Just a quick and short update on my experience with the Linux Desktop. Generally positive, but I’m used to things crashing more frequently than Windows. This goes against the narrative of “linux is more stable”. Well, the operating system might be, but the apps are not.

I’ve tried a number of different operating systems: Kubuntu (20.04, 21.10, 22.04), Neon, Fedora, Manjaro. They each have their pros and cons. Essentially, I keep at least two installations “fresh” in the sense that I can boot them and they work, so that if I run into trouble with one installation, I can switch to another for a period.

My current favourite is Kubuntu 22.04. With Firefox browser (Opera as backup).

I use zfs to store separate boot/root datasets for each operating system. And I have a boot-menu grub2 configuration installed under UEFI to allow me to choose at boot time. This has its own zfs dataset.

I also have a persistent subset of my home directories that move with me between operating systems. I cannot just carry my entire home directory, because some applications (e.g. firefox) are temperamental about having an old (or newer than expected) configuration file.

I have a lower-powered mini-PC in my recording shed (fanless). I did run this with both Manjaro and Fedora root on zfs. But I switched to LVM to manage the multiple OSs, and it runs much better. I think 8GB is just too little to run zfs in. I’ve given up the snapshoting capabilities of zfs (which I don’t really need on this machine) for speed.