I decided to switch my ThinkPad to Windows permanently.
- I will need to use Windows only software when I’m not at my desktop
- WSL can be used for anything Linux specific and for easy access to the Unix toolchain
- There were some issues with Linux that appeared (more on them below)
Motive
There were a few issues that I had on Linux:
- Fractional scaling wasn’t great for XWayland and Electron apps
- Some graphical issues started to appear recently
- I wanted to use specific Windows only software (including Word) These issues not as troublesome when I first started using my laptop, because I was still doing things on my desktop. Now that I am using it as my main device, it is more ideal if I have certain software and guaranteed compatibility with the rest of the world
The Process
I wanted the move to be as simple as possible, and keeping the files in my home folder was a must. The original plan was to make a clone of the disk, which I could then retrieve all the files off, but this was very impractical because Clonezilla wanted to do a sector-to-sector copy of it, including all of the free space (around 90% of the drive). So I opted to manually copy my home folder over to another drive.
Once I had a copy of my files I could then install Windows. This was done in the usual way on a USB stick. There wasn’t anything special about the installation.
During the initial setup, Windows wants you to connect to the Internet so you can set it up with your silly Microsoft account. Despite this laptop model being around two years old now, Windows didn’t have any WiFi drivers, so I had to use the oobe\bypassnro trick anyway. This lets you set it up without a Microsoft Account or Internet.
Settling In
Since Windows feels like an OS designed by people who don’t use it, I have to change some settings to make it feel better:
- Remove the AI stuff
- Switch off the lock screen widgets
- Switch off the Bing search in the start menu
- Disable most of the telemetry Copying the files from the external drive back to the laptop wasn’t too hard. I could also add my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles so I didn’t lose things like the configuration, bookmarks, etc.
On Linux I am used to using a package manager to install software, and Windows has a similar tool called winget. Most software is available and you can use this website to see if your packages are installed.
Conclusion
Overall I have learnt a lot from Linux and I have enjoyed using it for around two years in one way or another. I’ve learnt a lot from it, including more programming skills and how to set up my website, but some things just didn’t work out and I have to use Windows on the desktop now.
I still run Linux on my servers to keep my Website up, and I have set up another one to start using Nextcloud. I might write an article on that depending on what I do with it.