Dear Linux, I want to love you. I do. I want to have your babies, I want those babies to understand that you’re great. But you’re not, and it hurts.

I’ve dumped Windows (again) and I’m making a concerted effort to make Linux work no matter what. I did the usual of going through all the latest versions of all the ‘better’ distros, I settled on Linux Mint with GNOME installed and it’s fine.

Common Linux bugbears for me tend to be:

Package manager wise, I prefer APT, SMB for my NAS just isnt pretty. You have to go into files, down to the location at the bottom of the window and type in your network address. In Mint, thankfully, it automatically picks up my NAS and I dont have to do this. For me, those two things are a big win.

Gaming is in two flavours, either via Steam and piracy.

In Steam, I have a Steam Deck also so I am now more used to it, but some games require you to play ‘hit and miss’ with proton versions to try and get working. FFXV is a perfect example, anything newer than v6 causes artifacts under Mint and it’s a pain. I just want it to ‘work’.

Piracy under Linux, again I think thanks to the Steam Deck, has come a long way thanks to WINE, Lutris and the Heroic Games Launcher. I’ve NEVER managed to get this working properly. I’ve always gone back to Windows because something’s come out that I want to play but dont want to buy it without giving it a go. Whatever your views are on piracy, I dont care. Sorry. You do you, Ill do me. So the new Elden Ring DLC came out and I thought I’d use that as my yardstick to get working, after an afternoon of headscratching I now think Ive got the whole thing sorted out in my autistic brain. I’m using HGL and it runs the game great – I dont like Elden Ring, but I wasnt about to fork over a 50 just to try it.

Similarly to piracy, I love using Photoshop. I understand there’s ways to get this working with the above launchers, it’s going to be my next adventure into tinkering, but I cant say Im looking forward to it. I hate dual booting, I just end up with having two seperate installations that I need to keep switching between and it’s extremely inconvenient.

I appreciate that not all of the above are the fault of Linux, or the Mint team etc, it’s just my use case. I realise that the core of Windows, what it SHOULD be, is what’s spoiled me all these years. I just cant be bothered with the mega corporation bullshit anymore. Microsoft has been really screwing the pooch over the past couple of months and it’s now less than trivial how much I hate what Windows has become.

So yeah, I’m trying to be friends with Linux but it’s hard. It’s like that friend that you love hanging out with, but then they get drunk and abusive and you just cant be around them anymore. I want to love Linux, and I’m going to keep trying.