The move to Linux
Life ... the universe! SysAdmin
I got sick of Windows, it's bloat, it's constant push of AI into everything and just decided it was time to look at alternatives.
I've used MacOS, and Linux before - and lets be honest, Apple is heading the same was as Microsoft (and Google ...) these days, so I figured it was time to properly kick the tyres on a Linux desktop again - the last time I did this was so many years ago, I actually had no grey hair ...
I plumped for PopOS purely because it is a derivative of Ubuntu (a really good base OS), but also because it rolls in the NVidia proprietary binaries as well, and given I run the NVidia GPU's on my desktop and laptop it makes sense to avoid the pain of having to maintain this myself.
The install was _absolutely_ painless. It just worked. Everything was detected, worked, and just ... behaved. Switched over to Chrome because (yeah I know) it's the most comfortable I find, and synced all my bookmarks across from my mobile (Pixel). Thunderbird is massively improved since I last used it, and is honestly a really functional mail client. All the usual apps needed (for me :P) are there - Spotify, LibreOffice etc.
But the other part of my time is spend gaming. Yes - I need to let off steam. Literally. I use Steam. A lot. And this was another reason I picked PopOS. It apparently behaves really well with Steam. And this is actually why I'm writing this - to try and document some of the steps I've followed to get the games to work, and my streaming setup, just in case it ever helps anyone else ... or me ... in the future!
General stuff
Finger Print Reader
I have a finger print reader on both my laptop and my desktop, and this obviously is something I wanted to get working – annoyingly this was one of the only things that wasn’t automatically detected and prompted during the install flow. A quick google showed it was pretty straight forward to install the bits and enrol however.
sudo apt install fprintd libpam-fprintd
Then enrol with
fprintd-enroll
And finally enable it with
sudo pam-auth-update
And all done! The ability to sudo and login with fingerprint is a god send given my passwords are .. hellish.
OneNote
Yes, I know. I am moving to Linux and I should ditch everything is Microsoft. But I do work with Azure, and a lot of people who use it, and honestly … have a lot of time invested with that ecosystem – and know it well. I have a LOT of notes, files etc there. So I’m not entirely ready to leave it entirely yet! The good news is that while there is not an official client for Linux (no surprise), there is a brilliant wrapper for the web interface which makes it all work so much better.
Strongly recommended! I grabbed the AppImage from the GitHub releases, and job done :)
Github: https://github.com/patrikx3/onenote
OneDrive
Much like my use of OneNote, I have a ton of stuff in OneDrive too … and I’d loath to loose access to this (and honestly, I do find that it “just works”, so I can’t really see myself moving away from it).
I found a really good fuse driver which supports the on demand download of files, so they don’t have to clog up my NVMe drive, and given I have a LOT of stuff in OneDrive, that is a big boon for me.
Their Github repo Readme has instructions for Ubuntu / PopOS too :)
Github: https://github.com/jstaf/onedriver
Printer setup
My Lexmark printer was a bit of a ... sod ... to get working. No idea why. It's a Lexmark MC3326i, and I threw the driver pack on, but PopOS didn't want to do anything but black and white.
Checking in the CUPS interface on localhost:631, I could see another printer there, which DID work correctly ... I just changed the default to that and it worked fine. No idea if it was detected after a period of time, or what ... but it works so who cares! 🤷♂️
Gaming
Steam (and Proton)
Steam mostly works really well, however, I did find that it was best to install the ProtonGE version of Proton, and not to rely on Proton or Proton Experimental for the virtualisation layer.
ProtonGE is a fork done by GloriousEggroll (amazing name!), and can be found here: https://github.com/gloriouseggroll/proton-ge-custom
Installation for the native (non flatpack) version of Steam is pretty simple – run the script. Same for updates. If you have the flatpack version of Steam installed, I’d honestly change it out for the System version ...
As a quick aside, if you are going to be sharing your game library from an NTFS volume for Steam on Linux, go and symlink the compatdata folder in SteamLibrary/steamapps to somewhere on an ext4 volume or something; Steam for Linux creates odd filenames at times, and it does NOT play nice with NTFS and WILL cause you problems.
Streaming
// To follow!
OBS is the defacto streaming tool, be it on Windows, MacOS or Linux, so thats what I use.
However there are some essential plugins and configuration you will likely need to get things working for you - well, I did!
OBS Pipewire Audio Capture
Github: https://github.com/dimtpap/obs-pipewire-audio-capture
This allows you to capture the game audio using Pipewire (which is the standard audio "wiring" mechanism in PopOS), and without it you will be stuck with just grabbing your default audio streams ... which sucks.
Installation is pretty straight forward, and well documented on their Github repo.
OBS Pipewire Video Source
Github: https://github.com/hoshinolina/obs-pwvideo
On Windows, I used the Spout2 video sources to funnel sources from things like VTuber / PNGTuber software etc to OBS - however, on Linux this doesn't exist. Instead you are going to need something like this tool.
Thankfully, its install is as simple as an
sudo apt install obs-pwvideo
Instructions otherwise are on their Github repo, however, essentially this will let you enable a number of video source options in OBS and things like Veadotube Mini that you otherwise wouldn't be able to (hello transparent PNGTuber!) :)
I'm going to keep this post updated as and when I find more stuff I need to sort on my setups, so if this has been useful to you, bookmark away!