About time! Going all in on Linux!

Finally the decision was made to move to freedom

After much sitting with my thoughts, I finally came to the conclusion to go full linux on my machine.

Don't get me wrong, I am fortunate enough to be equipped with a decent machine. It has 16Gigs of RAM, a fairly good (Intel I7 11th gen) CPU and overall its a very big upgrade from my old machine which is still at my home.

But here we are! I finally did the deed.

Neofetch info showing PC information

Thats the neofetch screenshot.

This isn't the first time I have installed it on bare metal though. The home pc which I had, I installed Xubuntu (XFCE version of Ubuntu) on it and it was working fantastically. It was a old machine but not potato. Linux gave new life to that machine.

I noticed one of my professors during this semester at my university that he had ditched Windows completely! And gone full linux on his laptop. Many seniors I see also have done the same. So it felt like a right time to actually go into Linux. Already I was using some WSL2, Git Bash and other hacks to get Linux like feeling on windows but I finally left all that baggage behind and sat in one sitting from the afternoon and installed Ubuntu 24.04.

The process

Everything was pretty smooth. There was one speed breaker in the beginning though. BitLocker from Windows.

Ha! I had totally forgot about Bitlocker and disabling it and decrypting it took over an hour! Well I carried on anyways.

I made a list of software I wanted to get which I used daily and mostly these were available for all sstems. I managed to get up and running and getting familiar and setup with most of my things by the evening.

The list can be found here for my future reference and maybe even yours. I have also taken the base version of my dotfiles and then tweaked it to match Ubuntu's as I dont see myself going back to Windows anytime soon.

Thoughts after the process

The entire process was very easy actually. Just you need some time and good internet. Most software, as I said, were already cross platform available so I didn't have many hiccups. Except Whatsapp and Notion which I may have to use web clients for. ( Or even look into FOSS alternatives :p).

Some notable mentions are auto-cpufreq - this helps to keep your cpu speed according to your battery life and actually have a good battery life. I have this running and can easily go about 5-6 hours which I got before as well while on Windows. In addition, thermald is also mentioned on the internet.

Impact on workflow

I believe its actually an upgrade! Everything is so snappy and everything is so easy and with a Desktop Environment like GNOME, where you have everything setup (of course there are others, and I said that I have Xubuntu running on another machine), it is just flawless. I'm actually looking forward to using it more and more.

I think thats all for now! Maybe I'll post more dev and updates about my FOSS journey here as well!

Terminal Setup