Why I don't have Windows installed
I found my old blog post here and thought I'd post this as a reply to myself.
I don't understand this thing people say, that Linux has to get easier to install before people will adopt it. I installed Arch Linux the other day, it doesn't even have an installer anymore, it's just a readme file with chroot instructions. Once it's done, sound and network have always worked out of the box for me, unlike in Windows where I need to download the network driver on another computer and copy on a USB stick!
Last time I tried to install Windows, I had to use obscure tools/hacks to trick the installer into believing my USB disk was a DVD, since my DVD-reader is broken. I also used other tools to remove some components from the image, since I had a new fancy SSD drive of just 128 GB, and didn't want to use 25 GB of that just to boot W7 and be able to play games. Surprise: these two sets of tools didn't work well together, each time a certain key component was removed, the installer would fail halfway with a mysterious error. Took me two days to install Windows this way, and after a few months, the installation was STILL using over 20 GB.
It's been 2 years since that, Windows 7 has been a parasite on my disk but I've kept it to occasionally play some games. Then I got a headset to chat with a friend while playing, but could never get the microphone to work. I changed all settings back and forth, tried all potential solutions I could find online, and of course kept installing different driver versions. No dice. Meanwhile in Linux, the microphone worked perfectly.
Then one day not too long ago I decided to see if I could get some games to work in wine, and even with my complicated, switchable laptop graphics card, and me never caring to find out how that really works under Linux... it worked. Starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft both worked, the former with a few bugs in the menu but none in the game. Dota 2 had a native client for Linux, too.
So yeah, the recent installation of Arch Linux I mentioned, was because I decided to finally get rid of Windows and give the disk space back to Linux. I have not regretted this decision once. Everything I need to do in Windows, like when I'm required to use certain tools, work perfectly in wine and/or VirtualBox. Playing Windows games while talking over Skype works perfectly, and even seems faster than in Windows. Also, I can switch to other programs without my monitor needing to change resolution for several seconds.
This time, while setting up my system from scratch, I also found some new cool software that replaced what I had used before: fcitx worked better for me for Japanese/Chinese
input than ibus had; moving from xchat to quassel allowed me to connect through my VPS and always remain online. I found that Vimium for Chromium actually does everything I need from a vim-plugin, and finally retired the heavy Firefox and its bugs.
It's a cheap HP laptop from 2011 but feels like a speed monster with Arch Linux, and now that I don't have a Windows partition, the 128 GB seem like plenty. I did upgrade to 8 GB RAM to run more virtual machines. I'm still using Awesome WM and rxvt-unicode, same as in my last blog post.
I don't understand this thing people say, that Linux has to get easier to install before people will adopt it. I installed Arch Linux the other day, it doesn't even have an installer anymore, it's just a readme file with chroot instructions. Once it's done, sound and network have always worked out of the box for me, unlike in Windows where I need to download the network driver on another computer and copy on a USB stick!
Last time I tried to install Windows, I had to use obscure tools/hacks to trick the installer into believing my USB disk was a DVD, since my DVD-reader is broken. I also used other tools to remove some components from the image, since I had a new fancy SSD drive of just 128 GB, and didn't want to use 25 GB of that just to boot W7 and be able to play games. Surprise: these two sets of tools didn't work well together, each time a certain key component was removed, the installer would fail halfway with a mysterious error. Took me two days to install Windows this way, and after a few months, the installation was STILL using over 20 GB.
It's been 2 years since that, Windows 7 has been a parasite on my disk but I've kept it to occasionally play some games. Then I got a headset to chat with a friend while playing, but could never get the microphone to work. I changed all settings back and forth, tried all potential solutions I could find online, and of course kept installing different driver versions. No dice. Meanwhile in Linux, the microphone worked perfectly.
Then one day not too long ago I decided to see if I could get some games to work in wine, and even with my complicated, switchable laptop graphics card, and me never caring to find out how that really works under Linux... it worked. Starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft both worked, the former with a few bugs in the menu but none in the game. Dota 2 had a native client for Linux, too.
So yeah, the recent installation of Arch Linux I mentioned, was because I decided to finally get rid of Windows and give the disk space back to Linux. I have not regretted this decision once. Everything I need to do in Windows, like when I'm required to use certain tools, work perfectly in wine and/or VirtualBox. Playing Windows games while talking over Skype works perfectly, and even seems faster than in Windows. Also, I can switch to other programs without my monitor needing to change resolution for several seconds.
This time, while setting up my system from scratch, I also found some new cool software that replaced what I had used before: fcitx worked better for me for Japanese/Chinese
input than ibus had; moving from xchat to quassel allowed me to connect through my VPS and always remain online. I found that Vimium for Chromium actually does everything I need from a vim-plugin, and finally retired the heavy Firefox and its bugs.
It's a cheap HP laptop from 2011 but feels like a speed monster with Arch Linux, and now that I don't have a Windows partition, the 128 GB seem like plenty. I did upgrade to 8 GB RAM to run more virtual machines. I'm still using Awesome WM and rxvt-unicode, same as in my last blog post.
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