Kinda like dealing with Microsoft Office… You can’t find anything in that “new” toolbar design because so many options are grouped together in ways that don’t make any sense. I’m so glad I never had to actually use that garbage even though I did enjoy the older versions.

It’s been a long time since I used Windows myself, however one of the big reasons for switching was the inherent instability. At once point I was developing code in Visual Studio and constantly loading/closing quite a few different programs to test things out. Windows just didn’t seem to handle memory-recovery and I would have to reboot every week or two (usually because of the whole OS locking up). In comparison, I run a variety of software on my linux machines which can involve anything from testing code in multiple browsers to image editing to 3D CAD drawings. Sure that tends to drain the memory but when I close something I get that memory back. I’ll frequently get down to the last 100K of RAM, close a couple programs that may be holding large caches (Firefox really hates me having hundreds of open tabs), and then I’m right back up and running again. Reboots may occur about every 6 months.

I have to support other people using Windows at work, which reminds me how much I’ll never go back to it. My biggest frustration is that Microsoft is constantly changing things. Hell you can’t even directly reach the control panel any more, you have to run searches to find the specific item you want. Want to check the settings of a certain printer? Good luck, that doesn’t seem to be available in the right-click menu any more. It’s just all these idiotic changes making it difficult to actually use or maintain Windows. Why should I have to google how to find something when everything used to be under the control panel or a right-click away?

Heh sorry about that. There’s also a zfs conversation going on where I had suggested disabling the ‘dedup’ option. I’ve never heard of dedupe being used in the context of the shell history, so yeah, I got confused.

I only include it because pretty much every guide on zfs setups recommends disabling it these days. I don’t believe it’s anything I’ve every had to use despite several drive crashes over the years.

I think this is the only change I’ve made that affects my history… It simply ignores multiple copies of a command when you repeat it multiple times, making it easier to up-arrow through the unique things I’ve executed.

export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups

A lot will depend on your preferred workflow, and since you mentioned SolidWorks I assume that means you prefer a more GUI-oriented approach. However as an alternative, if you are comfortable with more of a programming approach, you might look in to OpenSCAD. Most things are done from a more primitive standpoint in how you create each part of an object, but I like having the direct control over every aspect.

Haha fair enough!

That sounds really familiar, is that a quote from somewhere?

Uhh… have they not been paying attention to the bans against Threads? Somebody over there isn’t doing their job.

Somebody at my company got a hard-on for Microsoft products several years ago and I’d like to beat them senseless with all the problems it has caused. They started by moving all email to Microsoft “because we’ll save a ton of money not having to pay techs to manage the servers.” Within the month our mailboxes were full of spam and they’ve had to open up multiple new tech teams to deal with the constant fallout from phishing scams. And they just keep doubling down and ignoring things like the recent news of Microsoft ignoring a full remote-access vulnerability for more than a year and then mis-representing it when they did finally decide to patch it.

In the beginning it seemed like everything was a task – how do I install new software, how do I set up the right display or printer driver, how do I upgrade the whole OS? Then it quickly got down to making things look and act in a way that made more sense to me, or even adding and moving things around on the start menu. Back when I started, setting up dual monitors required manually building an X11 startup file and upgrading the OS usually meant compiling a new display driver, but that was around 2005 so of course things are MUCH better now.

Eventually you’ll get down to the point of simply finding compatible software to reproduce something you did in Windows, which usually isn’t difficult. A lot of this is going to depend on exactly how you use your computer and what you expect from it. I was already using Firefox and Thunderbird when I made the switch so that covered like half the things I needed at the time. Microsoft Office is (thankfully) gone although some parts of Libre Office still feel a bit rough. There’s pretty much no remaining support for Adobe pdf files, so if your employer makes use of advanced features for filling out forms then you may run into trouble (of course standard PDFs are very well supported). You will find things along the way where some business has made a point of locking people in to their product and there’s not much you can do except point out to your employer that they’re buying licenses for something that is free and more widely supported in open source products, but mostly you’ll just find your own solutions to work around these issues.

I think my biggest tip is to manage your expectations. What you are attempting is not the same as simply moving to a new version of Windows – literally everything will be different. You’ve spent a lifetime learning how to perform all these tasks until they became second-nature, but now you plan to move to a whole new system. Thing will be in different places, the way you tweak settings or access content will be different, and it’s going to be very frustrating because hey, this task should be easy. Don’t expect to cram all those years of experience into re-learning a new system in a few weeks.

The good news is that there’s a huge support community, and just about anything you want to do has already been asked and can be found through a quick search. Stick with it, and you’ll discover that linux actually gives you quite a lot more control over what you can do with your hardware (not to mention nearly all the software is free). It won’t be long before you’re asking how you ever survived without many of these tools.