So, I made another attempt at just switching to Linux, this time using Debian
12 (Bookworm) on my Dell Latitude E6430. I had it set up with Trinity Desktop
(TDE) for the GUI, as I still miss KDE 3, and modern GUIs (including XFCE and
MATE Desktop, for some reason) just absolutely pinged the CPU and drained
battery like it was nothing. Under TDE, the laptop was getting 7-11 hours of
battery on PowerSave mode, using only the slice battery—the main battery had
completely died, and will likely get replaced eventually.
I had Kontact set up for mail (KMail), RSS (Akregator), Usenet (KNode), and
calendar stuff, and nothing went wrong with any of it. TDENetworkManager
handled the wireless connections like a champ, and I could switch between wifi
and ethernet no problem. I also installed Trinity's version of KOffice, though
LibreOffice was installed as a backup. Kopete handled my XMPP account,
Konversation connected to all of my usual IRC servers, though I couldn't get
bitlbee-discord working for some reason, so I had to use the battery-tanking
web app instead.
But the big one was the web browser. Konqueror is too old to really be useful
on the modern web, though I added a Gopher plugin for it, and it was still my
file manager of choice. I *really* didn't want to rely on Firefox, and even
using the ESR version that comes with Debian was painful, so I went with Pale
Moon. I'd normally go with SeaMonkey, but since I already had Kontact and
Konversation set up, the only useful part of SeaMonkey would've been the
browser, and I'd rather go with a standalone option in that instance.
Otherwise, I'd replace 99% of everything web that I do with SeaMonkey,
including FTP (FireFTP), SSH (FireSSH), and web dev stuff (SeaMonkey
Composer).
I had my old love of Amarok set up for all my music—even transcoding my
library into Ogg Vorbis files using soundKonverter—and got all my terminal
apps ready for other things. No module music player for TDE, but I use
MilkyTracker on MacOS as well, so that's not an issue. Plus I had access to
modplug-tools (and modplug123), so all my bases were covered with music.
It...didn't end in true failure, but I just didn't feel comfortable with
everything. It never felt truly stable, and even when I did get things working
(which was a frustrating fight in itself), other things would break instead.
Bluetooth never started working, I couldn't install the needed nVidia driver
(no longer supported), and Pipewire made audio spotty at best (replaced it with
straight-up ALSA to fix it). My Wifi was also locked at roughly 1 Mb/s
connection speed, where as on Windows on that same laptop, it can use the full
802.11n bandwidth on the 5GHz access point it uses. Same with my MacBook Pro...
And that leads me to saying this: I decided it'd be better to stick with my
MacBook Pro, and continue using "outdated" software and OSes, rather than
moving to Linux. Linux isn't bad, it just isn't for me right now.
As I've said a few times on my blog now, I just don't want to deal with the
frustrations that seem to find me with modern OSes. I'm happier with older
software, and in some cases, the old OSes are still getting updated
applications. Things like the Roytam1 browsers for Windows XP/Vista, InterWeb
and Arctic Fox for MacOS Snow Leopard, NeoOffice and Apache OpenOffice, and
even just being able to modify open source applications to continue doing what
I need them to do, all make for a usable experience, even if it's not perfect.
And I'd rather be happy with what I'm using, than to hate the idea of using a
computer again, as Linux did to me twice before. Not so much this time, but I
don't want that to be my feelings toward the OS either. It's why I stopped
when I did, rather than tempting fate.
Sometimes, taking an "L" is better than hating the "W" you end up with. My
much-despised high school diploma is proof enough of that.
