Published on 18/01/2026

Returning to Linux

I have returned to Linux again on both my personal laptops and workstation desktop, after 15 years with Windows. I also replaced Windows 11 on my wife’s old laptop with Linux and gave it a new life. Windows 11 crippled it.

The Breaking Point

Latest update of Windows 11 brings me to the decision point, as at random times there will be a background process running and eating up my precious resources: CPU & battery. I did use Linux machines for my web servers, but not for daily use on my personal laptop. The last time I used Linux was during the early days of Windows 8, in which I thoroughly hated the “flying boxes” graphical user interface. I used Ubuntu, but then after losing that laptop after a theft, I relied on company laptops, which of course has Windows in it. I bought a Dell Inspiron 7447 in 2015 just before I resigned from McElhanney, and used Windows most of the time as it was my only computer. I continue using it for the next 10 years, and it still runs okay today. I replaced the fan multiple times, keyboard and the LCD screen once. The body cracked here and there, the hinge is about to fail, but otherwise, it runs Linux Mint flawlessly. When my work colleague switched to MacBook last year, he sold his Thinkpad E490 for $300. I grabbed it without thinking. After upgrading its memory to 32GB and its SSD to 2TB, and also replaced its battery, I continue using Windows on it for almost a year… until a month ago, when I decided to ditch Windows. With its ever-increasing hardware specification requirements and relentless updates behind the screen, there is simply no way I can tolerate this.

This 6 year old ThinkPad E490 which only endured on battery power for about 3 hours with Power Save mode in Windows, now getting 6 hours of battery time with Linux Mint! This is an amazing improvement, not only with battery, but also in the general responsiveness of the laptop.

Windows for Work

The only reason I used Windows 11 was simply because most of the software for my work is developed for Windows. ArcGIS Pro, Global Mapper, Trimble Business Center, Trimble Realworks, and also Microsoft Office, are exclusively for Windows. Now that I moved on to Mint/Fedora, I have come to terms with the fact that I have to forego my attachment to those software packages, and embrace the ones that support Linux. There’s QGIS, and Cloud Compare, but nothing can totally replace Microsoft Office and Global Mapper. Well, that does not really matter, as this is for personal laptop. I simply have to rely on Libre Office for my daily spreadsheet and word-processing needs.

Windows/Mac for work and corporate needs, and Linux is for my personal needs. Operating systems are tools after all, which is essentially what makes these machines “alive”. Getting too obsessed or entrenched into one tool is dangerous, I believe we should pick the right tool for the job at hand, whatever it is.

Linux for old Laptops

Installing and running Linux on popular laptops is quite straightforward. I installed it on Thinkpad, Dell, and Asus laptops without much friction. Once installed, everything is pretty much ready to use, as long as you’re using mainstream Linux distros like Ubuntu, Mint, or Fedora.

The largest resource hog for daily tasks on laptops is the web browser. Using Chrome and Firefox takes a huge toll on energy consumption. I tried different minimalist browsers, such as Dillo, Falkon, Midori, Epiphany, and even the text-based Lynx. Definitely Lynx won the race to the least resource consumption, but being a text-based browser, its use is very limited in our modern internet designed for visual content consumption. Dillo reminds me of my early days of internet with MSIE 3.0 or Netscape Navigator in 1997. It won’t render modern website very well, even something like Wikipedia. Falkon, somehow it refuse to render some websites. Then Midori comes to my next suggested browser, and I found it somewhere in the middle between usability and minimalism. Epiphany seems to be minimalistic and functional. But at the end, I cannot really trust these minimalistic browsers for online financial transactions or filling out government online forms, and I resort to rely on Firefox for these purposes. After using Midori for a while, I become annoyed that sometimes it could not render websites correctly, or websites become blank white screen. I looked around and found Mullvad, a good browser with focus on privacy.

These ultra-lightweight browsers like Dillo, Falkon, Midori, etc. are fast, but they broke the modern web, and sometimes buggy. I needed a balance between privacy and functionality, eventually landing on Mullvad for general browsing and Firefox for trusted transactions.

Linux for Workstation

On my workstation, however, I am not constrained with power consumption and CPU/memory resource usage. I have a pretty beefy 128GB RAM, an i5-14600KF, and an NVidia RTX 5060 Ti. There are 3 SSDs and 1 HDD installed. I opted for Fedora with KDE Plasma desktop, and it worked well. There was some hiccups due to the Secure Boot and proprietary drivers for RTX 5060 Ti and my WiFi 6, which ended up with me disabling Secure Boot and plugging in my old TP-Link 2.4GHz WiFi dongle. Otherwise everything got installed smoothly. In the end, I installed an Intel AX210 PCIe card to replace the WiFi dongle, and all is good. I’ve been using this workstation for about a month now, and I am happy.

Here’s my OS story:

Yes, I have small stint with MacOS as I manage the newly purchased computer at church, a Mac Mini M4 24/512. To be honest, I like MacOS and its sleek hardware, but I don’t like the pricey ecosystem. And sometimes I feel MacOS tried to dumb things down. However, to my surprise, I don’t need to have an online account to start using MacOS. It does force me to sign up for an Apple ID to use their App Store though.

Online Storage

For all my Linux systems, I got rid of OneDrive, GoogleDrive, and Dropbox. I deleted my Dropbox account, which has accumulated 11 GB of free space from referral bonus over the years, more than 15 years. A bit sad, actually, but now it serves nothing but nostalgia. Time to prune my subscriptions. I still have OneDrive which comes with Office 365 subscription, and Google Drive, which comes with Gemini Pro subscription. Plenty of space offered there, but I need to stand my ground. I still maintain OneDrive and Google Drive as they come with those services, but I refuse to use them as my primary file system.

From now on, I synchronize my “hot” folders across my devices to my custom system using Syncthing, with 100GB of hot sync space (NVME block storage) attached to my VPS at Linode. I am happy with this set up, I feel I am in control, and most importantly, I feel more independent from Google and Microsoft. This comes with a price, of course, as the VPS & NVME storage is more expensive than simply using OneDrive/GoogleDrive.

Conclusion

Returning to Linux after fifteen years has been a reclamation of territory. When we rely on Windows or macOS, we are essentially tenants in a landlord’s house—subject to their renovations, their surveillance, and their rent hikes. We trade control for convenience. By moving to Linux, I have decided to become the owner again.

Yes, there is friction. I cannot use the industry-standard geospatial tools on my personal machine, and I have to manage my own sync solutions instead of lazily relying on OneDrive or Google Drive. But the trade-off is undeniable: I have a workstation that respects my privacy, a laptop that runs cool and quiet, and a digital life that is fully mine. The “system” is no longer something that happens to me; it is something I control. For the first time in a decade, my computer feels like a tool again, rather than a service. It is not cheap and it does require some hours of learning and tinkering to fit my specific requirement, but freedom comes with its consequences. And that feeling is worth every bit of the learning curve.

Tags: #linux#windows#opensource#privacy#thinkpad