Return of the penguin

After I got my next laptop, I used it happily with Windows 8 installed. I had peace of mind for a while. That was until the "blue screen of death!".

After my OS had crashed, I said to myself, "this is it" and immediately began preparations for a Linux installation. The hard part this time was selecting a distro. After using Linux for a brief moment, I was well aware of the fact that numerous flavors existed.

After a long search on the internet, I eventually settled with Linux Mint (The distro I still use today). I liked the Cinnamon desktop. Coming from Windows, it felt very natural to me. I was also intrigued by the fact that it was built on top of Ubuntu and showed better memory usage capabilities. Back then, I was an Android developer. Suffice to say, Android studio wasn't happy with my current pc. So this was actually a plus for me.

I enjoyed Linux mint a lot, especially using it for software development. But one thing you would notice quickly when you start using Linux is the limited number of proprietary software that is available for it. Libre Office, I love you but you are just not MS Word. What followed next was a little hurdle with Wine and finally Oracle Virtual Box for running Windows workloads.

I had survived on the Linux desktop for quite some time without fully understanding most of the technology underneath it. Just flexing that Cinnamon GUI, pasting some command snippets from StackOverflow on the terminal.

The "cloud", another buzzword at the time. As a Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador, I was opportune to explore Azure, Microsoft's public cloud computing platform. It wasn't until I started spinning up VM's that I began to appreciate the real beauty of Linux and the terminal (When is the year of the Linux desktop coming?).

Problems when tweaking with Linux never finish. I wish I could say "I lived happily ever after" with my installation, but there were some notable events that transpired.

The python problem

When I was still new to python, I tried replacing the default python3 symlink on my system with another pointing to a newer version. I thought I was doing my system a favor, it turns out I wasn't. The first thing to go was my terminal. I restarted the system, but the OS wouldn't startup. I panicked! Then I remembered, "this is why I always keep a bootable live stick". After booting from my USB stick and gaining access to a terminal, it was just a matter of setting back the correct symlink.

Update catastrophe

Servers on the cloud are very useful. You get the ability to run compute workloads that you normally wouldn't be able to without the corresponding upfront cost. Sometimes you want more, say a remote desktop. I experimented with various remote desktop agents such as Chrome remote desktop and Windows virtual desktop. I was enthusiastic to try out the latest offering from AWS, AWS Workspaces (I got a $10 bill by the end of the month. I didn't know it was not covered by my cloud credit).

While trying to run the Workspace client on my Linux mint 18.3, I encountered an error that was associated with the current Gtk 3.18 installed, preventing the client app from launching. After some research, I felt a distro upgrade would be the simplest path to solving the problem as the next version, Linux mint 19 came with an updated Gtk 3.22.

I began the upgrade, but there was a disruption during the process, and my installation was left with a misconfigured display manager and desktop environment. You know that thing about "releasing" on Fridays, I suppose the same thing could be said for a distro upgrade at night. I burnt the midnight oil looking for a fix. I soon wrapped my head around the missing components, and what I needed to install. My pc was back to normal, and I could now use my Workspace client without any issues.