بسم الله الرحمان الرحيم

I recently made the decision to switch back to using Linux as my primary OS

I was first introduced to Linux in high school via my classmate Jeremy who gave me a Knoppix Live CD. Prior to this I didn’t realise there was an alternative to Windows and Apple. Specifically I recall that I didn’t realise that there was an open-source office suite (OpenOffice at the time) which was the main utility program that I needed.

I gave Knoppix a go and was reasonably impressed, but it wasn’t until 2008 when I was in university that I started using a permanent install – Ubuntu – on my main laptop. At the time I found certain features more useful than what was available on Windows – for example the command line interface. There were also aspects of the UI that were more appealing to me, for example focus-follows-mouse and being able to disable click-to-focus and having multiple desktop workspaces.

I used Linux until around 2015 when I bought a Surface Pro towards the end of my hospital internship. I was doing a postgraduate anatomy course that year and I found the inking really useful for annotating and highlighting PDFs, and became very dependent on Onenote.

I stayed with surface devices for a while for my laptop needs – after the Surface Pro I ended up getting a Surface Pro 3, and later on I got a used Surface Book 3. For most of the time that I owned these devices it was not really an option to install Ubuntu on them – much of the hardware was not yet compatible.

Throughout most of this time I did still use Ubuntu on my main desktop, however as I progressed through my career I was eventually able to afford a modern graphics card, something that had been missing from my computer setups for most of my life. With that came windows gaming, so I found myself dual booting and then booting mainly into windows more often than not.

Then I got a job where there was heavy reliance on Microsoft Teams, and so when I upgraded my PC I didn’t even bother with installing Ubuntu, however I did keep tabs on the Linux Surface project from time to time – and eventually it did seem like everything would work on the Surface Pro 3 except “Performance Modes”

I gave it ago and was able to install it successfully. By this time my SP3 battery had degraded to the point where it wouldn’t survive any meaningful time without being plugged in, which limited the usefulness of the device, but it was still good to know that it worked.

A few months later I decided to try it on my Surface Book 3. The compatibility matrix on the Linux Surface page said the cameras wouldn’t work, but this wasn’t an issue as I can use a USB webcam as needed, or droidcam.

I went through the process. I didn’t end up encrypting the ssd on installation because it said there were issues with the keyboard not being enabled on startup by default, and needing to edit the initram to enable this. The process was unfamiliar to me so I left it.

The main issues I have been having since then are the following

• Occasional wifi dropouts. The wifi doesn’t disconnect but if I turn it off and on from the laptop then the internet works again. This may potentially be a VPN issue, I will have to see if it happens when I am not connected to the VPN
• When inking fast strokes they show up with multiple small connected straight lines, as opposed to the smooth curves I used to get on Windows

The other issue I had was with OBS-studio

• installing from the OBS website, it wouldn’t launch
• installing from the Snap store, the virtual camera wasn’t available
• the above issues were resolved by using the flatpak version via flathub. I was not familiar with flathub prior to this

I got OBS for its background blur plugin and virtual camera feature to try and blur my background during work calls, but this was inadequate compared to the software I was using on Windows (Xsplit VCam)

I also installed Ubuntu 22.04 on my main desktop. I got a dedicated SSD for this purpose, but during the installation process I accidentally encrypted my Windows drive – I did click cancel or back when it warned me it would need to start the encryption process after I selected the wrong drive, but for whatever reason it went ahead. I am not sure how to decrypt it to restore Windows or if that is even possible. Nevertheless, there was no turning back.

The issues I had with my desktop were that the wifi didn’t work out of the box, but eventually after I connected to the internet via my phone I think it managed to find the right driver – however it cannot reach my WiFi N network, so I am restricted to slower speeds. It can see other N networks from neighbours.

On my desktop I am also no longer able to use my Elgato capture card.

In summary though I think it is adequate for my needs. The main Windows feature that I miss is not being able to use my android tablet as a second screen/graphics tablet – I was doing this previously with Superdisplay. I have tried Weylus but it just gives me a blank screen unless I just want to stream a specific window rather than the whole desktop.

For gaming I will stick to using my PS5 for now, though it does appear that Steam has some titles that run natively on linux, as well as their own compatibility layer – I am not sure how to use this (Proton)