Today was an ordinary day.
I did some real work. Working on a slide deck for an upcoming seminar. Fixing code in my WISPL chatbot implementation, so that it can handle SVG graphics better. Working on a paper. Thinking about a referee report that I am about to write. Reviewing our tax returns that I just completed. Doing some ordinary bookkeeping. Answering e-mails. Posting several nice (I hope) Quora answers. Playing with a Feynman diagram in LaTeX (fhe feynmf package) for one of them. Listening to music through my workstation, and watching Netflix on the same workstation while eating a meal.
Sounds perfectly ordinary, doesn’t it.
Here are the things I wasn’t doing, well, not much anyway.
- I wasn’t thinking about Debian and KDE;
- I wasn’t messing with a new backup for my workstation;
- I wasn’t trying to rebuild my workflow in a new desktop environment;
- I wasn’t searching for packages to install to allow software I need to run;
- I wasn’t testing Wine settings for old Windows programs.
In short, I was doing perfectly ordinary things on a perfectly ordinary Saturday on what feels like a perfectly ordinary computer… no longer thinking much about the fact that a few weeks ago, I abandoned Windows as my primary desktop operating system after 35 years of muscle memory.
Why I did it of course has a lot to do with Microsoft’s policies and decisions, but also with the fact that Linux has matured in amazing ways. I tried this once almost a quarter century ago… I still have a VM of that old desktop. I almost did it… but there was too much friction, and my workflow was too dependent on Windows.
Not anymore.
Oh well. I am sure there will be moments of frustration, perhaps even regret, in the future. But by and large I actually feel liberated. And, well, things just work. Whether it is my taxes, my favorite games, my papers, my entertainment, or the software code I write: things work.
OK, I lied. I actually did some work on the machine itself as opposed to with the machine. I installed my old copy of Maple 11, the last version that supports the Classic Worksheet interface, which I prefer.
It works.