I tried to switch my workflow to Windows 11.. it did not ended well: Long life to Linux Lite!

Other systems/tech
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Early this week I had the bad idea to switch my entire workflow to Windows 11 as primary machine… I should never done it!!!

In some words I had 2 crazy days, installing my native Windows softwares, after the second day computer was working very pretty well… I was going to do primary backup after a couple of days…
But between last tuesday and wednesday I installed a software called “Open Shell”, which is a Windows 7 / 10 start menu replacer for Windows 11, and it’s open source. I downloaded it from the relative github repos… After I realized I did not liked it I was trying to uninstall this software completely from my system…
After uninstalled this software, and after rebooted my computer, Windows was not able to correctly startup, I was seeing only a black window with only the mouse cursor. The process explorer.exe was not running in background anymore, I tried to launch from elevated permissions powershell, but nothing happens… I tried everything, from the command sfc /scannow, and the commands for restore the system image… but nothing of these works… as I did not had any restore points on my system… I had no way, Windows was un-recoverable.

So, full of anger, I said a big “F… Y…” to this horrible OS and I went to Linux once again.

I was with Arch for a couple of months, I was quite liking it, but I was nos satisfied because it’s frequents updates, I had almost 300-400mb of updates per day! That’s not acceptable.
So I decided to came back to my so loved distribution Linux Lite.

Linux Lite is a very friendly distribution based over Ubuntu LTS, current release is based at the top of Ubuntu 24.04. The development team, from Australia / New Zeland is not the best in quality of support… I tried to contact them couple of times but they never gave me feedback.
But I very like the customized XFCE look and feel, for my current experience, for what I have to say, for me it’s one of best distribution to use. It’s indicated both to new users to experienced ones. In quality of system it’s very rock stable, videogames are starting without any problem, Nvidia drivers are very familiar with the distro. It’s very similar to Linux Mint, but for my use case I prefer using this distro instead Mint.

Now I unified all my backups with Borg, I’m able to do a full system backup in about 10-15 minutes. I’m very satisfied about this setup.

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I have never been able to understand how with a simple download, Microsoft allows you to break the system so easily.

But hence, with the “user friendliness” of Windows the ability to download and double click to install is why a lot of people like it. Of course hackers love that too.

Anyhoo, long live Linux!

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23 posts were split to a new topic: Arch Linux Updates: Frequency, Stability, and Best Practices

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@ricky89

You really rode that Windows 11 rollercoaster! Sounded like a real pain and not the first time I’ve heard of Windows updates or 3rd party tweaks bricking a system. Windows has always been fragile when it comes to modifying system behavior, even when using open-source software like Open-Shell.

Glad you’re back on Linux and found a distro that works for you. Linux Lite is a good choice. I hear you on Arch, it’s great for bleeding-edge users, but the constant updates can be annoying if you want a “set it and forget it” system. I prefer rolling-release cycle so I don’t think my daily distros can be anything but rolling. There are 5 main distros that are rolling. We discussed those here: Arch Linux - problems and resolutions - #6 by hydn

Borg for backups is a great call! Fast, efficient, and deduplication makes a big difference over time. Now that you have your workflow back in place, I’m guessing you won’t be going back to Windows anytime soon. :joy:

What kind of work do you do on your system? Gaming, development or general productivity?

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hey @hydn
Yes I remember that conversation, but for my use case and personal taste I prefer something Debian - Ubuntu based, Kali is not the correct distribution based on my needings and Tumbleweed and Void I tried couple of times to use on my machine, I did not fit myself.

What kind of work do you do on your system? Gaming, development or general productivity?

Thanks for this question.
My daily computer usage is all about these activities,

  • General mail reading, web surfing
  • Home office working on Word and Excel documents
  • Stay connected with the buddies in Discord
  • Cozy gaming (Palia, some single player games, some retro gaming)
  • Music production (I primary use FL Studio), that’s the main reason I preferred using Windows physical machine over Linux, but I found a Windows virtual machine with audio card passtrough is working fine
  • Some legacy .NET projects, I was preferring using Windows as primary machine for this as well, but Visual Studio Community is also working great on a virtual machine, maybe a little slow but no problems after all
  • General personal project developments mainly in Java, Python
  • Connect to my Windows Work laptop via RDP using Remmina: I can even connect in with both of my screens, which makes the setup really productive.

That’s pretty all my daily computer usage, I personally find some Ubuntu derivate such as Linux Lite, with some Windows virtual machines, is the correct way to manage my workflow.

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Music production (I primary use FL Studio), that’s the main reason I preferred using Windows

image
image1366×768 158 KB

Here FL studio running on my old computer
wine-10.0

Edit :
I’ve also very powerful audio pipe system
via Pipewire services that binds (wine)ALSA and Pulse into audio node network

image
image1366×768 123 KB

For example I can take audio from FL studio
and pipe it into firefox as if speaker or mic
so much freedom in linux and free software in general

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@Halano

Waw that sound fantastic, I tried a couple of times to run FL Studio in Wine some years ago like in Wine 6 or 7, but I had some audio e visual artefacts, software in Linux was not so stable.

I prefer running it in a Windows virtual machine, trust me with an external audio card and a wired headset both passedtrough into the virtual machine audio performance and latency in ASIO audio drivers are 99% equivalent to native Windows. I am satisfied using this kind of setup :slight_smile:

Second part of your post seems interesting:

I’ve also very powerful audio pipe system
via Pipewire services that binds (wine)ALSA and Pulse into audio node network

I don’t know about this aspect, I recently switched audio server from pulseaudio to pipewire, I would like to learn more about those kind of audio piping. Can you explain me better please?

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@ricky89
You aren’t gonna lose anything, give it a try
wine has improved so much since version 6-7
I’ve submitted bug report to wine Bugzilla for fl_studio
they also been improving ,it’s run under wine as if it’s native

Let give you a mini guide :
First you need

  • Pipewire
  • Pipewire (alsa - pulse) ( packages )
  • Wireplumber (session and policy manager for pipewire)
  • qpwgraph (qt graph for pipewire)

better set wine audio driver to alsa
and enable all pipewire service via systemctl

pipesystembyhalano
pipesystembyhalano1123×794 8.31 KB

However you still need alsa-utils and alsa-tools to automate the low level devices.

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@Halano
For now I decided to use FL in a Windows virtual machine, as I said you with audio cards passtrough the software is very usable and it’s having the same performance as Windows native.

Thanks for explanation about the graph util for pipewire! very useful topic

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