other options mentioned. Removing duplicates without sorting - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11532157/remove-duplicate-lines-without-sorting#11532197

            Bonus: neovim integrates with vscode quite well, and on itself it handles reasonably huge files without an issue.

            • DebianGuyOP
              2•3 months ago

              Whoa, thank you for the elaboration. As I said in another comment, I was vim user for a short time but it may take a long time to use it again. I don’t rule out vim from my OSS life. Who knows what will transpire :)

    • @[email protected]
      7•3 months ago

      I never used npp as my code editor but as a secondary program that i kept notes in and would paste text in to manipulate then move back into code editor. It had a rich plugin ecosystem way before that was common. I use Kate for those purposes instead now

    • zelifcamEnglish
      6•3 months ago

      I couldn’t agree more. I had a foot in both the MacOS and Microsoft Windows worlds at the time and can appreciate what a game changer notepad++ became. Having used BBEdit on the Mac since around the mid 90s, it was kinda more like “it’s about time” a decade later when notepad++ was released. I’m not necessarily comparing them feature to feature, but it was a much needed piece of software for Windows. I still have memories of opening up text files and being like … damn someone f’d this txt file up on a windows machine… again.

    • @k4j8
      2•2 months ago

      I don’t like Notepad++ as a text editor for code, but my god is it amazing for taking quick notes. I’ve been searching for a Linux equivalent but haven’t found it yet. My favorite Notepad++ features:

      • Opens immediately.
      • Never loses data, and I mean never - unsaved files are restored after crashes, reboots, power outage, you name it.

      For jotting down quick meeting notes in a hurry, it’s great. The settings are messy and hard to configure though, so I use Vim/Helix for writing code (hobbyist, not professional).

    • @[email protected]
      1•3 months ago

      Agreed.

      Vim/Neovim and Spacemacs (Emacs) are so much more addictive than NPP.

      That’s cool if NPP is OP’s thing, but there are quite a few text editors which check those boxes in the *nix world.

  • JeenaEnglish
    12•3 months ago

    Many many years ago I switched from OS X back to Linux and had to find alternatives: https://jeena.net/why-i-switchedfrom-osx-to-linux

    For the three software you point as a must have there are alternatives, even those you’d not think of:

    • Visual Studio - Stop writing .NET web applications, there are so many other web frameworks around you don’t really need .NET
    • Notepad++ - It’s a steep learning curve but Vim and Emacs give you all and more freedom than Notepad++
    • Excel - You can use the 365 version in the browser, that is what I do at work
    • OneDrive works through the browser again, but there are alternatives like Nextcloud, Syncthing, Seafile
    • DebianGuyOP
      7•3 months ago

      Thank you for your comment.

      • .NET is my bread and butter and the C# language is great now. Can’t let go. I do have my eyes, and some proficiency, on Go and Python.
      • I planned to use online Excel for a while, but installed LibreOffice Calc as of now.
      • For backups, I am trying OneDrive-For-Linux, but eventually plan to have a syncthing based setup.

      Regarding the editor, having a similar experience like Notepad++ is not a must, and I used vim on and off but could never stick due to various editing requirements over the years as mentioned in other comment.

      • @[email protected]
        3•3 months ago

        .NET is such a second-class citizen (Mono situation looks shaky now) on non-Microsoft Windows. I mean don’t give it up cold turkey perhaps, but adding new languages to your belt will help you get unshackled from Microsoft.

        • DebianGuyOP
          1•3 months ago

          Absolutely yes, I definitely have my eye on becoming a polyglot dev in the next 5 years. So it is quite the journey, but I am in it for the long run. Switching to Linux was also the easiest way to do this as I realized.

  • nek0d3r
    9•3 months ago

    This has been a dream of mine and one of my friend’s as well. There’s a small handful of blockers that I’ve slowly been transitioning but the upcoming windows pain points you mentioned are definitely recent motivators for me. I’m glad you made it and I hope the rest of us can too! I look forward to reading more about your experience.

    • DebianGuyOP
      5•3 months ago

      Thank you and I wish you a similar or better success soon. Yes, I do wish to share the writings on this here slow and steadily.

  • @[email protected]English
    9•3 months ago

    I’ve also recently switched to Linux Mint as my daily driver. Linux + Open-Source is finally in a really good spot. I tell people that switching OSes always takes new learning, but a step-by-step approach is a sustainable one.

    Whenever I go back to Windows and see news and ads popping up in my Start Menu, etc, I realize how much shit we were putting up with even pre-Copilot. That’s not even including Microsoft Edge forcing itself back as a default program with each major update. It’s like the word “consent” doesn’t exist to those people.

    • DebianGuyOP
      2•3 months ago

      Yes, great times for us. It takes time to get up to speed, but the important thing is to keep at it.

  • CyborganismEnglish
    8•3 months ago

    Hello there!

    It’s funny, I just made the switch this Monday. I got fed up with Microsoft’s bullshit being shoved down my throat. I was going to keep Windows 10 for as long as possible, but a recent update that installed Copilot on my machine was the last straw. I have been a Linux user since 2000 and have been using Ubuntu (and switching flavours) since 2004.

    I had a big conversation on the Linux Gaming community about choosing a new distribution as a daily driver. You can see it here.

    I wanted to get people’s opinion and it started a big thread with lots of responses. It led me to try many distributions to see which ones would be the best fit and read a lot about people’s experiences with them as well. In the end, I decided to stick with Kubuntu which was already installed as a dual boot on my system even though I didn’t use it much except to tinker from time to time and it was doing a great job. Gaming on it was also working fantastically well. And I knew that every time I booted into it it would always work unless I really started messing with system files and didn’t know what I was doing.

    So Monday I had a day off and did the jump. Backed up my system, downloaded Kubuntu 24.04.1, booted off the USB stick and wiped the whole system clean.

    But I learned something about Kubuntu (and Ubuntu in general) during that experience that made me regret keeping that distro. I knew that Canonical had developed their own sandboxed package system like Flatpak: Snaps. They were already available in 22.04, which I was running, but I didn’t really pay attention. Upon installing Kubuntu 24.04, I realized just how much Canonical insisted that Snaps be used. Some software is now exclusively available as Snaps and nothing else. This unacceptable for me.

    To be fair, Snaps aren’t THAT bad. It’s pretty comparable to Flatpak in general in terms of features except for the fact that they are stored locally in their compressed form while Flatpaks are uncompressed. So the startup time of Snaps is slower. But they both offer sandboxing and therefore an added layer of security. This is great for apps like internet clients (browsers, email, etc.) or even servers or any kind of software, especially in an immutable system meant for IoT. Baeldung’s website explains the differences pretty well.

    I’d probably use snaps for certain scenarios, but I think Canonical is pushing the limit by forcing people to use them. And also they’ve said they wouldn’t support Flatpak in future releases, even though it has become very popular and is being adopted much more than Snaps by third party software providers. I’m fairly certain Snaps are going to go the same way as Bazaar and Unity over time. In any case, I’ve been able to get around Snaps enough that it’s tolerable for the moment.

    So now I’ve been considering starting over with Debian stable instead. I’m already used to Apt and .deb packages and the Debian way of doing things. I’m looking for stability over having the latest and greatest software and honestly, a 2 year release cycle is not that bad. Plus there’s backports as well. Almost everyone is saying “Debian is too far behind! Packages are too old!” but what’s “old” anyway? 6 months??? Honestly that’s not a big deal for me. I just want my system to boot and be very confident that it’ll work and won’t break during my next apt-get upgrade. Debian offers this peace of mind. But, after using Ubuntu for so long with all its quality of life improvements, Debian looks pretty rough around the edges in comparison.

    I think I’ll stick with my Kubuntu for a bit and see how it goes and if I really get frustrated at Snaps, I’ll switch to Debian. But, right now I’ve spent enough time setting up my system that I feel too lazy to switch.

    • @[email protected]English
      4•3 months ago

      “Debian is too far behind! Packages are too old!”

      The best rule of thumb I’ve ever heard regarding Debian Stable is that if the kernel in stable’s default repo fully supports ALL your hardware, and the software in stable’s default repos fully support your workflows, it’s fine.

      If those are NOT true, then you probably don’t want to use Stable, because you’ll either end up fighting it via manually compiled and installed software, or you’ll venture into so many 3rd party repos for updated packages that updating it later becomes problematic and prone to making the whole system catch fire and burn down.

    • DebianGuyOP
      2•3 months ago

      Thank you for sharing your experience. I never distro-hopped much, but still got to try Ubuntu a few times while always using Debian Testing. After a point, I had all the things I needed on Debian Stable and the few that I needed, I learnt how to use backports or makedeb etc. Kubuntu is pretty great. My own Debian journey was probably like Lubuntu > Mint > Debian Testing for a long time > Debian Stable rest of the life. If it works for you Kubuntu is still great. No need to switch to Debian unless there is a strong reason.

      As for flatpak and snap, I have my reservations. I go out of my way to avoid them and find either packaged version or try the source install. However, I am not completely averse to them. I still think if someday I need flatpak only software in my workflow, I would have no qualms to use it.

      • Cyborganism
        2•3 months ago

        I felt the same way about the flatpaks and snap. But having used flatpaks a bit I realized how great it is for desktop apps.

        What I like the most is that you don’t have to pull in a ton of dependencies for them to run. For example, when using a Gnome app in KDE.

        I also appreciate the sandboxing. Especially for web clients like Firefox and Discord for example. I’m using Flatseal to configure the app permissions like you would Android apps. And the Flathub acts like an app store. The software there is often more recent than what’s in the repo.

        I highly recommend it.

        • DebianGuyOP
          2•3 months ago

          Glad to know your experience. Once I have the stable resilient setup I will definitely explore flatpaks. Thank you again!

  • @[email protected]
    8•3 months ago

    Aw half the fun of linux is all the weird janky software some nerds felt strongly enough about to release.

    Npp can be replaced by several different linux tools. You just have to like using the terminal a bit. Personally I get it. I know awk and sed and all those crunchy tools the olds made exist, but it’s not a crime to have it all in one place in a gui. That said it npp 1000% works under wine. Sublime Text has a linux version and all the plugins you could ever want if you’re willing to learn new ways of doing stuff you’ve already figured out. Vscodium is also a decent npp replacement. It’s fast, has a cli, and a great plugin ecosystem.

    Excel is all hype. Unless you’re a data analyst or numbers nerd LibreOffice Calc has all the things. It’s not as performant as excel with large datasets, but it has formulas, pivot tables (though somewhat weird), and macros. It’s just ugly installed from the debian repo. Also if you’re paying for office you can probably still use excel in the browser.

    OneDrive sucks, unless you are committed to the Microsoft ecosystem. If you find a suitable replacement for excel, you could always cancel your office subscription and setup a nextcloud instance. You can have it all hosted for you through nextcloud and they have web based office tools using LibreOffice. Their syncing app works on everything so you’ve got options. Or you can try to self-host it. I have a raspberry pi with an external hard drive attached running nextcloud, and a vpn. Reasonably stable, if slow.

    I hope that outside of Visual Studio, you can completely free yourself of the windows ecosystem.

    • Random DentEnglish
      7•3 months ago

      Aw half the fun of linux is all the weird janky software some nerds felt strongly enough about to release.

      My favourites are the ones that just have a Github with absolutely no explanation of what the software does at all. It’ll just be like “After two years, blurplr has been refactored to use the updated flerb library instead of flerbp, which is deprecated” and then just a link to a tarball.

    • DebianGuyOP
      1•2 months ago

      Thank you for the awesome comment.

      As mentioned a few times here, its between Kate and Sublime although it looks like it will be Sublime unless Zed becomes good soon.

      I did not renew my office license since a year for this exact reason. Though it is good, I could not justify it anymore. I am slow-exploring Calc.

      I am done with Visual Studio faster and before other lesser dealbreakers. I will get to use it in any work environments anyway. Personal and OSS Dev will be done on a Jetbrains Rider.

      Wrt One drive, I am keeping it as an eventual piece of puzzle for a nice backup strategy along side others like Borg etc. I will explore Nextcloud once again.

  • Mr. Camel999
    7•3 months ago

    If you absolutely need functionality of some Windows only applications on Linux, it’s a bit clunky, but a solution exists to use a VM to integrate the Windows apps into your Linux environment. It’s called winapps, and I use it to run the latest version of Excel, which I do need for some things. Here’s their GitHub: https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps

  • Foster Hangdaan
    7•3 months ago

    Notepad++ is a fabulous software program that had no complete alternatives on Linux. I used it for scripting, text manipulation, note taking, dumping and editing thoughts. Scintilla-based equivalents Geany, SciTE exist, but do not come close.

    Really? No alternatives on Linux? Have you tried Emacs? I think Emacs with Org mode blows Notepad++ out of the water in all the uses you just mentioned.

      • DebianGuyOP
        2•3 months ago

        I always loved how super fast it was. I did use it for a year or so some years back. But I will try it out again in a while.

        • Tony N
          2•3 months ago

          Another vote for sublime. I’m a full stack web developer and it’s all I need. The native features and extensibility blow me away. It has so many features I’ll never use them all. Multiple cursor editing saves so much time. Really give it a chance and you’ll fall in love.

          • DebianGuyOP
            1•3 months ago

            Yeah, I have it in my list. As mentioned in few other comments. I am now willing to try Kate as well. But with Sublime, I do have prior experience. I will probably go for it soon. Do you use the paid version for web development?

    • DebianGuyOP
      4•3 months ago

      Yes. Emacs/Vim is different than the traditional Notepad++ experience. For someone using Visual Studio daily, Notepad++ is relatively the same editing experience. I did use TextPad for a while before discovering Notepad++.

      I did try Vim for few times on and off. I could not stick to it as I had to work on few different software areas like C#/ASP.NET, then Python, and some build scripts (windows) and more recently Terraform. I know if I could master one of Vim / Emacs I could do all this in one editor, but as I alluded to in another comment it could take a long time for this mastery.

      That said, I do have a massive respect to devs who could do this.

      • Foster Hangdaan
        7•3 months ago

        If you want a similar editor on Linux, then I suggest Kate. If Vim and Emacs didn’t exist, I’d be using Kate.

        • TurboWafflz
          5•3 months ago

          Kate is so good, I switched to it once atom was discontinued and only stopped using it when I finally got around to setting up neovim to have all the things I need

        • DebianGuyOP
          3•3 months ago

          Yes, thanks for the recommendation. I heard about Kate but have actually yet to try it out.

          • @[email protected]English
            4•3 months ago

            You can grab Kate from the Windows Store right now. Get all of the KDE apps, they’re pretty much the only good stuff on there.

            • DebianGuyOP
              1•3 months ago

              I am already on Linux so can’t try the Windows version any more :).

              However, thanks for the idea, I will probably will try on my work laptop.

          • boredsquirrel
            4•3 months ago

            I use Kate daily, all the time. It has plugins, there is LSP support, I just dont know how it works, and you can write and download code snippets!

            The UI is customizable and modern too.

            • DebianGuyOP
              3•3 months ago

              You had me at LSP support :)

              This is a second recommendation in this post, so I will have to try it sooner than Sublime. Firing up my apt…

              • boredsquirrel
                2•3 months ago

                Good luck and report on your LSP experiences? For me I had strange errors, using it on Fedora

  • HandlesEnglish
    4•3 months ago

    Welcome to the resistance! 😄

    I did pretty much similar as you, but about a decade ago. Was it really Windows 8 at the time? 7 perhaps? Even then the OS was becoming increasingly bloated, and crudely implementing channels for Microsoft to milk data from users.

    For me it wasn’t so much editors and development environment that kept me around, but the Adobe suite — specifically the lack of CMYK support in FLOSS alternatives. In the end I was quite happy to just find workarounds for the few print jobs I would have to do.

    Quite often I think people are less resisting a new OS environment than the software available. “I couldn’t use the same shortcuts in [FLOSS package] as in [proprietary software], so I went back to Windows”…

    I’m not exactly a hardcore Excel user myself, but I’d be interested to hear how your transition to LibreOffice (I guess the most viable alternative?) will work out.

    • DebianGuyOP
      2•3 months ago

      Thank you for the welcome :)

      My rationalization for LibreOffice Calc is — As I see it, I have never used too many formulas and the complex reporting, but for organizing data. For example, I had a sheet called large-purchases where I had listed down all the things I want to buy, and then tracked things estimated price, actually price, total amount remaining, etc. If you see, it is just a database table with a fancy entry and some calculations. So Calc can do all that simply and for something more, I can either learn more of Calc and/or just use a db and turn it into simple personal app.

      • HandlesEnglish
        1•3 months ago

        Yeah, that was my thinking — that for most purposes LibreOffice will replace Microsoft Office fairly well. But I’m always keen to hear what bumps people run into when they switch from the latter. For you it seems there haven’t been any worth mentioning?

        Glad to hear it’s gone so smoothly!

        • DebianGuyOP
          2•3 months ago

          Yeah, my usage was not particularly deep. It would take while to see any issue, if at all. I would certwinly post here if there are any major troubles.

  • Blastboom Strice
    4•3 months ago

    Heyy, I’m too in the process of moving from windows (10) to debian :) (though I’m very new to linux, but not new to open source software)

    I was surprised that notepad++ didnt have native support for linux and while I tried many stuff, indeed I couldnt find a real replacement. I have kinda concluded that I will either use bottles with wine to run notepad++ (takes around half a minute to open) or use Geany and try to customize it as much as I can. (There are also Notepadqq which is kinda dead and NotepadNext which is still in very early stage.) I’ll probably go with Geany and chech on NotepadNext if it evers becomes good enough.

    I had a recent post about running windows stuff on linux and people gave me some good advice here: https://mander.xyz/post/18701186

    Edit: I just found Textadept, might check it later (found it from a comment under this video).

    • DebianGuyOP
      3•3 months ago

      I have tried notepadqq, it is a bit promising, but I don’t think it can use the npp plugins yet. Thanks for the link, I will check it out.

      I know of TextAdept and loved it when I used it years back. Loved the extensibility part. Unfortunately could not stick to it mostly due to plugins IIRC.

  • @[email protected]
    2•2 months ago

    I’ve dabbled with Linux for decades but only within the last year decided to make it a permanent switch due to a new career move. When I’ve previously used Linux it’s always been on a USB stick or something like that, so when something didn’t work I just tolerated it and ended up using Windows most of the time. By removing my Windows installs and doing a permanent switch I found myself more inclined to learn and fix the problems, though most of it is simply searching and searching until you find someone else who’s already solved it.

    It’s not exactly been a smooth process, and in the end I ended up dual-booting both of my machines with Windows just for the odd thing that I couldn’t be bothered fixing, and it’s kind of silly that both of my Windows installs were so easy and set most things up automatically compared to the Linux ones. While I like Linux it certainly isn’t for everyone and I don’t care what anyone here says but Linux won’t be a desktop of choice for normal people for a long time, if ever. If the year of Linux ever happens it won’t be because everyone suddenly wakes up one day and decides they love FOSS, it’ll be because someone like Google rolls out an incredibly locked down version, such as ChromeOS, in a way that works for most people. The year of Linux won’t be what people on here want it to be. And I still think the Linux community has so many people in it with a shit attitude that people are often driven away just as they’re dipping their toes in. I was just looking at a post this morning that was asking the exact question I had and the first reply began with “Did you even bother to read the wiki?”.

    • DebianGuyOP
      1•2 months ago

      Thanks for sharing. Agree, In had a few of these separate running, dual booting episodes and moved only now completely due to the right mental space and bandwidth.

      I proclaimed multiple times in my life that Linux will always have less than 5% desktop users and that is perfectly fine. Forget normal people, even the most tech savvy users could never make the move.

      For those of us who do, after the navigating the technical challenges, elitism, and hostility, it is indeed a lovely journey. I know everything will not be smooth and there will days of halted usage due to some breakages. The system if setup in a sensible way just like a server, it could reduce this friction to some extent.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•2 months ago

    Jetbrains? Use vim :) Just kidding. As for Excel, you can use LibreOffice calc, or OnlyOffice. Or any office… or Excel web. As for onedrive, i remeber linking my gdrive to my gnome files, but i personally don’t need it that much, i use git lab/hub. btw as for linking to phone, I recommend using KDE Connect.

  • originalucifer
    0•3 months ago

    im kinda stuck with a windows workstation for work also, for the exact same reasons. ive used the discrepancy in environments to completely air-gap my home and work life. linux for all things personal, and windows for the BS at the office… never the twain shall meet

    notepad++ really bothers me… if theres one freakin app that linux should have a mastery of its text editing… and yet.

    e. for the vim/emacs/nano peeps: no. just no. its not me who is wrong here because i dont want to learn 400 obscure keystrokes among other nonsense. we dont need to hear about your text editing stockholm-syndrome.

    • DebianGuyOP
      4•3 months ago

      What you said about resonates with me. Though I used vim over the years a few times and understand it’s philosophy, I feel that experience is not for many. Given how many things we handle professionally dev, ops, iac etc, the master-one-editor principle doesn’t hold for people stuck in traditional corporate / enterprise dev envs.

    • @JubilantJaguar
      4•3 months ago

      i dont want to learn 400 obscure keystrokes among other nonsense. we dont need to hear about your text editing stockholm-syndrome.

      This reads like projected insecurity. Or maybe even… jealousy.

    • @[email protected]
      4•3 months ago

      Yes, because it would be crazy to learn keyboard skills for text editing. Such a super great point.

      The thing about the vi keystrokes is that almost all programming editors support them. There are few skills that will save you more time and retraining than vi movements as you inevitably move from editor to editor.

      Vim, IntelliJ / Rider, and VS Code. If you know the vi movements, you are productive in any of them right away.

    • @[email protected]English
      4•3 months ago

      You know, the older I get the more I respect the people who come out and say ‘I’m not going to learn that, and I don’t want to.’

      It’s a LOT better than dealing with someone who half-asses and kinda wishy-washes around and says they’ll maybe do something but then doesn’t and well, wasn’t ever going to.

      If you’re not interested and won’t, say so up front so you don’t waste your or my time trying to get you to do something.

    • TurboWafflz
      2•3 months ago

      For text editing, kate is really good and has like zero learning curve and it has tons of features like really good lsp integration but can also just be a normal text editor if you don’t want all the fancy stuff.

      (But also I promise learning vim isn’t as hard as you think it is, you can learn the basics in like an hour or two and there are so many things it makes so much easier than other editors)