Finally taking the plunge...

I was perusing my past posts, and realized that it was April of 2016 when I first mentioned planning to migrate to Linux. By September of last year, I had bought a 2nd hard drive, with vague plans of dual-booting. Only one thing stood in my way: my gaming habit, and the fact that most of the games I was interested in simply didn't run natively on Linux. Worse, getting to run games on Linux using Wine looked really... complicated.

I had high hopes for SteamOS, which seemed to pair well with the new Vulkan API and a growing trend in cross-platform development to make more Linux-compatible games a possibility. But Valve seemed to be letting the SteamOS initiative wither on the vine, which left me using Windows 7, facing end of service in a year and a half with an extra hard drive still in its packaging, and wondering if Linux was really the OS that a lifelong PC gamer like me needed.

All that changed last week, though, when Valve announced Proton, a Wine implementation that they'd built into the Linux Steam client, adding 1000 certified Linux-compatible games to Steam in a week -- and making all of the other games on the service Linux-installable at the same time.

Suddenly, installing any game on Linux that I wanted to play was a doddle, and the main reason for my procrastination was gone. Here I was, with two weeks' vacation ahead of me, every reason to switch operating systems, and no excuses left

And so, I decided to finally take the plunge. None of this dual-booting bullshit for me, though; that unused 1 TB HDD is still in its packaging. No, sir, I decided to wipe my existing HDD, and just replace Windows with Linux completely. No going back.

Here are the steps that I followed:

1. I backed up my data, discovering in the process that I actually didn't have much data saved on my PC in the first place. Zipping everything that I had and uploading it to Google Drive took a lazy Sunday afternoon.
2. I created a Firefox Sync account, and saved all my saved logins, bookmarks, and so on. Google Chrome probably has similar functionality, but I've been using Firefox Quantum as my default browser for a while now, which proved to be serendipitous: Firefox is the default browser for Ubuntu, which is both the most-used version of Linux, and one of the easiest to install. (Thanks go to Jason Evangelho at Forbes for that tip.)
3. I created a bootable Ubuntu USB drive. To do this, you'll need both an Ubuntu disk image (or ISO file), and an application for turning that file into a bootable USB drive, plus one spare USB drive that doesn't have anything on it you want to keep. There are plenty of tutorials online that will walk you through the steps of the process; creating a bootable thumb drive only took me a few minutes, not including the downloads themselves.
4. I turned off my PC, plugged in my bootable USB stick, and turned the machine back on. There were a few false starts here, before I realized that simply copying the ISO to a thumb drive doesn't create a bootable media (d'oh!), but once I had a proper boot drive plugged in, it was smooth sailing. Ubuntu booted up in "testing" mode, which allows  you to try things out without committing to anything, but I was already committed by this point, so...
5. I clicked the big, friendly "install Ubuntu" button, and followed the steps.

I'll admit it: I had to take a few deep breaths before clicking the "erase drive and install Linux" option. Trepidation evaporated quickly, though, as the installation process itself came off without a hitch. Ubuntu includes basically everything I needed to start with, too, right off the jump; you won't need much by way of additional software. Firefox synced my old bookmarks and saved logins flawlessly, and the OS updated in the background as it was installing, so there was no patching needed.

I only hit two bumps along the way:

1. The latest version of Ubuntu (18.04.1 LTS, a.k.a. "Bionic Beaver") includes a feature called Livepatch, which can install critical kernel updates (i.e. the core of the OS) while the OS is still running, with no restarting required. Sounds pretty neat... but the Livepatch server was apparently down which I was doing my installation, so I couldn't get it set up.
2. I also hit a pothole while trying to install the latest drivers for my AMD Radeon graphics card -- I ended up needing to reinstall Linux because I'd borked my installation -- but getting back to the same point was quickly accomplished, and driver installation went flawlessly the 2nd time. Installing the Steam client, activating its Proton-enabled beta, and connecting my Steam Link all went seamlessly, too, and I've got games installing in the background as I type this.

And, OMG, am I ever impressed with Steam Play+Proton! Pre-Proton, my library of SteamOS+Linux games was already longer than expected, with dozens of titles available to install that I already owned (which made me feel a little silly for ever having worried about having enough games to play on Linux, frankly), but with Proton enabled? It seems that my entire games library is now certified as Linux compatible. My list of shame remains intact, and as daunting as ever... which is probably just too bad, since the first game I intend to test Proton with is the time-eating Path of Exile.

On the whole, though, my transition process was easy and relatively painless... with one important caveat.

I am a long-time PC user, having cut my computing teeth on the Commodore 64, and I've actually studied Computer Science a bit. True, I washed out of Computer Science at University, so I'm not an expert by any means, but I'm not a stranger to command-line prompts and such, either; I wouldn't know what to do with such a prompt if I were to go in cold, but if you give me solid step-by-step instructions, I'm comfortable enough with computers, generally, to be able to punch in a few commands in order to get a thing done.

This will be necessary if you want to install third-party software on Ubuntu. False start notwithstanding, installing my AMD graphics card's driver on Linux wasn't hard... but it was a command-line exercise, and you'll have to be OK with that if you want to get the most out of your newly-Linux gaming PC.

This may not be necessary, at all, as long as you're running Linux-compatible software. Ubuntu comes with a built-in software store that offers up almost everything you might need, in the normal course of things, and it comes with built-in, AMD-compatible generic drivers, so less graphically demanding games might run just fine; I wouldn't know, since I installed with the intention of testing DirectX-compatible games via Steam Play/Proton, and wanted to have the best possible performance from my rig. If it is, though... just be comfortable with following instructions, and watching a lot of meaningless text scrolling by as things like driver installations play out. Like I said, no issues for me, but your mileage may vary.

And that, as they say, is that. With Ubuntu as my main, and only, OS, I am now embarking on my journey into the post-Windows world, much as I'd threatened to do years ago. I may take a while getting there, but I do get there eventually.

Sayonara, Satya Nadella! Microsoft made it pretty clear that people like me are not part of their future vision of personal computing, so I've made other arrangements... and so should you. Seriously, Linux just ain't that scary anymore, and now that I've switched? Well, let's just say that it's going to take some pretty amazing changes from Microsoft's direction, to win me back as a customer now.