After leaving the green pastures of Windows land I have been residing in the walled garden of MacOS land for over 5 years. I find myself curious about Linux and, now I work with servers more, I wish be more proficient with using it. Surely the best way learn Linux would be use it as my main personal OS.

In MacOS it just works as long as you want to do what Apple wants you to do, which for me is most of the time. In Linux it seems that anything you want to do is theoretically possible if you’re willing to try hard enough. Instead of the (mostly) sane defaults I found in MacOS, Linux provides many paths to achieving what you want. With no single correct way, even choosing an operating system wasn’t easy.

I’ve chosen Ubuntu which is popular and apparently easy to get started with 1. I was planning this in 2022 and originally wanted to run Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi, except I couldn’t get my hands on one due to the RPi shortage 2. Instead I bought a second hand Dell Optiplex 5060 SFF PC, inspired by Project TinyMiniMicro on Serve The Home 3. Equipped with a 6 core 8th generation Intel i5 CPU, it is more powerful than an RPi could even hope to be and more than enough for what I need.

I’ve been seriously using Ubuntu for my personal computing for the past month while I still use MacOS on my work computer. This blog will chronicle my experiences.

  1. https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major ↩︎

  2. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/some-shops-will-let-you-buy-more-than-one-raspberry-pi-at-a-time-again/ ↩︎

  3. https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/ ↩︎