By skyforbes Time continued to pass, and I got a used laptop and got ChatGPT to walk me through creating a dual-boot environment on it–with Windows 11 on one partition, and Ubuntu 24 on another. In the beginning, this was an absolute nightmare. I probably spent upwards of 40 hours just trying to get Linux installed. Windows installed just fine. The problem was that Linux was fighting my BIOS every time the computer slept. This is beyond the scope of my understanding, but at a high level, my BIOS somehow was winning and corrupting my installation, so that I'd have to reboot but couldn't log back in. I kept reinstalling and having the same problem.
I experimented some more by tweaking the BIOS setting, and installed Ubuntu again. It crashed again, this time because of a FUSE issue. Little did I know, I wasn't supposed to use fuse2 or fuse3, but instead, fuse2t64. (The exact details are hazy, since its been months, but I'm certain that once I installed fuse2t64, things worked. The other fuse version was a time bomb.)
Mostly things have been OK, though occasionally I lose internet connectivity, or my scanner stops working or my printer stops working. There was that time where using Slack somehow broke my UI, so my mouse would only operate on one of my monitors. And that other time that audio played really fast. And sometimes the timeshift app doesn't work because somehow my nvmE external drive spontaneously unmounts.
One of the reasons that I came to Linux is that I was told it was "rock solid" and that LInux systems, unlike Windows systems, can stay up for years at a time. This hasn't been my experience on my box. I'm not going back to Windows. I'll stick with Linux, but if someone asked me the virtues of Linux, I'd probably say "privacy." It's not easy, and it's not stable, as far as I can tell. Maybe it would be stable if I were running an FTP server, but the minute you add in a UI or peripherals, that stability is gone. And if I'm being honest, that's an area where Windows succeeds better than Linux.
My knowledge is limited. My CLI use cases typically involve using find, grep, mv, cp, sed, vim and sometimes awk. (You might be able to tell what I do based just on those commands.) I also do a little bit of Bash scripting, but this is still pretty difficult for me.
Among the many, many thingsI don't know how to do yet is work with systemd and systemctl. I've also tried to learn debugging techniques so I can figure out what's gone wrong by looking at var/log and htop and dmesg, but it's hard to find courses that teach these thoroughly, so I'm breaking my teeth on these.
When I learn something that I think will be useful in the future, I tend to record it in an Obsidian note so that I can use the information later. Anyway, that's my Linux story so far.