After writing that short-form piece about Windows yesterday, where I observed that nothing really ties me to Windows, I realized I should take action.

So I moved my Windows/CUDA machine to Linux last evening.

There was a period of wasted time when somehow nvidia drivers got installed from two sources and broke the package manager while it panicked about overlapped files.

Got that sorted and got everything setup. A super-modern stack where I can use the latest FlashAttention and Triton without a concern.

I always keep machines replaceable, such that every project is always up to current on repos, every document is in some sort of cryptographically protected cloud source, and so on — machines and drives can fail at any moment, and I always operate as if they will — so it wasn’t some big thing. Barely an inconvenience.

And it just works. This piece is being authored in WebStorm on linuxmint. All of my primary apps and toolings are all here. I’m hardly early to using Linux on the Desktop, and have made attempts at mainlining this before, but never has everything I use had first-class support. A number of Steam games even have ports (Valve has been hugely influential in making that happen), and where they don’t Proton can often emulate Windows sufficiently. Gaming on this machine isn’t a big need for me, and I usually just use Geforce Now for that.

The one thing I was concerned about was VNC versus RDP. VNC is trash, and is just a horrendous experience to have to endure, while RDP is almost like being at the machine if your connection is decent. Figured I’d just deal with it and largely lean on SSH terminal connections.

Then I discovered NoMachine. Delightful. The remote experience is significantly superior to RDP (and infinitely better than VNC), and a client was available for my Mac. It has some serious limitations unless you subscribe to their increasingly expensive tiers — for instance limited to the foreground desktop, and thus a single connection, and limited to the resolution of the host machine — but it’s such a step up from the horror that is VNC.