In my home office, I have an aging gaming desktop that I built almost a decade ago. It’s still in good condition, but I don’t really play many games anymore. I don’t think it will be able to upgrade to Windows 11, so I thought I would swap out the OS for Linux.

My first choice was to install NixOS. I got the base operating system installed. Then I started installing packages that I wanted, and just couldn’t figure it out. I pretty quickly grabbed an .iso for another distribution and quit.

My next choice was to go back to Manjaro. I used to use Arch back in school. I think I gave up on it after a pretty nasty kernel corruption issue. I’m hoping that using Manjaro instead of mainline Arch will be a bit more stable.

So far I’m pretty happy with the switch. I have a lot of the software that I need set up. I’m starting to use it to write more, and I have rustling set up so I can press forward with my latest attempt to learn rust.

Plus since I have a KVM switch that allows me to switch between my work laptop’s docking station and my desktop, I have a much more ergonomic setup for writing than using my laptop. That’s especially handy since my laptop is a first generation Onyx Pro from System76, so it doesn’t really have docking capabilities.

I don’t know if this current setup will last. There’s a possibility that Manjaro might not be stable enough. If that happens, then I will probably switch to something like Ubuntu or Mint. There’s also a decent chance that my aging hardware might give out. But if that does happen at least I tried to get as much use out of it as I could.

On Suspicious Timing

While not directly related to Windows Recall. I can’t help but imagine that seeing some of the negative reactions to that ill fated product may have influenced me to do this earlier than I might have otherwise. That aging piece of hard ware would still be able to use Windows 10 until next year. I don’t like that Microsoft is making this feature. I also happen to think that it’s poorly named. The first time that I heard the name I thought that some patch that Microsoft released was bad enough that they had to issue a product recall.

I just think that for development, and home projects, Linux is a much lighter and efficient environment. As my hardware ages, I just don’t want to deal with it getting that much slower with newer, bloated, and in the case of Recall asinine software features.