So long.. Linux

 With a heavy heart I am saying bye to Linux. Unfortunately, it is not without some bitterness.

Recently, I decided to jump back to Linux from Mac. So, I sold all the Macs I got – Those were a MacBook pro 13″, a MacBook pro 15″ and a mac mini. All these machines held up strong to the test of time and served me well. They were all bought between 2011 and 2012 and worked perfectly for 8 to 9 years without any trouble. The mac mini had lost the hard drive due to the frequent power cuts in Bangalore and to my negligence of not providing a power backup.

Then I bought a few PC parts and assembled a new desktop. The hardware: Ryzen5 3500(6 cores/threads), 16GB DDR4 3000Mhz RAM, a Radeon RX 560 series graphics card and an NVME SSD. Pretty decent or more than sufficient for 2020 and far more powerful than any of the Macs I had.

First OS choice – Linux and during Feb 2020, Pop!OS was pretty popular. Downloaded and installed it. Initial impressions, super smooth and fast. Coming to the user interface – it wares very quickly and I started hating the massive thick title bars – designed for “touch” interface where there is practically no space for Pop!OS or any popular desktop Linux distros. Now you can argue that I can change the themes and install “tweaks” or directly edit the GTK CSS files. I was looking to set up a system for doing some development work and video and music editing, not for tinkering around with Linux files. Launch your IDE (Intellij for example) and the title bar takes away quite a bit of the real estate and glaringly keep you distracted with the massive max/min/close buttons etc.

Just to get relief from the UI experience, I thought of using Elementary OS. It is indeed inspired by OS X and offers the best user interface for Linux distros so far. But annoyingly the latest available elementary OS is not on top of the 20.04 and once again the UI design follows the default GTK guidelines of having massive title bars and such. I edited the GTK CSS and made it to the size I liked, but it started messing up other stylized windows and title bars. Once again, back to tinkering stuff and not paying attention to my workflow, I lost a lot of time and energy.

Then I installed Ubuntu 20.04 – Focal fossa. I had been an avid fan of Ubuntu right from the 2000s. Had used many different versions of it and it was well suited for development workflows. Ubuntu 20.04 is definitely fare more modern and an OS ready to take on the year 2020. The user interface design is truely professional with all required elements for a modern desktop user interface.

First pain in the “back”. The mix of ALSA and pulse audio makes the audio input and output behavior very unpredictable. I have multiple outputs, but there is no way to set a default output! every time I restart or logout and log back in, the output changes and I do not get audio out of my speakers. Then I have to go manually select the output device from settings to get it working. Same goes for input devices too. I tried searching through various forums and tried many things out, but there is no consistent fix for it.

Coming to content creation. First is creating videos to record screen along with your webcam. OBS is a superb piece of free software that helps you do this. However Linux terribly lags with audio and video from webcam. I am using “terrible” because with the given hardware resources Linux should not have struggled.

Same experience continued with a MIDI keyboard – sever lag between keypress and notes and audio recording through a USB microphone.

At the end of the day, I do not want to blame any of the Linux distros because it is built for free and it is built for tinkering around and adjusting to your need. However it impacts the productivity even in 2020 – which is really really bad. For the lack of a better choice, I am in Windows 10 now :(, running an un activated windows version. But everything works and no major complaints so far.

So long Linux desktop.. not sure if we will meet again.