Made the full leap to Ubuntu Linux yesterday! A love letter of happiness.

I'm a Windows 10 power user. I run lean machines, and have always maintained them so.

Yet Windows 10, over the past two years, has been gradually annoying me with its forced updates, and the forced telemetry/privacy/'diagnostics' with Cortana. What first irked me: my Windows was slowing down constantly, despite reformatting and/or refreshing, and I couldn't really keep my machine on for more than a few days running because of updates. What worried me: multiple Explorer processes kept running or resurrecting without my knowledge - despite the anti-malware and anti-virus and other stuff I'm running, and reformats every 2-3 months. Windows 10, despite my fairly-beast machine (i7-7700k 4.2Ghx x8, 32GB RAM, GTX 1080), felt slow and just sluggish.

So I tried running Ubuntu first in a VM for about a week. Was hitting Stack Overflow and other places everyday to just learn about the basics of terminal syntax and the OS, and customizing the setup to ensure compatibility of frequently used office software (e.g. like SumatraPDF, custom-written scripts and others) -- and observed that they run equally well on Wine. Ubuntu on the VM also ran fast, even though using VM obviously had performance tradeoffs.

I then decided to take the plunge, first with my old 2012 Dell XPS. I chose that because it had one issue that made me abandon it: the brightness settings, which couldn't be adjusted and stayed maxed out at 100% constantly (which I thought was a hardware issue). I had before this spent hours before trying to get that brightness thing fixed.

...Instead, and magically, Ubuntu did some sorcery to the brightness drivers: that machine's brightness worked again. It just did. A full cure. With zero config.

I also noticed that despite the 4GB on that laptop, Ubuntu was running fast. Maybe not objectively 'fast', but it felt smooth - smoother than in Windows; I first noticed this with the scrolling in Chrome and in Sublime Text. That machine could now acceptably run Pycharm and Datagrip and heavy scripts too, which was surprising. That made me consider that Ubuntu would perform better on better specs.

So I took the leap. I've another PC with the same specs as my beast machine (but without the GTX1080), and installed Ubuntu fully on it, cleaned out everything and put on LUKS for disk-encryption. I've just been warbling-garbling in happiness all day as a result. Because after customising it properly, this thing just screams. I'm not sure if it's just me, but:

• Browser rendering is crazy fast -- tabs/windows close and open instantly (which was never and still not is my experience even with freshly formatted copies of Windows 10).
• LibreOffice opens instantaneously, compared to Microsoft Word.
• VMWare Pro runs my office copies of Windows 10 VM images at speeds indistinguishable from my current live Win 10 box too. (The office copy has special court-filing related Java software, which is why I install it in an image, rather than letting it pollute my main box.)
• Steam on Windows/for Linux runs the games I play perfectly.
• Japanese IME support is smooth and super fast.
• I'm really impressed with Linux's filesystem (the '/' nomenclature), which is well-designed and thought out, compared to the haphazard registry and Program Files/Local/Appdata placement of files in Windows.

I've a few niggling issues still -- e.g. there's some Japanese software I use, which has only Windows support - and while that software is functionally sound in Wine, the menu interface is... not pretty, even after installing Microsoft font support. Launchy, while available, doesn't work as well as in Windows, and has problems launching *.desktop files. The fantastic Everything search engine is missing, so I've had to use Fsearch, which doesn't have an extensive search setup. And Linux text expansion software is generally poor for choice -- I've had to employ Autokey + Python for a lot of things, whereas in Windows there's a lot of choices (like Breevy, PhraseExpander, etc). If it matters -- I'm a lawyer, so software like these are necessary, and not having them (or they're not being able for purchase) is disappointing. I also write a lot in Python in Windows, so there's some inconsistency/way of doing things with the Linux terminal which I've to relearn.

But otherwise, I'm really surprised, and extremely pleased, with the speed, performance, security and privacy and peace of mind I'm getting.

To the guys at Ubuntu/Canonical, and to Linus T and friends: you guys are awesome. Thank you so much. I'm sticking around, and figuring out more of Ubuntu, and will do my part to contribute to the ecosystem in time.