My Linux Year: 2024

As we’re now closing a door to 2024 and enter the year of 2025, here are my Linux Year Highlights.

Prologue (August-2023):

Starting my Linux Journey in 2023 when I finally decided that it was time for me to commit myself to Open-Source projects, write this blog, learn something new and lower the burden of my budget (laughing), OpenSUSE has been my Go-distro. OpenSUSE wasn’t my first rodeo on the Linux side. I tested in the past many: Ubuntu (the foremost), Fedora, ZorinOS, Pop-OS!, Debian… but Why?

• Rolling release: I wanted something always up-to-date. Not that when I read something in the news I have to wait for a year or two to get hands on it. I wanted them fast, I wanted them now.
• Stability: Among those distros called “rolling”, OpenSUSE at top as solid and reliable.
• Documentation: OpenSUSE website is resourceful (I’ll just leave it like this) (snugging)
• Community: OpenSUSE is one of the pioneers in the Linux World. They have been around since 2002. Around that time, they were only few of them (distributions). Along the years, they build a solid, trusted community.
• Independent: Yes, at his launch it was based on Slackware, then on Red Hat, then on SUSE Linux. But since 2006, they claimed their independence and proclaimed freedom.
• Corporation backed: (I know, I know… some people want to stay away of big corporations, but you want to stay under their leach?) Yeah! The fact that it is a Corporate-backed distro gave me some assurance that the System won’t disappear any time tomorrow as smoke. Because corporations have money, money calls people (workers), people means maintainability.

Fading trust (June-2024):

As for any Operating System, the road wasn’t always rose, blue and sunshine. They were incompatibilities (software and hardware), drop of performance (especially in gaming, I’m coming back to this) and a lot of ifs (that haven’t ended yet).

A’right, let’s develop a bit:

• Incompatibilities: They are all listed in my blog’s record : Article link. They were mostly Wi-Fi card driver, fingerprint driver for the hardware part. And No Adobe Acrobat Reader, No Microsoft Office (I’m not stupid, I acknowledged those beforehand), No suitable email client (Thunderbird, Kmail, Evolution… all of them not that awesome), difficulties of installing Davinci Resolve (I’ve learned along the way).
• Performance: mostly because of the NVIDIA driver not being open-source and not that well-supported of Linux (especially running a Wayland session Forum link)
• The “ifs”: Because of all those issue, I did a lot of troubleshooting, and I’m to say that I fixed a lot of them. They were some that I just couldn’t ; some because of Linux incompatibilities, other because of the distribution I was using. The Distribution? Yes, let me explain.

Around June 2024, NVIDIA fixed one of the common issue people had when playing video games on a Wayland session: screen tearing. As I stated earlier, I chose OpenSUSE because it is a “rolling” distro. So I was expecting getting the newer driver, R555 2nd Beta Release, 555.52.04 as soon as it was released. That never happen still now. I learned the hard truth “even if OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is on a rolling release cycle, they decided to stick with the “stable branch” of the Nvidia driver” when other distributions of the same type ship the “featured branch” of the Nvidia driver. That’s when I decided it was time to move to a different boat (Arch Linux).

Rebirth (August-2024):

As I couldn’t enjoy my gaming time on OpenSUSE because of the screen tearing… you may ask: why not use X11 or Xorg as people do? I just couldn’t. X11 never worked for me. Every time I was launching a game on X11, after a few minutes, my PC just freeze, and I had to just reboot the PC. So, I decided to test some other distro (Arch Linux, Manjaro, EndeavourOS, CachyOS) for replacement. Only one stood out: Arch Linux. It is rolling, stable (some might argue), documentation-proof, independent, a big community and somewhat a corporate-backed distro.

Yeah! It isn’t what we can call a “friendly” distro for beginners, but I not a beginner (not anymore). So yeah, since… I don’t even know… the Arch Linux’s boot image ships with a script called “archinstall”. That simplify the installation of the system a lot. You still need to know what to install or how to configure your system, but not manually anymore. Just choose what to install and after the reboot, your computer is ready to use (kind of).

And yes, Arch Linux ships the last NVIDIA driver from the “feature branch”. Yes, you have to install and configure things afterhand, but I love it and hate it, that is when learning comes. Arch is one of the most minimalistic distros out there, you install things when you want or need them, not given to you in the way “you might need them someday”. But you have to dig into the rich documentation to make sure you configure everything well.

Since Arch Linux, I can happily and proudly say, “that is an upgrade”. Yet, I’m riding a low-end laptop from 2016, and it’s not able to run the games I play smoothly, that’s a budget matter for later.

Epilogue (So far…)

What a journey! I can finally say that “Linux is my Home now”. Not that I dislike Windows (yeah I hate it because it steals my data and runs a ton of services on the background that are even not necessary) but Linux has taught me a lot (far more than Windows did), I install what I want when I require it. Applications made for Windows? I can run them using Wine. Games made for Windows? I can run them using Proton or Wine. Desktop customization? With KDE, I have a ton, and not just that. I can switch Desktop environment at will from KDE to GNOME, from Sway to Hyprland (I know, they are not called “environment” but still).

• OnlyOffice/LibreOffice as Office Suite
• VLC/Haruna/Elisa as media player
• Visual Studio Code as text editor
• Joplin as note app
• Firefox/Chromium as web browser

Just a few applications I am using.

Yeah! I also discover (after 5 years) that my laptop had an empty slot for one more hard drive. Yeah! You can say that I’m somehow blind or an idiot. That means I can easily run more than one system on my PC (not really a dual boot because both system are completely independent of the other. I can simply remove one drive and the other still works smoothly). Yeah! I’m an Idiot ‘cause I have a different definition of “dual boot”.

All that rest to say: Happy Year 2025! May this year teaches us more and more. Always aim for the excellence and beyond.