Episode 002 - The last straw

Let me tell you a story, it started around September 2018 ,before I begin a bit of background information.

I have been a Windows user since I built my first computer at 9. Back then it was Windows 95, since then I have used all versions of Windows following 95, apart from 8 & 8.1 ( they don’t really count ) so 98, ME , XP ( RIP ) , Vista , Windows 7 , Windows 10.

I have been a gamer since i can remember, the first computer game i played must have been Quake back in 96 or 97 , we used to go round to my friends house and he had 6 or 7 PC’s on a LAN and we would play deathmatch.

I thought this was the coolest thing ever! I mean those PC’s must have cost about £1000 a piece for hardware which can be trumped by the mobile device in your pocket. In fact your mobile probably has more processing power than all 6 or 7 of these computers combined.

Fast forward 21 years and we get to 2018 , and i’m still playing games like this, on £1000 hardware on a LAN and now over the internet, like some of you. Now the obvious OS of choice for gaming is Windows. 2018 wasn’t a good year for Microsoft and its Updates, and this is really where the story begins.

Prior to the October 2018 Windows 10 update, things were really starting to grind my gears about using windows.

Privacy being one of them, I’m talking to you Cortana ! Microsoft’s not so secret spy.

Anyhow, In the middle of a game, it minimised , Windows updates forced down my pie hole. Clicked postpone and everything was OK , ALT+tab to get back into game and only lost a few seconds or the round .This happened on several occasions, but luckily having an SSD and a fairly decent computer ( considering its 10 years old ) i got back into my game 9/10 times.

Not on this occasion, introducing the October update of 2018. This time, game minimised and Before i get a chance to maximise and get back into my game hoping i hadn’t been knifed in the back by enemy for being AFK.

POOF windows is now installing updates please do not turn your PC off.

But this wasn’t a 5-10 min update this was a full feature update, now having a wife and 2 kids, i have set aside 1 day for games during the week, the rest is filled up with work, gym, family stuff etc, anyway. This one took 4 hours.

Yes 4 hours, and we are talking only just getting on my PC at 8pm after getting the kids down, loaded up steam, started playing and BAM, there’s my gaming night gone. On top of that, if you were one of the unlucky ones like me and lost a lot of data during this fantastic update from Microsoft, I feel your pain, luckily I have backups, I thought to myself, there has to be a better way, something better than Microsoft’s offering. Being in tech I know about Linux, and Mac OSX, although i would never pay that money for an Apple product.

I started digging more into Linux, more specifically gaming on Linux, as this was probably my main usage for my “ Gaming PC”. I watched many a YouTube video, benchmarks of Linux gaming, Windows always came out on top, which was no big shock but i wanted to see if i would lose that much changing over to Linux.

I’m a creature of habit and i don’t like change, the move from XP > Vista > 7 > 10 were all painful experiences and took me forever to get comfortable using each as i upgraded. So making this jump to Linux was a big thing , I needed to make sure i was going to be happy with the Linux distro i was installing.

For those who are Windows or Mac users and don’t know the first thing about Linux, a little background.

It’s a Free and Open source operating system with hundreds of variants ( Distributions /Distros / Flavours ), the Linux kernel was created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Distributions are made up of several elements to create operating system the user experiences.

If you want to learn more about Linux i would recommend heading over linuxacademy.com and check out their “Linux Operating System Fundamentals” course. It’s is free if you sign up for a Community edition account , I have no ties to Linux academy but have used the free community edition account to learn more about Linux, I found it very informative and if you really want to get into Linux then i highly recommend it.

Back to installing Linux, I knew that there were several distros i could choose, the main ones i knew about being Ubuntu and CentOS ( now this is primarily a server OS ), i knew about these because of work and i have had to mess around with them, installing stuff so i got the basics down.

I have a Raspberry Pi so i knew about Raspbian , a Debian based OS for the Raspberry Pi ( i will be doing some videos on these in the future )

The more i dug into distros, the more i felt lost, but also felt like a kid in a sweet shop, so many choices , where to begin?! I had to come up with a plan.

How am i going to get from Windows to Linux and be comfortable about it ?

Find out more in my next post where i show you how i went about planning my move , what i did and how you can do the same. So if you have had similar experiences with windows and want to join me in showing Windows the door leave a comment below with your Windows Woes.