For Freedom's Sake

The Back Story

It must come as a surprise that a blog that's about free software has its first post on installing a free OS on very proprietary hardware. When I look back on my own journey with software, it has been one of running licensed software (original and pirated), installing Fedora on a laptop that was getting to the end of its life because I wanted to learn what GNU/Linux was all about, and then having to work on a laptop running Linux at work. When it was time to get a new laptop 7 years ago, I decided to go for a Macbook Pro because the specs looked good and I was told great things about the operating system by some of my friends. Very soon, I had changes of jobs, and ended up with a Macbook at work as well. OS X looked very neat in the beginning. I purchased some software which made my life easier by improving my productivity through keyboard shortcuts, having system metrics displayed on the system tray etc.

Over the years, I started getting annoyed with the OS except for the conveniently placed Cmd key which made the said shortcuts a pleasure to work with, instead of having to use the Ctrl key which is placed at a position where one has to take their hand(s) off the home row to trigger shortcuts, at which point I'd rather use the mouse to do the same actions.

Fast forward to the later months of last year, there was the great exodus from Twitter to Fediverse, which opened my eyes to the world of free software and also reignited the love in me for looking at software dabbling as a hobby. I also gained enlightenment on the perils of being inside walled gardens, and have been trying to get out of those step by step. One such step was installing a free OS on my old Macbook Pro. The reason I did that instead of buying a more compatible device was that I wanted to upcycle my device because the hardware is still pretty good on it.

The Choices

I explored various options for desktops on virtual machines, and liked the looks of KDE on Ubuntu. However, there are two options for those who want to take that route. There's Kubuntu, which is a stable desktop engine on top of a very stable OS. Then there's KDE Neon which is a rolling desktop engine on top of a very stable OS. I decided to take the risk of having KDE Neon on my machine because it felt interesting to be able to get upgrades to the UX features more regularly while the underlying software remained stable and supported. I did inadvertently create a playground for a second OS, but I'll get to that in the next section.

The Process

Armed with a bootable USB, I sat down to create a partition for the new OS on my disk. I still didn't know if I was still ready for a total GNU/Linux experience yet, so I had planned on preserving OS X in one partition. I then found that installing KDE Neon wasn't working well with it getting stuck on os-probe during the installation process (I found what it was doing by looking at the logs by running live OS first and then running the installer from inside that environment). I wondered if installing a vanilla Ubuntu would solve it, so I created a bootable disk with that instead. While booting the system up, I realized I'd messed up the boot loader for good, so I decided to go ahead and wipe out the entire disk. However, I still wasn't satisfied because I couldn't install what I really wanted. So the next thing I did after installing the OS was downloading the KDE Neon ISO and creating an installer for that.

I also realized that I could actually have two OSes sitting side by side, so I used the partition utility to create a larger partition for installing KDE Neon and this Ubuntu partition for any distro hopping I'd wish to do going forward.

This time though, the process was smooth, and I was able to install KDE Neon without much effort. After a day of fighting things I didn't have any idea about, I had what I wanted on the Macbook.

First Impressions

Dual screen setup works great. I do wish there was way (maybe there is one, I just haven't found it yet) to open a new window/app in the screen on which the focus currently is.

KRunner is great. It does most of the things I used to do with Alfred on OS X. Klipper app takes care of my second favourite feature on Alfred, which is multi-clipboard.

Customizability of almost everything is nice to have. I particularly enjoyed changing the look and feel of the login screens.

Gotchas

• Ubuntu detected WiFi during the installation process, but didn't after the process had finished.
• Always back up your system.
• Keep a network cable handy for when WiFi doesn't work.
• Colemak layout with English (UK) makes several keys misbehave, including the pipe “|” key which is essential on a shell, so stick to English (US).

Conclusion

I'm in love with operating systems again and what they can do for me. I'd love to go over some of the things I've set up on this machine in some follow up posts, what works for me, what doesn't etc.