It’s time for my yearly linux escapade.

Like last time, I have a spare surface laptop to try it on. Now I know that linux doesn’t yet support the touchscreen, but luckily someone made a modified version that works. So I’ll be following the instructions here.

There are only 4 officially supported distributions, so I chose fedora. And… It’s broken. It doesn’t boot at all, due to some problem. I don’t know why they specifically listed it as a supported distribution.

Next, I tried ubuntu. I got an error unable to find a medium containing a live file system while booting from usb, but after restarting it somehow started working.

Let’s install some programs. Many people praise linux for having package managers that make it easy to install software, but I disagree. Firstly, my distribution had two package managers for some reason, one called “app center” and one called “software”. Across these there were 3 sources of packages: debian packages, snap, and flatpak. Many of the packages were months or even years outdated. Also, many snap and flatpak packages have bugs, as we will see later.

As a result, to install software, you first have to search for it online, find a website, and check it’s latest version number. Next you have to check what package format it is available in, and whether that package is up to date. Finally you check what the name of that package is and download it from the package manager. On windows, there are also several package managers such as winget and chocolatey, but at least the packages don’t introduce new bugs and are almost always up to date.

Now it’s time to try using the software. Upon switching to linux, I did expect to find alternatives to some windows-only software. However, several of the programs that “supported” linux were broken as well.

First, I looked for a keybind/hotkey editor, since it was getting very annoying to edit text and navigate windows without them. I normally use autohotkey, but since it is only on windows, I found a linux alternative called autokey. It didn’t work either. After some frustration, I discovered that it was only compatible with x11, not wayland, which came with my linux distribution.

My next problem was with my code editor. Vscodium is available on both windows and linux, so switching over should be easy. And yet, a few of my installed extensions didn’t work. This was because I had installed it using flatpak, resulting in problems with system permissions. Unfortunately, many programs are only available as flatpak or have extremely outdated debian packages.

I also had to find a new light/dark theme switcher, since my current one was only for window. An online search led me to the ubuntu forum, where I was recommended gnome night theme switcher. However, it was broken. Upon further troubleshooting, the app’s website specifically says: Ubuntu is not supported due to their heavily patched GNOME components that conflict with the extension 🤦.

Some positive aspects of linux: it is much easier to set default apps for each file type and edit the file manager’s context menu using nemo actions. On windows, the file context menu is bloated and requires several registry changes to modify it.

By the way, I always see people talking about linux and recommending it on technology-related websites and videos, and at my school’s programming club. But I think they are advertising to the wrong audience. As someone who uses computers frequently, I have very specific software, configurations, and keybindings that I have to set up on linux. Now consider someone who only uses the computer to read the news. They won’t care that power button on the start menu can’t be moved, or that photoshop is not available, or that the terminal emulator does not respect copy and paste keybindings. Get them to use linux instead.

The theme of this run is compatibility. Software being “compatible with linux” is not enough. The program has to be compatible with your package format, window manager, graphic environment, which has to be compatible with your distribution, which has to be compatible with your graphics card and peripherals. And a lot of the time, it isn’t.

I hope you are doing well. Stay tuned for another attempt in 2026!