migrating from Windows 7

[Slade Watkins]

Hi everyone,
Firstly - I'd like to thank everyone on this thread for your insight
and help with this. I sincerely appreciate it!

I spent the past couple hours getting 21.04 installed on my desktop
and everything worked like a charm. Drivers and everything were up and
running out of the box, so it was pretty much smooth sailing from
there! I do not regret moving away from Windows, though I admit, it
was a little sad leaving Windows 7 behind (man, was it wonderful).

Obviously, I reached out with several areas I needed insight and
solutions for, so I wanted to quickly give everyone a final update on
all of that and close the thread out on a high note. Here goes.


On Sun, Nov 7, 2021 at 6:09 PM Slade Watkins <slade at sladewatkins.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
[snip]
>
> As for what I need to be able to accomplish on a daily basis:
> - Gaming: I usually play games on Steam (with the exception of
> Minecraft Java), and thankfully - Valve's Proton compatibility layer
> is phenomenal so that's not as much of a concern as it was a couple
> years ago. Looking at ProtonDB it seems most of my games work with
> little to no tweaks, so I think I'm set there.
>     - I have an NVIDIA GeForce GT 740 card, which is dated, but I
> believe it has drivers for Linux I can snag fairly quickly after
> install?
>     - Another interesting solution to games that won't work on Windows
> that was floated to me by a friend was Steam Link and streaming it
> over my local gigabit network. (I also have gigabit internet so
> streaming from afar would also be open to me through Parsec or
> something too, I suppose.)

And so that's exactly what I'm doing! Streaming from my Windows laptop
using Steam Link/Parsec whenever my Linux desktop simply can't run a
game. It'll even work when I use my Mac or phone, too, so that's nice!

> - Productivity: I used to use Microsoft Office on a near daily basis
> for writing, though as of recently, I've been trying to migrate over
> to a mix of LibreOffice, Airtable, and Google Docs. I still have
> Office installed as a way to open things that aren't yet compatible. I
> could switch to Google Docs, but then I lose some feeling of
> privacy/security when it comes to sensitive documents that I can't
> necessarily ensure will stay that way.

I've migrated my local documents over to LibreOffice without a
problem. Everything works as it did before! And I'm happy to report I
find LibreOffice to be more enjoyable than Microsoft's office suite
now. As for the stuff on Docs and Airtable, not much I can do. They're
web-based services so they're fine.

> - Communication: I use Discord to communicate with people regularly. I
> believe there is a (somewhat terrible) Linux client that is compatible
> with Ubuntu
> - Streaming/Recording: I don't do this too terribly often anymore, but
> I'll need some way to do video capture in the rare instance where it
> may be necessary.

OBS Studio is great. That's all I'll say.

> - Video Production: I will be producing videos for YouTube regularly
> by the end of this year, and with the level of production quality I'm
> trying to hit, I'll need a Linux-compatible NLE that I can try to
> learn and get acclimated to. The only one I know of is DaVinci
> Resolve.

As mentioned, I have a Mac and macOS has Final Cut Pro. While I'd
rather not run a third machine, I suppose it'll work just fine for my
use case and it ultimately solves my need for an NLE. There's a chance
I may swap my workstation to Mac and just use the desktop as a
personal machine, but I've yet to decide (and that's beyond the scope
of this thread. So moving on...)

> - VMs: For anything I absolutely cannot run on Linux (which compared
> to a long time ago, is few and far between), and for some other
> purposes, I'll need a way to spin up a Windows VM rather quickly. I
> have a VMware Workstation license for Linux, so I plan to use that. If
> that doesn't work, I will need a backup. (I have another computer with
> Windows 10 installed, too, but I'd like to avoid needing multiple
> computers if absolutely possible).

Running VMware Workstation. I'm familiar with it and it ultimately
came down to a preference thing. I may experiment with KVM and/or
other solutions in the future, but I had a narrow window of time to
swap today and ultimately took it.

> - Storage Drive: I boot off of a 256GB SSD and store all of my data
> (and some games and other software) on a separate 2TB spinning hard
> drive. I need this to mount on startup for my own sanity, so
> everything works without an issue, and I've no idea how to do that.

I figured this out. There's a toggle in the disk utility to mount on
startup now, which was never present before (remember, I'm coming from
experience with 14.04) so three clicks and it was done. No commands
required!

And that's about it! I still have more testing to do, but this should
be the end of the thread barring any big disaster.

Thanks again, everyone! :)

             -slade