2025 was my Year of Linux
My partner, our cat, and I rang in the New Year of 2025 like I'm sure everyone else did, by building new PCs! We've been together through multiple rigs, but this was the first time that we'd be on identical hardware. The only notable hardware difference, and what we carried over from the old rigs, was our NVIDIA 3090 video cards. We switched from Intel CPUs to AMD 9700X3Ds.
Windows has reverted too many of my configuration settings, annoying me and pushing stuff I don't want. I hate NVIDIA software that made me register an email address and ran unpredictably. I don't use any other software that requires me to run Microsoft code. I've been running Linux casually on an old laptop and in virtual machines. As the Proton translation layer for gaming has matured rapidly, and my daily use of a Steam Deck since it launched has proved, DirectX is no longer mandatory for the gaming hobby. I had no good reasons to stick with Windows 11 and installed Nobara Linux.
The KDE flavor of Nobara I originally started with had issues with my NVIDIA 3090 so I switched to Gnome. This fixed some problems and my stability improved, but trying to play the Monster Hunter Wilds demo was impossible, along with other compatibility issues. Then the Trump Tariffs were announced and we were looking at another graphics card apocalypse - new cards being released in limited quantity and far above MSRP. The new stuff also has less VRAM and was designed to push synthetic frames. I went in on AMD RX 7900 XTXs for our PCs, A 7900 also went into a new living room PC running Bazzite that I built to supplant our Apple TV for everything we can get outside of Apple, and to play games like BG3 with no latency away from our desks. I also replaced an old laptop and tablet with new Framework laptops, which is probably my sole technology regret this year (but that has nothing to do with the fact that they are running Fedora and more the fascists and bigots Framework as a business entity is partnering with in their big [Nazi] tent).
Taking advantage of what forewarning I had from reading the news of the economic "policy" shifts, I enhanced my homeserver I initially stood up in late 2024 with more hard-drives. The server is running Proxmox, a hypervisor that can host virtual machines and containers for specific apps, primarily for TrueNAS and Jellyfin so we can watch our movies and TV shows more conveniently than having to juggle all our physical discs, and also comfortably ditch streaming subscriptions. The homeserver is also facilitating ripping said discs and trans-coding the videos to a more efficient codec for storage on my TrueNAS RAIDZ2 array. Audio books, eBooks, and music is also self-hosted and ready to stream locally. A couple new mini-PCs turned my lone homeserver into a Proxmox cluster to help with additional computing and to trans-code more movies quicker. Other notable services I'm running include my RSS service CommaFeed that allowed me to shift the expense from Inoreader to my own hardware, a self-hosted VPN, and a persistent IRC web client.
These turned out to be very good moves. Microsoft is misusing Large Language Model (i.e., AI) technology in Copilot. Complicit in the Gaza Genocide, Microsoft has been added to the BDS (Boycott Divest Sanction) movement. Microsoft continues to antagonize their user-base on a weekly basis. Switching my daily driver to Linux couldn't have been better timed. Goodbye Windows! Good riddance!
This is all not to say that Linux has been a flawless, carefree experience. Examples of issues I've had include NAS drives not mounting as expected at boot, desktop crashes, weird permission issues preventing system updates, Bazzite not loading KDE on boot, file thumbnails breaking when upgrading from Fedora 42 to Fedora 43, Steam not identifying mounted drives, and various issues with gaming like crashes and the mouse clicking out of the gaming window because the mouse crossed the windowless border for some reason, In some cases, there are forum posts or stack overflow questions with helpful answers, identified and tracked bugs, etc. where a solution or workaround is available. In other cases, I have had to try and address the issue myself. It's time-consuming, but it's a part of the hobby I'm willing to entertain. It's better than dealing with Windows. Although I'm not sure the time difference between Windows or Linux headaches is that different, as Windows quality continues to decline.
Linux being "free" is a selling point for some, but I am fortunate to have disposable income I could throw at making these changes. I don't know that I could have played as much Monster Hunter Wilds as I did on an Nvidia card, and things went noticeably smoother after I was running all AMD silicon. Earmarking what I would be paying Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Inoreader, et. al. does add to the savings account though.
Taking those savings and directly supporting the indie developers making and maintaining the open-source software that allows for me to continue my daily operations is also a nice benefit of having spare cash. My money going to an individual or a small team instead of funding an executive bonus at Microsoft or Adobe is a gratifying idea. Especially after all the layoffs in the tech sector this year to offset the the grotesque and rampant "AI investment."
At a time when online services are getting more expensive and providing less value, Linux has been freeing. When U.S. corporations have fawned to fascists, I have bailed. I can spin up a new VM or container to do almost anything I want to on almost a whim. Host a website, or a game server, or a Fediverse instance - the sky is the limit. And I can still load up Steam and play almost anything I want. Diving into Linux and virtualization this year has been an incredibly fun and rewarding project, and I can't wait to see what else I can do, even as the world around me and the internet get more restricted.