I have recently gotten a new laptop, and my first act was to install Linux on it. Being that it was over the holidays, I didn’t have a lot of use for it yet, so the laptop was mostly sitting there until semester started. Once I started using it the flaws in Linux became apparent very quickly.

The Linux driver for the media keys on the laptop were inconsistent, changing every kernel update. This was a decent annoyance, but the biggest problem was a constant battery drain. For some reason I was losing a sizable amount of my battery when my laptop was closed. Given all this I decided to try out Windows again.

Immediately upon switching over, it was apparent that a lot of software is just designed for Windows. No, it didn’t have a package manager but installs just happened and software just ran without issues. Additionally there was software on Windows that I was able to use again (hello Adobe Acrobat), although there was some I wished I could take with me (evince and gedit are so much better than the Windows defaults).

This time around I decided to use WSL, since it’s the latest feature that everyone’s talking about. Getting it set up wasn’t too hard and it seemed to run fairly smoothly, all that was left was to set up Emacs. There are some tutorials online to set up vcxsrv to use GUI apps, since it’s not supported yet. The problem was getting it to appear in the start menu. It took a bit of fooling around with shortcuts executing a bit of PowerShell but eventually that worked. The biggest problem came when my windows would close when the computer slept, something about the connection closing.

The breaking problem was with virtualization. At the moment I’m working on integrating a 4g modem and I’m doing most of my work in virtual machines. Given that I was using WSL, which uses Hyper-V internally I thought I’d give that a shot. Problems arose in getting a GUI to display, which was solved only to find out USB pass-through doesn’t exist. So I decided to try VMware, virtualization worked better but it wouldn’t load though the modem, apparently some incompatibility. VirtualBox didn’t even boot. This was so simple on Linux, I was able to pass-through any device I wanted.

Given all that I decided to go back to Linux. The media keys seem to be working and I’ve done some work to make the battery last a bit longer (it’s still not comparable to Windows), so I think I’ll stay there for now. Bluetooth is inconsistent and that may push me back. At the moment neither OS is doing it for me and I may flip between them. I’m very thankful to be able to have the choice though.

EDIT 8/4/20: After playing around in Linux for a bit, I have enabled hibernation, which is greatly increasing my battery life, at the cost of some disk space devoted to swap. Additionally Bluetooth is proving to be much better than I remember it being, with my earbuds almost automatically connecting and playing from my phone and laptop being nearly seamless (it wasn’t much better on windows).