As I am approaching 50 I want some things to simply work. Flip a switch and do not feel adventurous. I want them boring and without options.

When I started on my current employer, I continued working on a Windows machine, like with my previous one. I had a somewhat weird, but working for me workflow that relied a bit on running VMs via vagrant in order to keep some things isolated and easily restorable.

This kind of changed when I decided to upgrade to Windows Pro, since Hyper-V and VirtualBox did not seem to play nice at the time. But with WSL I could adapt the way I worked a bit and continue …on Windows.

And then I switched teams and joined some friends (from within and outside the company):

• You of all people are running on Windows? How is this possible?

Well, I want my Zoom calls to work, my Wacom to work and a few other things, like my Bose QC35ii connecting properly via Bluetooth, otherwise what’s the point of having them.

• Oh but they all do work.

And in fact they do. Even the Wacom did, almost as good as on Windows. And Zoom. And even the Bose, despite the fact that I needed to buy a Creative BT-W2 to connect and enjoy proper sound. I switched partly out of shame and I stayed on board for a year with 20.04 and 21.10.

And then 22.04 came about and they did not. Because you know? 2022 is still not the year of the Linux desktop. Zoom it seems cannot share Windows when on Wayland (yes, I know I can start with Xorg and not have issues. I’ve compiled and run X11R5 and have seen systems with R4 and I’ve books about Xlib, what about you?). And when you work for a big company there comes compliance. Some may call it a theater, but it does not matter, it is still a requirement. And it expects some pretty standard stuff, like AV, disk encryption, specific VPN (which may or may not install under 22.04 LTS) and other clients that are ported to Linux later, or as an afterthought. And I’m not there to battle IT and Infosec. I’m there to work with them towards and end goal, which is not making my computer work.

Oh I know, you get a happiness fix when you make things work. You can blog and brag. When in fact you shouldn’t. They already worked for everyone else. So you kind of "rage quit" the Linux desktop for the third time. It took me less than 30 minutes to migrate (it took me more to copy files).

And I really do not care anymore. All I need is a decent terminal, a browser and BT connectivity for the communication software to just work. And with the current state of things, Windows 11 and WSL achieve this at an affordable price. I got a MateBook and a macmini at the price of a MacBook Pro and I work on the MateBook most of the time.

And they just work.

PS: The 2014 MBAir that does not run the latest MacOS also works. 22.04 makes it a pretty good couch browsing machine. So it is not expelled from the household in the end.