Lessons learned in the first 24h

Choice of Distribution

this one was simple to me. i tested a few through distrosea and decided to use Zorin OS

Issues

Screen greyed out

on one of my machines, it's plugged in to an external TV. it did not correctly auto-detect the color-range and sent out 16-235 instead of 0-255. there's no direct option to fix that. gladly, as expected, reddit helped. edit the file at .config/monitors.xml.

// .config/monitors.xml

...</monitorspec>
<rgbrange>full</rgbrange> // add this

read more at this comment on reddit

Autologin causes a password prompt to show up when launching browser

this is very common on Zorin OS and well-documented. go to the start menu and enter 'passwords', select the password vault top-left, right click and 'change password'. set it to no-password.

Screensaver for OLED screens

atm screens are just set to never go to sleep, and taskbar is hiding. cursor is set to have a black border so it can be moved out of the screen.

UX Quirks

how to enter an own path into the file-open dialog? press ctrl-l

Plans

Themeing

copy over the default dark theme folder and edit all the css files to go fully black on the OLED screens. as well due to personal preference, have border-radius set to 0 at the end. no round borders for me.

* { border-radius: 0 !important }

Developing

going to explore how to write own .NET applications that run on linux, how to navigate the OS defaults (folder structure, what goes where) to plausibly even release own apps.

Application Exploration

for now, i basically only use the browser on the devices of choice. for that, i chose Vivaldi for it's promise to not add AI features. over time, i have to explore linux-native and compatible windows apps to fill in my needs.

Future

for now, my goal is not to fully move to linux, but to get to know it. the main machines stay on Windows 10 for now. but windows 11 is now gone from this household. it'll be a slow process, one driven by curiosity, not pressure. it's exciting.