after 21 years on this earth i've finally made the jump from windows to linux, and it both feels incredibly good and INCREDIBLY bad. not by any fault of linux itself (im just dumb and somehow enabled EVERY SINGLE FEATURE that makes it difficult to install.
beyond that though its nice to have an OS that just. works. it boots, it functions, its entirely customizable, which is a MASSIVE sticking point for me in a lot of scenarios. windows 11 completely removed my ability to keep my task bar on the right side of my screen, where it's been since i was like 10. when i was like 15 they were doing the roll outs for the dev/preview builds of windows 11 and even then as a stupid mush brained child who had barely learned what the CPU does i knew that shit SUCKED. it was lacking in almost every personalization option and ran terribly. i ended up switching back to windows 10 after like a week.
fast forward to march of 2025. i upgrade my pc to an AM5 processor and go to set everything back up and WHOOPS! seems my boot files have been completely corrupted or something. guess i gotta reinstall windows! and then of course i go to fire up my backup and get everything back and it just. won't boot. no matter what i do. which was infuriating in its own right, but the more infuriating part was that the only thing that it seemed to want to boot into was windows 11. i could not go back to 10. i was thrust into this new hell and given no chances of escape.
fast forward AGAIN to last night, when i finally snapped while watching some CRD videos and went "wait a minute, theres nothing stopping me from just dual booting windows. i have like 3 hard drives in my pc surely i can boot windows off of one of them and linux off another!". and i was right. i could in fact do that exact thing. i did some preliminary research, decided mint would probably be best, and started work on making the worst dual boot setup known to mankind.
i started by installing the ISO, mounting it, partitioning off 3 gb of my C: drive, moving all of the requisite ISO files from the disk onto the partition, setting that as a boot device, and then attempting 20 TIMES TO INSTALL MINT. no joke it took me re-formatting the disk a billion times, disabling secure boot, disabling nearly every single thing that could have possibly been the issue, but it kept throwing "faital grub error" at me until finally, FINALLY, i got it to install. it was still throwing the faital grub error but after enough trying i got the grub boot manager to install on its own to the disk, letting me FINALLY launch linux (this process took about 10 hours in total btw)
what i was left with was 2 completely isolated OS installs that could not speak to one another, but i could choose to boot one or the other at will. the logical next steps are to get a proper boot manager so i can select my OS at startup without having to touch the bios or going "SHIT" when i forget to mash delete and accidentally am thrown back into the sluggish hell of windows 11. this effort however is blockaded by bitlocker.
let me talk about BITLOCKER real quick...
never in a million years have i experinced DREAD like that which i feel when i see "please enter your bitlocker key" because if i have to enter another 40 digit code to enter my OWN HARD DRIVE imma lose it. its MY COMPUTER. THEY'RE BOTH MY HARD DRIVES. THIS IS A CONSUMER WINDOWS INSTALL. WHY AM I BEING FORCED INTO THIS STUPID ENCRYPTION!!!
that brings us to right now, when im writing this. i am currently decrypting my windows install so that i can install wingrub so i can have a boot manager but ALSO so i can access my pre-installed steam library off my faster and larger NVMe that currently holds all of my data. once that's done ill only really need to touch windows to use premiere and photoshop. most every game in modern day runs on linux and i've fully stopped giving a fuck about fortnite so pretty much every qualm i could have with linux is gone. i can just exist within it now, and i look forward to it becoming a seamless part of my life. i don't think the process will ever be devoid of friction, but that friction is exactly what im here for.
Video Recommendation of the day: Cathode Ray Dude - Quick Start Ep 2: What The Heck Was Asus Express Gate?