Report #8 - Useful Windows Things

In my last report I gave a list of useful utility software I use regularly. Everything in that list is cross-platform for Linux and Windows. For this report I'll be going over everything I've found to make Windows 10 more useful and get out of the way as much as possible.

I'll be linking things as I go along but everything will be listed at the bottom as well.

My previous version of Windows was 7 and after that in the last 4 years was Linux so my everyday knowledge of Windows 10 itself was pretty much none at all. The most I knew was from screenshots, snappy headline article or simply hearsay; The way Windows 10 loaded up the start menu with junk and all the extra Windows Store related apps that behaved a lot like Snaps from Ubuntu. Something that attempted to replace the base software, such as a calculator with the "store" version, I personally dislike this approach for something as straight forward as a calculator, or any basic pre-loaded program for that matter. First thing I looked up was the editions Windows came in as that will at least give me a direction. The de facto Home, Pro, Education & Enterprise showed up but also noticed this one in particular called LTSC, It's an enterprise version that is heavily stripped down to the point where it even lacks the store. Well sign me up!

Yeah getting a hold of a real copy isn't possible unless you're a certified enterprise customer as it's for ATMs and so on. Well that just fueled me further. Finding the direct ISO link from Microsoft themselves isn't exactly hiding anywhere so that was easy. As it was the evaluation copy, I wasn't cracking into anything and about all Microsoft will do is slap a watermark on the bottom of your screen, silently judging you. Once it was booted up, it was so... empty, I loved it. No store, no preinstalled garbage, just so very empty. Another detail is that the LTSC version will not download feature updates, you know the ones that break everything in sight. Only security updates for this version, slightly less breakage. But I knew in the back of my mind that something like this could break a game or a program as it could be missing a module or service it depended on and that would get annoying quickly. Just this looming thought that would be waiting to bite me later bothers me.

From here I took my older Windows knowledge and what I'd do before would edit the registry or something along that lines, there has to be something like that for 10 right? So I searched for Windows 10 modifications to find everything was Powershell! Powershell all the things!

First promising script that came up is a de-bloat powershell script from https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater this was great to find as it gave me some insight as to how far Windows 10 can be stripped down. I kept looking and found https://christitus.com/ who made a guide using the Sycnex script but then also made his own https://christitus.com/windows-10-scripts/ later on with details he was looking for. Reading over the details he added gave me a whole bunch of new information and programs to use for Windows 10. One of the major useful things with running powershell scripts is that with a new install of Windows 10, I don't even have to open a single browser to get started with downloading Firefox, then go to ninite and make a collection to download then fuss with Windows while it downloads. It does it all, right away. With the script I was able to get an LTSC-ish version of windows from a home edition no problem!

Another nice detail of the Chris Titus script is that you can tell windows to not load in the newest feature upgrade of Windows for 3 years, let everyone else run into whatever new problems arise, only security updates! Gee why would anyone not trust the newest updates? https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/nvidia-staff-suggests-rolling-back-windows-10-update-to-fix-game-issues/ My tinfoil hat hums with excitement over this script. In all seriousness, with the wide scope in the ways people use their computers, updates that are just a new set of features perhaps just a small amount of users will use anyway is not really that beneficial to inconvenience everyone gets. This is a great feature I think more people should use to prevent a lot of headache over these sorts of snags.

Some of the following stuff is within https://christitus.com/windows-10-scripts/

O&O Shutup10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 All the privacy and telemetry stuff can be quickly disabled within this program, an extra thing I love to use this for is to disable auto download of drivers, I find that super handy for fussing with hardware and need to install older drivers. Or more in my case, keeping Windows from downloading the "newest" driver to muck everything up that was running perfectly fine before.

Chocolatey https://chocolatey.org/ A package manager, for Windows! This was a huge thing for me as in the back of my mind I was dreading the thought of all these programs I'd have to either download a new executable for every now and then or for it to annoy me with an auto update pop-up. This is such a quality of life thing that brought a sigh of relief for me, I really dreaded about it as this was something Linux distros do a fantastic job at. Now do be warned this isn't perfect as there are some programs in here that are wildly out of date, not very many, just something to keep an eye out for. But then there are major advantages as it helps you find the download to a program that might be a major pain in the ass to find on the official website.

Bulk Crap Uninstaller https://www.bcuninstaller.com/ From the start you've always needed something to help uninstall a program all the way, just one of them Windows things that never seems to go away. Select all the garbage and just be careful not to hit the dumb restart button in that ONE program midway through.

Hourglass https://chris.dziemborowicz.com/apps/hourglass/ Sometimes you just need a simple clean timer and not a phone app.

Notepad++ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ The default notepad in Windows just never cuts it, Notepad++ out of the box just works. Bonus feature; It keeps all your tabs in memory so even if you close it and haven't saved, they are still there. Used this in the past and still works well today.

Looking at the next few items on my list is invoking a bit of a rant. I'd like to bring up WSL, Windows Subsystem for Linux. When first looking at this I was overjoyed as I'd be able to keep doing the fussy terminal things I knew how to do now within Windows in a Ubuntu terminal shell. Yes! Well also, no. How I imagined it working was a bit like the command prompt or powershell within Windows, but it's more of a self enclosed environment with it's own rules that don't play nice with Windows. First I had to hunt down what directory it was even installed in. Fine, I thought, just make a shortcut and that's done with that. I was using it originally as a quick n dirty way to use youtube-dl along with ffmpeg to do converts or export out an audio track from multitrack video as I record in OBS with both a system sound and a mic sound track in separate channels and like to master the mic audio separately. It was unusable, the moment I did any edits to a file in explorer I was unable to touch it with the WSL Linux terminal.

Looking through Chocolatey I found that youtube-dl and ffmpeg can be directly installed, so that's what I did and now I just go into powershell, most of what I know of bash seems to work just fine in powershell so fairly effortless on my part. Some time after this though I started messing with building custom keyboards using QMK, now you could setup a build environment within Windows itself to build the firmware or wait several minutes for the QMK site to build it for you, or even better, just download the QMK MSYS CLI https://msys.qmk.fm/ It's just Arch Linux in a tiny bottle and it's adorable. Built from the base of https://www.msys2.org/ This works way more smoothly than the WSL does, but keep in mind it won't have all the packages you might be used to. At this point for me updating things through Chocolatey and using powershell just worked right away. Wanted to mention MSYS it as I'm sure someone might find it useful for a quick n dirty terminal. Improvements will keep happening to WSL along with being able to launch GUI apps. That will be fun to play with in the future but for now getting things going in powershell seems to be working just fine.

Something I did want is a dedicated program for SSH, so here is old reliable; PuTTY https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ used this in the past mainly for COM serial stuff with repairing routers so I already knew about it.

The Gnome desktop spoiled me with fantastic addons and sadly the customization levels of Windows 10 is way less than it used to be from say XP days, even 7 was limited but not as much as 10. One tool in particular was the aptly named "screenshot tool" from oal https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1112/screenshot-tool/ a nice and simple screenshot tool that isn't going to make a loud shutter sound and flash the entire screen white. Why do you do this all Linux desktops? I don't understand. Well to my delight there is ShareX https://getsharex.com/ While it has a lot of extras that I'm sure are super useful, I'm able to set it up to be simple, and was even able to setup my original hotkeys, PrtSc for the whole screen, no prompt or sound or flash just take the damn screenshot and save it as png. PrtSc + Shift to screenshot a region of my selection and PrtSc + Ctrl to screenshot my active window. I'm sure later I'll setup another modify key to copy directly to the clipboard.

Now for something I'm delighted yet upset for not finding earlier, VeraCrypt https://veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html Now I don't mean the software it self, I was already aware of it and used it for drives I was traveling with. I was also aware that I could use it to encrypt the boot drive of Windows but for whatever reason I automatically thought that this involved some massive setup before even installing Windows. Nope, you can encrypt the drive Windows is installed on at any time. The reason this upset me so much was that one of the major reasons I refused to use Windows any more is that while upgrading my laptop to Windows 10 it required me to make a Microsoft account to keep my system encrypted so Microsoft could "keep it safe and backed up for me" I didn't like that at all and found later that bitlocker at one point simply relied on the encryption of the disk itself https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/flaws-in-popular-ssd-drives-bypass-hardware-disk-encryption/ rather than generating it's own keys. Sure this has been fixed now but at the time it just fed into my tinfoil hat. But don't worry there is always a new way to mess it up somehow! https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-secure-boot-update-triggers-bitlocker-key-recovery/

Coming back to my laptop I wanted some way to encrypt it, so looking again at the options in the Veracrypt manual only to discover it essentially does what bitlocker in Windows does. You'll have to make sure you laptop can boot from 3rd party certs but it works the same way. Encrypts the drive via the SSD hardware but with it's own keys. There is the fact you'll have to enter in a password at boot or from hibernate that is separate from the Windows login but I'm already used to that from the way Linux handles an encrypted boot drive. You'll find this function in System -> Encrypt System Partition/Drive. What would of been my move if I knew of this option before all this 4 years ago? I really don't know but glad to know about it now.

There are plenty of RSS programs but here is QuiteRSS https://quiterss.org/ nice and simple, just the way I like it.

Normally PuTTY is enough for a quick SSH but there are times I need to look around files in detail which is where WinSCP https://winscp.net comes in. Sometimes Samba breaks, sometimes I just need to look at the jails directory structure to find why something isn't working. Very handy tool.

The default image viewer in Windows was always lacking, and with the debloat script letting me go full nuke option on everything Windows store app related, it removes the default image viewer anyway. In it's place comes IrafanView https://www.irfanview.com/ does the job just fine and is skinable. I also like being able to make a quick selection, copy it and paste it into a chat program fairly quickly. Another notable image-viewer is ImageGlass https://imageglass.org/

Sidebar Diagnostics https://github.com/ArcadeRenegade/SidebarDiagnostics is a hardware info panel. It puts itself all the way to the right which fits how I put the taskbar along the left side of my screen rather than the bottom. Minor note, if you run games in a non-native resolution the sidebar likes to freak out and after closing the game I'm unable to move a window all the way to the right side as if it's still the old resolution. You'll have to refresh the desktop resolution or refresh rate to get rid of that problem.

For my PDF viewing I use SumatraPDF https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf It lacks a lot of official related things like digital signing Adobe Reader does but you can always install both and leave SumatraPDF as the default and use the Adobe one when that sorta thing is needed.

And finally for viewing more in depth detail of hardware info stuff I use both CPU-Z and HWMonitor from https://www.cpuid.com/

While this is mainly for my own personal reference for in the future I hope someone else finds this useful in some way. A lot of the time when messing with computers the biggest hurdle is simply finding what you're looking for which results in a lot of wasted time. This gets even worse as the software being promoted or talked about from others, is just the well known names anyway. It might do what you need but often times it comes with a truck load of stuff you don't need. Photoshop is a great example, there is so much "stuff" that comes with using it, even outside of Photoshop itself the Creative Cloud program is entirely unnecessary. But because it's so well known even to the point where something being photoshoped is a verb listed in dictionary's puts it in a prime position to be what you use because that's what "everyone" uses.

Now I wouldn't blame anyone for expecting me to say just go open source and grab Krita or GIMP and ditch the Adobe stuff for good. I enjoy using primarily open source stuff as often times I don't have to worry about the rules being changed in some future version for a subscription model. This isn't always the case though and easy to spot if it is. I'm still using FL-Studio after what I think is 8 years now, paid for it once and they offer all future version for free. This is getting more rare but is still something you can find out there. My point being that use whatever you're most happy with, if it's getting in your way more than you'd like then perhaps take a visit to https://alternativeto.net/ and see if there is something else. 

Windows 10 Debloater - https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater
Chris Titus Tech - https://christitus.com/
CTT Windows 10 Script - https://christitus.com/windows-10-scripts/
O&O shutup - https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
Chocolatey Package Manager - https://chocolatey.org/
Bulk Crap Uninstaller - https://www.bcuninstaller.com/
Hourglass - https://chris.dziemborowicz.com/apps/hourglass/
Notepad++ - https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
QMK MSYS - https://msys.qmk.fm/
MSYS2 - https://www.msys2.org/
PuTTY - https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
Gnome Screenshot Tool - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1112/screenshot-tool/
ShareX - https://getsharex.com/
Veracrypt - https://veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html
QuiteRSS - https://quiterss.org/
WinSCP - https://wintcp.net
IrfanView - https://www.irfanview.com/
ImageGlass - https://imageglass.org/
Sidebar Diagnostics - https://github.com/ArcadeRenegade/SidebarDiagnostics
SumatraPDF - https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf
CPU-Z & HWMonitor - https://www.cpuid.com/

Disclamer, I'm not being paid or affiliated with any group or anyone mentioned here.

Report #7 - Useful Cross-Platform Programs

This report will have a tidy list of all of the software posted at the bottom if you want to quickly peruse through. For everyone else that enjoys some ramble, read on!

Very top of my useful bit of software is Joplin https://joplinapp.org/ It's a markdown editor that I use for pretty much anything involving text in some form or another. Quickly making lists, writing these reports or writing down technical information that requires sections to be marked as code. There is also a webclips addon that while I haven't used very much, the few times it's been very handy for quickly capturing information from web pages. Before this I used Simplenote and while it also has markdown functionality, it's hosted by someone else and I was looking to move as much as possible to self hosting. It also works on my phone so I'm able to check and edit things else where.

There really isn't to much more to say about it other than it's handy for keeping a ton of information and/or writing, easy to sync with just about anything.

Other notable text writing programs would be:
Focuswriter https://gottcode.org/focuswriter/ Good for distraction free writing.
Ghostwriter https://wereturtle.github.io/ghostwriter/ A minimal markdown editor.
Simplenote https://simplenote.com/ note keeping app that you need an account to sync, uses markdown but I never used that bit.
novelwriter https://novelwriter.io/ Side info for novelwriter, if you're on Windows the easiest way to install it is to install python3 with PATH enabled in setup then in powershell execute pip install novelWriter Linux land in terminal run sudo apt install python-3 and then pip3 install novelWriter
It's a very useful bit of software if you're going to write a large novel, it helps you keep track of a lot of information and stay organized.

Next part I should talk about is syncing files among machines, I have a desktop, laptop and a phone. The desktop and laptop have general files to keep in sync with all of them but I do want things like Joplin to be able to sync to all three. I tried to use Dropbox for a while as Google's Drive was not something I was interested in as I've been slowly removing google bits from my digital day to day. Nothing inherently wrong with how Dropbox worked it just didn't give me enough granular control over what I wanted, for general single folder sync, would of been perfect. I did find Syncthing https://syncthing.net/ and it fit everything I needed and wanted perfectly. I could declare different folders to sync and the big bonus, it's something I could self host, you don't even need a central server to self host either, it's peer to peer so no middle man bits, just need two computer you want to sync a folder, or folders to. Setup was really easy and wish I found this bit of software sooner! And while you don't need a server, I run an instance of syncthing on my server anyway to be a kind of 2nd hand back up.

Now if you need something more manual for syncing or manual I can recommend FreeFileSync https://freefilesync.org/ it's pretty much Rsync in GUI form which I like, you can also save sync jobs and name them so when you open up a job it's options easily readable rather than trying to remember what the long list of option commands.

"Is recursive -r or -R...wait why are there both -a and -A in here too?"

This has happened a few times and having to reread the documentation for a terminal command gets old after the 2nd time. FreeFileSync does all the things you'd expect, Local files & SSH remote files. There are more fancy features but that's all I really use it for as I have an external HDD that I use to keep my photo library on and after a shoot I dump all the images onto it, then sync the drive to my server which does all the backing up in background for me. Also the visual comparison that lets me skim to make sure things should be running as they should is just a nice little quality of life detail.

For general automated backup system of my desktop and laptop is Duplicati https://www.duplicati.com/ An automated backup system that can send backups in lots of different remote ways. Used to use DejaDup on Linux and I'm aware that Windows has it's own backup system but I stuck with Duplicati as it still allowed me to use it across whatever OS I want. Also it lets me recover a backup from a Linux backup onto Windows machine and vice versa if there is something I need.

KeePassXC https://keepassxc.org/ It keeps your passwords. That's it really. Has everything I need and has some nice password generation features, a dark theme, looks clean. Keep backups of your keepass file and nothing to worry over. The idea of someone else hosting my passwords is simply terrifying to me, companies get broken into all the time, I don't need that looming stress.

You'll notice a bit of a theme that I'm slightly obsessive over self-hosting as much as possible. Well here comes some more! I only recently came across this but with what I've messed with of so far seems very promising. I currently use things such as Discord, Telegram and whatever dozen accounts for messaging programs I've used in the past. Naturally I have to find a way to do it myself in some way. First on the list is voice chat, for that I've been using Mumble https://www.mumble.com/ it's comes bare bones so it's a small task to setup but the voice quality is so much better. Discord or Telegram will always hit you with the robot voice sooner or later. This is something I have running in a jail within my TrueNAS server that I'll talk about more later.

As for messaging and way more there is RetroShare https://retroshare.cc/ this is an interesting beast, does way more than I'm really needing but it's something that I'm hoping to slowly introduce at least to my close friends and family into using. A quick fire list of details is chat rooms, email-ish system, forums and a post board in a reddit style voting system. It's decentralized so no need to rely on someones server, it just requires at least two people to connect to one another and you can keep it to as small or as big of a network as you want. Some NAT and UPnP router stuff to make sure it works but as my router has UPnP on mostly auto it worked fine out of the box. There is a list for voice and video in the future but I've got Mumble for voice and video isn't something on my need-to-have list.

As mentioned earlier a lot of this self hosting is done with my server, which runs TrueNAS https://www.truenas.com/ previously known as FreeNAS. Before using TrueNAS I just spun up a Debian box but it was only a file hosting system, doing anything extra like virtualization or running instances was a hassle. I covered quite a few details in report 6 about the file sharing so I'll just cover the other stuff I self host. So currently on my server there are jail instances running for Mumble, Minecraft, a ffmpeg specific jail, Nextcloud, Plex, Syncthing, Zoneminder and Deluge.
It's doing quite a lot of utility for me without having to fuss to much and the WebGUI of TrueNAS makes it easier to quickly see the status of everything going on and still be able to jump into the shell of an jail. Just in case you're unaware a jail is a virtualized instance of the OS, very little overhead and lets you create and destroy them without having to worry about the base OS. This is a function of FreeBSD which TrueNAS runs.

Nextcloud https://nextcloud.com/ is a strange use case for me as I tried to use it as an all in one stop for just about everything. These days however It's simply a WebDAV server for my phone to keep contacts and events, just another tiny detail to make sure Google isn't holding enough of my personal information as is.

Both FFmpeg https://ffmpeg.org/ and Plex https://www.plex.tv/ I use together in a way. I'm not able to do this with everything but I prefer to buy the bluray of whatever movie or series and then take MakeMKV http://www.makemkv.com/ to turn it into something FFmpeg can chew away on the server which is then sent to a directory Plex can read it. Buying the optical media for what you want is more expensive, yes. But I've run into a movie or a series being kicked off of whatever streaming platform just for it to end up in a completely different one and that is simply frustrating, everything is far to fractured with streaming services and I'm not going to pay for all of them. Once you buy a disc, it's there, the bluray won't break down magically one day just for purpray to come out the next day and have to buy it again. I don't watch many shows or movies these days anyway so it's not like it's a huge budget anyway.

Zoneminder https://www.zoneminder.com/ is a CCTV NVR. You'll have to double check what kinds of cameras to buy and the WebGUI is a touch fussy. I'm not sure if it's my server or cameras but it's not quite smooth or easy to use. I'm looking to replace it with something else but currently all the other options are way more expensive or come with severe privacy concerns. For now though it's handy enough to slap some cameras around and have them record.

MineOS https://minecraft.codeemo.com/ I've made a previous post before about this bit of software and glad it's still around.

Deluge https://www.deluge-torrent.org/ While I’m sure the image of anything torrent is tainted with the look of “that’s for pirates” is a stain that will never go away there is plenty of things that still use it. That list is rather exhaustive so won’t clutter it up here.

There are other home server options available, make sure to do research for what you need as that's beyond the scope of this ramble.

Here is a quick fire list of programs I use as well.

mpv https://mpv.io/ A clean video player. I know a lot of people stick to VLC but in both Windows and Linux VLC gave me issues now and then but so far mpv has been flawless. I keep both them installed anyway.

Strawberry music player https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/ This is a fork of Clementine, for the most part there isn't anything drastically different. Updated fairly regularly.

FFmpeg Batch AV converter https://ffmpeg-batch.sourceforge.io/ take a beast of a CLI tool and slap a GUI to it. What's nice is that it gives you the CLI output so you don't need to always use the GUI.

Kabuu Audio Converter https://kabuusoft.com/product/detail/2/kabuu-audio-converter a simple audio converter tool, nothing I use regularly but very handy for when it's needed.

Audacity https://www.audacityteam.org/ Audio editing software, good for editing down podcasts or samples of sounds. I've used this bit of software for a super long time.

youtube-dl https://youtube-dl.org/ A super handy utility to download and make back ups of youtube videos, or almost any video on a webpage.

Everything in here is cross platform for the most part. I'll be making another post that is much more narrowed in on Windows specific programs. Along with other nit picky details in setup or usage. If there are changes to this list I'll make update notes at the bottom.

Joplin - https://joplinapp.org/
Focuswriter - https://gottcode.org/focuswriter/
Ghostwriter - https://wereturtle.github.io/ghostwriter/
Simplenote - https://simplenote.com/
novelwriter - https://novelwriter.io/
Syncthing - https://syncthing.net/
FreeFileSync - https://freefilesync.org/
Duplicati - https://www.duplicati.com/
KeePassXC - https://keepassxc.org/
Mumble - https://www.mumble.com/
Retroshare - https://retroshare.cc/
TrueNAS - https://www.truenas.com/
Nextcloud - https://nextcloud.com/
FFmpeg - https://ffmpeg.org/
Plex - https://www.plex.tv/
MakeMKV - http://www.makemkv.com/
Zoneminder - https://www.zoneminder.com/
MineOS - https://minecraft.codeemo.com/
Deluge - https://www.deluge-torrent.org/
mpv - https://mpv.io/
Strawberry music player - https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/
FFmpeg Batch AV converter - https://ffmpeg-batch.sourceforge.io/
Kabuu - https://kabuusoft.com/product/detail/2/kabuu-audio-converter
Audacity - https://www.audacityteam.org/
Youtube-dl - https://youtube-dl.org/

Full disclaimer, nothing here is something I was paid to say or link to. These are things I simply find useful in my day to day.

Full Migration from Windows to Linux - Report #6 Being Sensible

Shortly after writing report #5 a lot of changes happened and from the perspective of writing this, kept happening.

The first thing to get out of the way is that I’m using Windows again, that alone might have people stop reading but I’d rather not save it for the end as some sort of surprise.

For anyone else still reading there is plenty of Linux related thoughts, mostly realistic but hopefully positive.

After writing report #5; It was a few weeks after writing it that all of my Solus systems stopped booting, something about a particular update would prevent it from booting up, couldn’t find out why. While the folks working on Solus are talented programmers, watching the weird events unfold about Doherty and the Patreon for Solus (which I was apart of) being locked out of sent way to many red flags to me. With the combination of being weirded out and Solus just not booting, (even after a fresh install and update) I had to go look else where.

At this point I needed working machines again so Ubuntu would be the easiest thing to slap on and go but there were still things that Ubnutu kept doing that I wasn’t the biggest fan of. One of the big ones was the default install of snap apps for things as basic as the calculator taking ages to load, even on a higher end system.

While distro hopping can be a little disorienting I did try out a distro, one a week; OpenSUSE, Manjaro, Fedora, even considered going Linux Mint again and pumping it full of PPAs. This trip down distro lane was both frustrating and informative in how others view the functionality of how a distribution of Linux works for them. For example OpenSUSE has this wonderful control panel where you could change lots of little details without having to mess with the terminal. This greatly appeals to me as I think there a lot of settings that could/should be easily user adjustable without the use of a terminal. I’m not anti-terminal, just that there are adjustments that should be more end-user discover-able without having to know exactly what to type in.

One thing in particular I found missing from everything unless it was an Ubuntu based distribution is file sharing not being enabled by default, particularly Samba shares. My home server is a FreeNAS box, it uses Samba shares for my computer along with my wife’s machine which is Windows, Samba is the easiest way for it to work with both systems. For some reason trying to enable automatic file share detection wasn’t working for me on any distribution of Linux unless it was Ubuntu based. There might be something I’m missing I spent a better part of a day trying to figure this one out. I’m to the point now if something like this takes more than an hour to figure out, then to me it’s simply broken.

While I’m on the thought of Ubuntu based, any time I see another spin/flavor/remix of Ubuntu, Arch or what have you, I can’t help but roll my eyes a little, but everyone has a different fit. So when seeing all this buzz on Pop!_OS, I did my little “another one?”. At this point though I was hitting a roadblock with nothing fitting me and started up reading up on what System76 was doing with Pop!_OS. There was actually quite a few things they were doing I found interesting. So I went ahead and installed Pop.

It’s been almost 2 years using Pop!_OS and it’s been a great fit. I’ve only encountered two snags this whole time. The first one was upgrading my CPU to a 3rd gen Ryzen cpu, my system would freeze up on heavy load. Had to use a custom kernel for a month until the mainline Pop!_OS kernel got patched and that’s not really a issue related to the distribution. The second snag is more of me unknowingly setting up a trap for myself. When upgrading from 19.10 to 20.04 the upgrade kept throwing errors until I removed my custom PPAs. Now this isn’t the first time PPAs have caused me problems, it’s happened in Linux Mint and vanilla Ubuntu as well. Even after successfully upgrading to 20.04 I had left over programs and packages that I had to nit pick remove with Synaptic, everything works fine after that. The less trouble I have to deal with when using my computer the better, so I’ve opted to stop using PPAs.

I’ve used Flatpaks as a side repo for quite some time now so with wanting to ditch PPAs and Pop!_OS fully supporting Flatpak in the Pop Shop itself this made things a lot easier.

Now this whole time I might be sounding like I’m hammering on about how every distribution of Linux is greatly flawed. This is not the case, as whats frustrating to me is that the desktop side of Linux is so very close to being a very good desktop OS, almost perfect. I don’t entirely mean perfect for me, there is always something to change to feel completely settled in. An example in Pop!_OS is that by default the Minimize & Fullscreen buttons in the title bar of the windows are not enabled by default and you have to download Tweaks for Gnome to enable them, old habits but I need these controls or I just feel a little lost.

What I mean by perfect is that just about anyone can install and get going with minimal setup. No having to mess with packages/.deb/appimages/PPAs (let alone explain what they are) or install Nvidia drivers if need be. All they would have to do is install the programs they want to use from an app store which at this point most people understands to a degree. No fussing with any system configuration to make sure file shares work and power management is enabled by default, it’s just all there already.

Now to what I wrote about at the beginning, that Windows thing.

I attempt to be a realistic person with the things I use and buy. One thing I can clearly see of myself now, after using only Linux for over 4 years is that I wasn’t being realistic with myself in how to use it.

It’s software, it’s a tool to use in a functional way with as much ease as possible while using it.

While I did use it as a tool in my day to day, I also let creep in that it’s somehow apart of my identity, somehow this software is a reflection of my personality. This is dangerous behavior, as it lead towards several traits I never quite saw in myself before, or at least severely amplified in a negative way. One of the big ones that got in very quickly was the superiority idea, an idea that simply because I’m using this free and open source software it makes me or my work just “that” much better than say someone who uses Windows or even, Apple.

Second trait would be the die-hard idea that open-source is the only software to use, nothing else matters unless it’s free (in both sense of the word). Luckily this trait didn’t last that long after rolling with the Novu drivers for my Nvidia card, it was not fun to use. But I did still heavily lean towards this idea for about a year into my Linux only journey.

Another trait that more slowly crept in was finding other groups of Linux users and just disliking or outright hating on them. Why? Because this programmer said this thing, or they don’t use completely open software and/or services like Twitter, Reddit, YouTube. Or this one person has a beef with another person, so you gotta pick one right?

Nope. Not a lick of that matters. This trait in particular has even caused some grief with others, I’ve apologized to them but still something I’m disappointed in myself about.

I’m sure other issues arose but these were the big ones.

These issues are indeed entirely my fault, I let all of that in. This is strange for me as normally, I keep far away from hostile fandoms and their behavior. So how did I slip down this far? It was perfect timing of all things going on. I’ve been using Windows very early on, sense 3.1 days and slowly over time the little nit picky things you’re very familiar with somehow become this larger issues.

Even without Linux being present in my life it was already happening, I was looking at news about Windows 10 and gearing myself up to absolutely hate it.

With my need to use something else, anything else other than Windows, especially Windows 10 with all of it’s “extra” features I didn’t like or outright disagreed with. I was ready to jump onto anything and latch onto it.

The one big thing that got me to flip the table on Windows was upgrading my laptop to Windows 10 and unable to encrypt the drive unless I had a Microsoft account. I travel with my laptop and if it got stolen, anyone with the slightest clue can just grab my browser info. And I refuse to make a Microsoft account! Well, not true I already have a Microsoft account, I just didn’t want to link my desktop to it. Just in my head that’s how I said it, but this is how the negative traits will spin you around.

So I got fed up and started eagerly soaking in as much information about Linux, but rather than just getting informed about how to use bash, ssh or what have you I also listened to a ton of podcasts and videos from other Linux users. With that came their opinion on matters, often times very opinionated in every aspect about how so much better it is.

This combination of being eager to get on board whatever wasn’t Windows came with “yeah screw that other OS, I never need it again”. Shortly trailing whatever thoughts and opinion with it. Which I get, it’s extremely difficult to talk about Linux without their being some sort of opinion on the matter as Linux itself is pretty much built by other people fed up with what was currently available and often times that comes with a personal disdain towards something or someone. Then there is the reason on why would you would switch over to Linux (or even BSD for that matter) in the first place. It’s not like their are Linux computers sitting on the shelves at Costco, it’s something that must be perused.

So about 2 months before writing up this post,I was writing the draft for report number 6, this draft is not at all what you’re reading now. Shortly after that draft I found myself suddenly in a situation that made me very unhappy with everything on my system. One of the days where nothing properly worked, or if it did work it wasn’t as it should be. For some reason it was the day that every game I tried to play had graphical glitches. Even TF2 had the bug where white polygon squares would show rather than grass. That’s a Valve game, the biggest company outwardly supporting Linux.

I also broke my own rule and started dual booting Windows, mainly for Hammer, a map making tool for the Source engine. Was trying to finish up some CS:GO maps but then never found myself finishing the maps anyway as dual booting is just a pain in the ass.

Making maps is something I enjoy doing creatively, there are even maps I haven’t put up on the workshop as they were just a few hours on one tiny scene, a idea draft for the future.

This is where me being unrealistic with using Linux made me extremely unhappy. There were still tools and games unable to simply run in Linux. Follow that up with me spending hours of my day trying to find and alternative or forcing it to run through Wine was just adding up to my frustration.

You’ll also find very little help or info on these sorts of things as most of the time you’ll get a response of: “It runs on my end.”

Running it isn’t the same as working. Hammer runs in Wine just fine, a lot of it doesn’t work though.

So it furthers the frustration when getting and even seeing remakrs made to others that can be clearly seen as: “You can’t Linux? Wow you’re dumb!”

Is every single person who runs Linux this terrible person? No, not at all, quite a few good, reasonable people out there much better than I was about it. But it’s a small niche group, so when it feels like a large group of the Linux users are yelling at you, it sure does fell like all of them are.

And if the ones who yell, are not yelling at someone, they are yelling at each other.

One of the other negatives that surfaced in me is how much my creativity suffered, not because there wasn’t any tools, far from it, Krita and Blender alone could keep me busy forever. But the ever present need to feel updated on every little thing in the Linux world or some new daily build of software I most likely won’t really use. Had to keep the feed coming in at all times or I wasn’t good enough at using my own operating system. Then the time spent trying to get games running was another big time sink.

So that’s it? Dropping everything and just accepting the Windows life?

Not quite that far in.

This migration through Linux and open source software in general has brought me a lot of good tools, for example my router is running on PfSense and has been running on a low power Celeron box without hassle or restarts (only update restarts) for almost 3 years now. Unlike other off the shelf routers that need to be manually reset every month it feels like. I’m able to do all sorts of highly detailed rules for the firewall and was able to turn on RADIUS for my WiFi when the WPA2 KRACK vulnerability was discovered, so it gives security in running on older WiFi hardware.

The biggest thing I’ve done with open source tools is FreeNAS. Normally for sharing files and backing up data I just had some external HDDs. Then I moved over to some dual drive Netgear hardware that worked fairly well but no upgrade path and slow even for a 1Gb network. Before using FreeNAS I was using spare parts with Ubuntu and some drives thrown into it. No RAID, just drives.

It had a 3TB HDD in it. It failed. Data was lost.

The next server I built was running Debian but with ZFS. Almost went with a hardware RAID card but heard about to many nightmares about that, so software RAID it is. For several months I was running this server through a terminal via SSH, which worked for file sharing but I wanted to be able to run virtual machines and containers, sure I could do all that via terminal but why would I abuse myself like that.

FreeNAS felt like the best fit and so far it’s done everything I’ve wanted it to, even have it duplicating to another machine so there is a backup of the server.

Also want to note that ZFS has proven to me it’s been very bullet proof in dataloss. JBOD cards are also cheap compared to dedicated RAID cards which helps me save on cash now and later when it fails.

As for my desktop, it’s Windows. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in Linux to either get something working or find an alternative to, sometimes it either won’t work or there isn’t anything else. There are to many tools and games that frankly I don’t have time to miss out on. With the world as it is currently with Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter protests going on is a sharp reminder that life is way to short to make sure everything works exactly how you and only you want it to. It won’t, and you’ll be miserable.

You can however be thoughtful in what and how to use software. Writing up this whole post I used FocusWriter with Syncthing syncing the document to my laptops, one of which still runs Linux (a X230 from eBay for $90 bucks).

Do I never ever pay for software then? No, there are some I’ll gladly pay for such as FL Studio. But there are others I pay for I’m not quite so happy for, such as Windows. Ones I’m not paying for are as-a-service software, cloud stuff such as Adobe or Autodesk. While I’ve paid for these before and used them in a semi-professional manner the alternatives do exactly what I need and cost me nothing, so I don’t see myself ever paying for that again.

The hardest part in all of this is knowing what you need and is there an open source version of it somewhere out there? A lot of the times there is, but it sure is hard to find, which is why I see often times people will pay for things like Dropbox or Photoshop, it’s a known name, that’s way easier.

I imagine report #7 will be about what interesting or useful software is out there that I’ve found useful. So if you’re wondering what I’ve discovered, it’ll be listed when I make that.

This whole venture has changed me dramatically and despite what the internet thinks, yes you are allowed to change. I've gone from one end back to the beginning with just extra info. I’m hoping this post can help someone else out in their journey not take quite so long or at least not as taxing. I’ll go over what key ideas that should help anyone looking to move from Windows or simply introduce more open source programs rather than paying for something you might be using at just a surface level.

If you’re looking to migrate all the way to Linux, check what programs you’re currently using and if there is a Linux version out there. If there isn’t one, then you can choose to look for something that works a lot like it or decide if you even need that program. If it’s something you use often and there isn’t anything else out there quite like it then don’t worry about it, Linux isn’t ready for you yet.

An example I can easily give right now is Photoshop. If you manipulate images/photos on occasion then GIMP has a high parity to it, not a carbon copy mind you but it’s features are very similar. I make HDR shots within GIMP and the workflow is smooth, some examples

If you’re an artist you can still use GIMP but for drawing in general I’d recommend Krita.

While in Windows, download these programs and give them an honest try, the hotkeys will be all different, layout changes or even different names for something that works the same in Photoshop will be annoying but unless you’re working in a professional studio or a company I don’t see any real reason why these can’t work for the everyday person.

The choice of Linux distribution from my point of view comes down to two.

Pop!_OS if you’re doing a lot of gaming and want to get going right away. Major updates come every 6 months. Gnome desktop takes getting used to from Windows but I really liked it, there are features I miss from Gnome now that I’m using Explorer again.

Linux Mint if you want to set it and forget it, very Windows user friendly when navigating, a lot of the hotkeys are the same. Major updates are every 2 years but changes are very minimal at the user desktop level.

With the gaming side, you can easily check protondb.com and see what your Steam collection looks like. Be aware that Steam and itch.io are the only Linux native digital store fronts, while you can download Linux games from, gog.com, their galaxy client is Windows/Mac only. As for all the other digital store fronts, it’s all pretty much Windows.

If it’s online gaming then I’d just honestly say upfront to wait. A lot of issues arise when the online portion of gaming comes into play here, things like DRM and anti-cheat software will simply prevent the game from working. Just taking a look at protondb.com shows Pubg at borked with all the reports about EAC preventing the game from launching. While there is constant progress in this field, it’s a slow one.

Monster Hunter World is a game I was playing on Linux but every time it got updated it broke hard and had to wait for an updated ge-proton. The time and effort put into making these proton packs are amazing with high praise from me that this is even possible. I just don’t have time to worry about that any more.

The progress in gaming on Linux in the last 5 years are highly impressive by hard working people. I imagine the next 5 years will be even more impressive. Would I go back to full-time Linux in the future? Maybe at some point. Things changing and being improved will happen anyway but most of all, general support from other companies and not just Valve would have to happen. A lot of eyeballs are looking at the Linux eco-system but only very few are taking time and money into it. To be clear I’m not looking for total domination at all, that will never happen at this rate. Perhaps close on the heels of OSX, I’m interested to see what that would look like, if that could ever become a reality.

As noted before I’ll be doing another report but will be calling it something else.

For now I’m going to clock out of being updated on what’s going on in Linux land and go make stuff and even play some games.