this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2025
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Last year sometime. Frustrated by Microsoft's latest tomfoolery, I decided, "eh, might as well give Linux another shot, it's been a decade or so since the last time."
So I booted up my fifteen-year-old desktop computer as a testbed before I put it on my daily driver laptop. First I booted it into Windows (7, because that's how old it is and it couldn't hack Windows 10) to see if there was any data I needed to pull off of it, and predictably it was an awful experience. Slow? Try glacial. Constantly paging out of memory. I had to put it in safe mode without networking just to get it to boot all the way up. I grabbed everything I thought I needed and breathed a sigh of relief that I was done with that.
Then I put Linux Mint on it. And...wow.
Like, I knew Linux did a good job on older systems, but this was unbelievable to me. It was snappy and responsive in a way that it has literally never been. The thing ran like butter. I was flying around that OS, installing games, setting up backups, even trying my hand at a bit of light self-hosting.
But the real kicker came when I installed VirtualBox. See, I have one program that I still need Windows for; an Adobe program that some people I work with still use. So I installed VirtualBox and put Windows 10 on there, fully expecting to clown on Windows for a few minutes but just hoping I'd see enough to know whether it would be usable on my laptop.
But no. Windows 10—which, when I tried a decade ago, couldn't run on that machine at all—ran almost flawlessly in VirtualBox on Linux. I mean, it wasn't the quickest thing ever, but for a modern build of a more-or-less modern OS on a computer older than my marriage, it was honestly amazing.
So, when did I go full Linux nerd? When I discovered that it can run Windows better than Windows can.
There are a few other things, too. The software manager, the customizability, the lack of ads, the unobtrusive updates... And at some point along the way, I realized that it actually felt like my computer, which is a feeling I haven't felt in ages.
It's a great feeling.