This is a 12 year dream. I have always run a Windows workstation along side a Debian laptop. I am no stranger to Debian. I have a 12 year association with it. I am not a Linux wizard yet but have been adept with it.

Why not use Debian daily then? My personal computing usage unfortunately centered around consumption rather than creation. I watched videos, listened to podcasts, read technical articles, and browsed social media. On top of this, inertia and great software like Visual Studio, Notepad++, Excel, OneDrive held me back.

Visual Studio is an absolute must-have for all .NET developers. I built small pieces of complex web projects only occasionally. VS Code on Linux is decent for .NET development but it is not the same. Though Jetbrains Rider existed along-side, it is unthinkable to drop Visual Studio. At least for dark matter developers.

Notepad++ is a fabulous software program that had no complete alternatives on Linux. I used it for scripting, text manipulation, note taking, dumping and editing thoughts. Scintilla-based equivalents Geany, SciTE exist, but do not come close.

MS-Office Excel is another remarkable software program with no real alternatives in other ecosystems. It is worth the 5K INR per year. Organizing data, life planning, and creating simple reports are a few of its greatest capabilities. Also, the formulas system is amazing. OneDrive is another great and a utilitarian software program from the Microsoft stable.

So, why now? I had the most fun and growth when I built things. I love the independence that comes with the experience of building things. As far as I can remember, I was always a tinkerer, thinker, builder, doer and explorer. After a decade or so of inaction, I needed a change. A few things fell into place recently.

  • Windows is about to get a whole lot more annoying. An increase in ads, baked-in Copilot, and a suffocating push to outlook user-linked usage.
  • Jetbrains Rider became formidable now for CLI and web app development.
  • I learnt enough of apt-pinning, backports and makedeb repository.
  • The last straw is from an unexpected experience. I set up a Win 11 VM recently using the KVM+QEMU route. I noticed that the VM’s performance was quite responsive. KVM+QEMU despite all the pain felt worthy. I cannot recommend it enough.

Immediately I decided to remove Windows, install Debian with a Windows VM inside. I will write about various experiments and experiences over the next year. These are some of the sub-projects on my mind in no particular order.

  • Write about this setup
  • Implement a nice 3-2-1 backup strategy
  • Write about significant alternatives
  • Write about significant issues
  • Linking to phone
  • Configure monitoring, notifications and alerts
  • Configure auto dark mode
  • Find a way to play an old strategy game on Linux
  • 9point6@lemmy.world
    211·
    3 months ago

    I just don’t get the love for notepad++

    I started using it as my main back in 2006ish, I then switched to sublime text about 2011, then about 5-6 years ago to VSCode. All the time using vim for any in-terminal quick edits.

    Notepad++ is easily my least favourite editor of the lot, by several miles, it just seems so rigid and clunky without even going into how it’s windows only. Every editor I’ve used since has been a huge improvement over the one prior IMO

    • DebianGuy@lemmy.mlOP
      9·
      3 months ago

      Agree on all counts about Notepad++ “oldness”

      • slower when we have 100 files open
      • clunky
      • rigid
      • old GUI paradigms ( settings modal, find modal etc)
      • inflexible and less customizable UI chrome area

      Few things I like about Notepad++ enough to actually keep on using it on work workstations:

      • Plugins ecosystem. I am too entrenched into it.
        • PoormansSqlFormatter
        • Tidy2
        • JSTool
        • XML Tools
        • ComparePlus
        • TextFx2
      • great built-in editing operations Edit > EOL
      • great bookmarking operations
      • Very active development
      • Way faster than VS Code for text manipulation tasks

      Geany with Plugins with is great but misses out on the above stuff

      Sublime is the only one and I could use it for a serious amount of time. I only went back because I could not often get it installed in some enterprises.

      • 9point6@lemmy.world
        6·
        3 months ago

        Cheers for the response, I appreciate it!

        I’m curious about the plugins as obviously I’m not gonna be familiar with the notepad++ plugin ecosystem now—what’s special about the ones you listed?

        Assuming edit EOL is just changing the line termination characters, all editors have that don’t they? Or does this not do what I think?

        Intrigued about VSCode being slow for text manipulation too—I remember this being a big reason I dropped notepad++ for sublime and IMO VSCode and sublime more or less have parity on that front, particularly with vim bindings

        • DebianGuy@lemmy.mlOP
          2·
          3 months ago

          VS Code has gotten really fast recently but it is more of a combination of having the right plugin (TextFX in this case) and the general fastness. Someone should ideally just port that TextFX. I thought about doing that a lot of times, but it was a lack of time + lack of skill issue :)

          Again I do use VS Code for the occasional frontend work. It is great but for all heavy duty manipulation sometime really is off in VS Code. It could be that I haven’t out of inertia tried too much.

          I don’t know if I can qualifiedly explain what it is about the plugins, they work well and have sane defaults. Notepad++ with all its custom panels, that plugins create a quite a clunkiness in there, but having those separate panels sometimes gives it a unique and flexible usage experience.

          About the edit thing, there are just so many options that sometimes I forget that TextFx plugin exists. There are 100 or so options in that edit menu neatly categorized into sub menus like Insert, Copy, Indent, Line Operations, Blank Operations, Auto-completion, Paste Special, On Selection, Multi-select All, etc each having 5 to 7 operations.

          Line Operations for example has these:

          Duplicate Current Line
Remove Duplicate Lines
Remove Consecutives Duplicate Lines
Split Lines
Join Lines
...
Reverse Lines
Randomize Lines
...
Sort Lines Lexicographically Ascendlng

and 10 or more

          Another great thing is the whole design and the options around managing bookmarks while searching. I should write a blog post on it :)

          • fl42v@lemmy.ml
            3·
            3 months ago

            Given those options, you may want to try vim :) It’s a bit different in how you interact with it (pressing stuff on the keyboard instead of clicking stuff in menus, plus it’s more of an imperative vs declarative approach, i.e. you tell vim how to do stuff instead of what you need to be done; the good part is being independent of what sb thought you may need to do, the bad – having to learn editing primitives and stuff), but it can certainly do stuff you’ve mentioned, sometimes with some help from external programs:

            • dupcicate current line - yyp [(yy)ank_curren and (p)aste];
            • join lines depends on how you want to join them, in the simplest case it’s J or gJ to join current line with the one below with or without space as a separator respectively. You can also combine it with :g or :v and norm or macros to make this edit on lines matching (g) or not (v) a specific regex (e.g. :g/join me/norm J will join all lines containing “join me” with that below). Splitting also depends;
            • reverse, randomize and sorting can be done via calling external stuff: v10j:.!tac will reverse 11 lines, including the one with the cursor, via calling (!) tac on the selection (v) of the current line and 10 below (10j) and pasting its output in the file you’re editing (.) (it’ll replace stuff you’ve selected). Replace tac with shuf or sort for the other options mentioned. Removing duplicates without sorting - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11532157/remove-duplicate-lines-without-sorting#11532197

            Bonus: neovim integrates with vscode quite well, and on itself it handles reasonably huge files without an issue.

            • DebianGuy@lemmy.mlOP
              2·
              3 months ago

              Whoa, thank you for the elaboration. As I said in another comment, I was vim user for a short time but it may take a long time to use it again. I don’t rule out vim from my OSS life. Who knows what will transpire :)

    • zelifcam@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      3 months ago

      I couldn’t agree more. I had a foot in both the MacOS and Microsoft Windows worlds at the time and can appreciate what a game changer notepad++ became. Having used BBEdit on the Mac since around the mid 90s, it was kinda more like “it’s about time” a decade later when notepad++ was released. I’m not necessarily comparing them feature to feature, but it was a much needed piece of software for Windows. I still have memories of opening up text files and being like … damn someone f’d this txt file up on a windows machine… again.

    • Feyd@programming.dev
      3·
      3 months ago

      I never used npp as my code editor but as a secondary program that i kept notes in and would paste text in to manipulate then move back into code editor. It had a rich plugin ecosystem way before that was common. I use Kate for those purposes instead now

    • jollyrogue@lemmy.ml
      1·
      3 months ago

      Agreed.

      Vim/Neovim and Spacemacs (Emacs) are so much more addictive than NPP.

      That’s cool if NPP is OP’s thing, but there are quite a few text editors which check those boxes in the *nix world.

    • k4j8@lemmy.world
      1·
      3 months ago

      I don’t like Notepad++ as a text editor for code, but my god is it amazing for taking quick notes. I’ve been searching for a Linux equivalent but haven’t found it yet. My favorite Notepad++ features:

      • Opens immediately.
      • Never loses data, and I mean never - unsaved files are restored after crashes, reboots, power outage, you name it.

      For jotting down quick meeting notes in a hurry, it’s great. The settings are messy and hard to configure though, so I use Vim/Helix for writing code (hobbyist, not professional).

  • nek0d3r@lemmy.world
    5·
    3 months ago

    This has been a dream of mine and one of my friend’s as well. There’s a small handful of blockers that I’ve slowly been transitioning but the upcoming windows pain points you mentioned are definitely recent motivators for me. I’m glad you made it and I hope the rest of us can too! I look forward to reading more about your experience.

    • DebianGuy@lemmy.mlOP
      4·
      3 months ago

      Thank you and I wish you a similar or better success soon. Yes, I do wish to share the writings on this here slow and steadily.

  • Mr. Camel999@programming.dev
    4·
    3 months ago

    If you absolutely need functionality of some Windows only applications on Linux, it’s a bit clunky, but a solution exists to use a VM to integrate the Windows apps into your Linux environment. It’s called winapps, and I use it to run the latest version of Excel, which I do need for some things. Here’s their GitHub: https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps

  • JOMusic@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    3 months ago

    I’ve also recently switched to Linux Mint as my daily driver. Linux + Open-Source is finally in a really good spot. I tell people that switching OSes always takes new learning, but a step-by-step approach is a sustainable one.

    Whenever I go back to Windows and see news and ads popping up in my Start Menu, etc, I realize how much shit we were putting up with even pre-Copilot. That’s not even including Microsoft Edge forcing itself back as a default program with each major update. It’s like the word “consent” doesn’t exist to those people.

    • DebianGuy@lemmy.mlOP
      2·
      3 months ago

      Yes, great times for us. It takes time to get up to speed, but the important thing is to keep at it.

  • Blastboom Strice@mander.xyz
    3·
    3 months ago

    Heyy, I’m too in the process of moving from windows (10) to debian :) (though I’m very new to linux, but not new to open source software)

    I was surprised that notepad++ didnt have native support for linux and while I tried many stuff, indeed I couldnt find a real replacement. I have kinda concluded that I will either use bottles with wine to run notepad++ (takes around half a minute to open) or use Geany and try to customize it as much as I can. (There are also Notepadqq which is kinda dead and NotepadNext which is still in very early stage.) I’ll probably go with Geany and chech on NotepadNext if it evers becomes good enough.

    I had a recent post about running windows stuff on linux and people gave me some good advice here: https://mander.xyz/post/18701186

    Edit: I just found Textadept, might check it later (found it from a comment under this video).

    • DebianGuy@lemmy.mlOP
      2·
      3 months ago

      I have tried notepadqq, it is a bit promising, but I don’t think it can use the npp plugins yet. Thanks for the link, I will check it out.

      I know of TextAdept and loved it when I used it years back. Loved the extensibility part. Unfortunately could not stick to it mostly due to plugins IIRC.

  • IsusRamzy@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    Jetbrains? Use vim :) Just kidding. As for Excel, you can use LibreOffice calc, or OnlyOffice. Or any office… or Excel web. As for onedrive, i remeber linking my gdrive to my gnome files, but i personally don’t need it that much, i use git lab/hub. btw as for linking to phone, I recommend using KDE Connect.