After a year and a half of using Windows 10 (with WSL), I decided to come back to Linux.
I feel that this year, 2025, the year of Win10’s support sunset, someone at Microsoft could have pressed a button and issued a system update that accelerated the so-called “Windows performance downward spiral” effect. If you used Windows in the early days, you know about this. All of a sudden, your system starts to perform very poorly, even if it was stable for many months with no new software installed—nothing.
I chose Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with the Pro option that I got for free from Canonical. Since they offered it, I took it.
Overall, it’s good to feel the snappiness return to my computer. Everything loads in fractions of a second.
Nautilus is my favorite app. Really. Its keyboard shortcuts and responsiveness are great. Search by typing is incredibly effective.
Suspending the machine is also great. (Super) + “sus” (Enter) suspends it in a fraction of a second as well.
In Windows, I would have to open the lid of my notebook and press any key to wake it up. In Ubuntu, I just press any key on the external keyboard, which is wireless, by the way.
On the development side of things, Git, VSCode, and the stack work very smoothly, as expected. WSL was great! I have zero complaints about it, but with Ubuntu, you can really feel that things are integrated at the lowest possible level within the OS.
It’s great to be back! A Linux user since 2007, with a brief hiatus between 2023 and 2025.
What I didn’t expect
- LUKS setup wasn’t offered during installation, and I miss that. However, it’s not a big deal since I use VeraCrypt.
- VeraCrypt needs to be run with sudo to mount a volume, so you end up having to type in two passcodes: the sudo password and the volume’s password (which is annoying).
Updates
I downloaded a CSV file and needed to open it on a spreadsheet. Libre Office? No. Gnumeric just came to mind! So lightweight, so snappy.