Just like starting over

Over the past few months there’s been an enormous push (in some circles) to abandon Windows in favor of Linux. Microsoft’s decision to end support for Windows 10 in October was a big motivation, but one that didn’t affect me as such — I was already on Windows 11 at home and the office.

But some of the other reasons were nagging at me: particularly the Copilot AI hegemony and the increasing emphasis on saving in the cloud (OneDrive in this case) rather than on the local computer.

Push came to shove when an update locked me out of Office 365, and when I finally got signed back in, my local Windows account (full of files I’d saved on my computer) was hosed. Added to that, Microsoft announced all content of Office documents would be copied to the cloud even if the docs were not stored on OneDrive.

I’d ordered another NVMe drive, identical to the one in the computer. (That’s a USB safe charging adapter on top — unrelated to this project but it arrived in the same shipment.) After taking stock of the desk, I decided this would be a good opportunity to clean it up a bit. That took longer than removing the computer and opening it up, in fact. As a part of the clean-up, I moved the subwoofer to the floor, freeing up a good amount of space.

The drive came with a nice little screwdriver and even a spare screw, which was a nice touch. Unfortunately once I got the case open I discovered only a single NVMe slot (while the specs say four). I quickly decided to swap out the Windows drive and install the new one, and in a few minutes I had the computer reassembled and plugged into the monitor, etc., ready to go.

First light

Not surprisingly, it took a little longer to install the operating system than it had done to just live boot from the USB. But we’ve come a long ways from my first days playing with Linux: the installation was if anything easier than Windows, and the OS immediately recognized all my devices: graphics accelerator, audio, Bluetooth, etc. I had to pair the mouse, but I was able to do that using the keyboard.

Once the installation was finished I started plugging all the accessories back in and trying them one by one. (I haven’t yet tested the DVD drive, to be honest.) I had an NVMe adapter already, so I plugged the Windows drive into that and I was able to simply copy over all my documents, pictures and music.

And now I’m getting used to the changes. For example,to prepare the images for this blog post, I used a command line utility to convert them to JPG, resize them and, where needed, to rotate them. I’m sure there are polished tools available for this work (the Graphics Image Manipulation Program comes to mind), but the terminal got me sorted out quickly.