I have been without my PC for awhile now so have resorted to using my laptop which is a dell XPS running Manjaro. So far, it’s been fine and I haven’t needed to use Windows for anything however that does not mean there hasn’t been hurdles or difficulties along the way. I have been using Linux since I was 14 so it doesn’t bother me but given the option I’d rather just use a Windows machine for peace of mind.
One of the big things that still bothers me is the fact I can’t install the windows office 365 applications however I have managed to get around this by using the online version which has been no sweat just different and does make me feel like I’m on a chromebook time to time with me having to use a web browser for word processing and spreadsheets. I’m aware that there are open source equivalents but to be honest, they all suck and do not come close to Microsoft’s Office offering.
Another thing, I have had to grasp with is No Onedrive Sync client but that has been as I have been able to use rclone which has been a dream which allows me to mount my OneDrive and present it natively (almost). I have been so used to known folder move so I have had a habit of saving to documents or desktop knowing it’ll just be there on my OneDrive, this is not the case on my laptop and I need to make a conscious habit to save to my OneDrive now instead of not thinking about it.
Now if anybody knows me, they know I’ve spent a stupid amount of my life on a game called Runescape, more specifically in recent years, Old School Runescape. Now for me to play the native client, it was a bit of an arse to install so I decided to not bother but no one plays Old School Runescape using the vanilla client, unless that’s what they’re into then fair enough but obviously it was all about whether RuneLite would work, which it did and it just works. Now recently, I have been seeing a lot of work from Jagex with them making improvements to their Steam client which is written in C++ so obviously I wanted to give it a go. Unfortunately there is no native support for the game on Steam but thanks to Valve, I have been able to use Proton on Steam which has allowed me to use it. While it works, it’s not great so at the moment I’m using Runelite which is fine but I would like to see native support for their C++ client on linux going forward like they do with Runescape 3.
I was used to using a screengrabbing software like ShareX to simply press the print screen button and drag what I wanted to display on my screen in a image, but I haven’t found anything yet that can do this so that sucks. If you know of any good software for this on Linux, please let me know.
Every now and then I have had to connect to a windows box, which has been fine as I can RDP on and that just works but to use a remote control agent such as teamviewer, I have yet to find out how that is and if it works.
I find the linux environment a lot more productive than I do Windows and it has helped me focus on work which is great. I am currently using Plasma Desktop and while it’s mostly stable, it’s not all there and I have had crashes which has been annoying. I probably just need to do some digging to find out why it’s happening and can probably stop it.
I have found when looking for applications and installing them, it’s been mostly trouble free and https://flatpak.org/ has helped a lot with that. As expected there, I’ve had to build a few applications to install them as there’s been no native install such as for Microsoft Teams which can be a hassle if you haven’t done it before, but once you done it a few times, it’s not so bad.
I love the tabbed file manager + having a shell that mirrors where I am in my folder structure, which I wish Windows had with there’s + PowerShell embedded into file explorer.