I’m a retired Unix admin. I’ve been using Linux since I installed Slackware 3.1 from several boxes of 1.44MB diskettes. But, working in a corporate environment with lots of M$ Office requirements meant that my work desktop has always been Windows. I know it sounds crazy, but I was really hesitant to switch to away from Windows - I guess after 30+ years I’d developed a bit of Stockholm syndrome. But, Copilot and the looming Recall were enough to push me over the edge.

Anyway - I spent a while making sure I got all my data off OneDrive etc. and then installed Debian 12 with LXDE - my laptop is an older i7 with 16GB of RAM, but lightweight and minimal really appeals to me. Everything just worked and I was happy for a day or two. Then I started noticing video tearing - especially on my 2nd monitor. I did a bit of research and found a suggestion to enable TearFree in the X11 configuration - X wouldn’t even start when I did that. So, I did some more reading and now think I understand that the lightweight window managers don’t have vsync and this causes the tearing. Apparently the real solution is to use a compositing window manager (I don’t understand what that means…) with OpenGL. Oh well, I can’t have minimal lightweight - so, I installed KDE. It’s very clean and no video tearing. I still don’t have it doing power management for my monitors the way I want, but other than that - I’m very happy. It was noticeably sluggish compared to LXDE, but I’m used to that already after only a day.

It’s only been a few days, but I have not regretted the switch for one second.

  • slacktoid@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    That makes sense. The world runs on Linux, freebsd and then somewhere down the line macs and windows servers.

    Thats fair. That problem only comes into play when you’re dealing with really new hardware like things with NPUs or the amd ai processors.

    Hahaha love it! And the anxiety is legit I used to have an NTFS partition for the longest time till I found a way to consolidate things to my Linux partition.

    Woo hoo!! Fair warning while somethings have become easier, Slackware is still Slackware tho but better build processes thru slackbuild etc. The rest of the Linux space has kind of crustaceaned with how they do things due to systemd.