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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I did it in December. I had tried to run dual-boot many times in the last decade, but always ended up back at Windows (gaming was part of this). This time, I do not think I will going back.

    I chose Pop OS because of support for Nvidia GPUs and out-of-the-box flatpak integration. It was a bit frustrating at first because the new Cosmic DE is rather buggy. But I switched to KDE and things are smooth now. If I could go back, I’d probably install Kubuntu (or maybe Fedora KDE)

    Some things that have frustrated me:

    • Getting RDP to work took some struggles, and KDE is very laggy through RDP. Instead I make RDP boot into XFCE.
    • Updated my graphics drivers and all my games stopped working. Turns out this was because I had to accordingly update Flatpak stuff so that the container and my system would be synchronized.
    • The game I currently play most (Elden Ring Nightreign) has some brief moments of intense stuttering. I think this is because of EAC— I did not have the problem in Windows. But this is bearable. Also, screen-sharing in Discord seems to cause much more performance degradation than on Windows.
    • Zoom on Linux isn’t as good as Zoom on Windows (lacking features, a bit buggy).
    • I don’t like (/know how to use Libreoffice). Not really a big problem because I mostly use LaTeX.
    • Thunderbird doesn’t play super great with Microsoft Exchange, even though support has been added. I miss the outlook app (I mostly use outlook.com now).

    Good things:

    • I enjoy no longer being on Windows 11. From Explorer freezing randomly, to idling at like 16GB of RAM, to search not working unless I used task manager to end explorer.exe, I had enough.
    • I very much enjoy being able to update everything through terminal in a few clicks.
    • I like being in control of my own hardware again.

    I’ve no regrets. I just wish I could also make the switch on my laptop. However, for whatever reason, my trackpad becomes intermittently sluggish on Ubuntu/Pop (I’ve tried both). None of the solutions online (XPS 9510) seem to work. If I ever purchase another laptop, I will be sure to get one with better Linux support.