I’ve been a Windows user most of my 34 years on this earth. It was a matter of what my parents had in the house growing up in the 90s. As someone who got into videogames at a young age, Windows was the only way to go at the time. I wasn’t interested in building anything or being super technical, and it never even crossed my mind that I could be “good at computers” to pay the bills. After graduating with a severely impractical Bachelor’s in Religious Studies, and then bouncing around jobs and industries for 5 years, I landed in IT, and 5 years after that, I moved into Cybersecurity, namely administrating a major Splunk instance, their SIEM product, and their SOAR product.

It was this career move that exposed me to Linux, as Red Hat pretty much powers everything in the real world. Around the same time, I finally got around to watching the show Mr. Robot. That’s a topic for another time, but the point is that it was another thing pushing me down the Cybersecurity rabbit hole. Things like Trinity running nmap in the Matrix that I never noticed or understand before, began to jump out at me left and right. I still feel like quite a novice in the linux world, but I have played around enough to know that right now I love Fedora and Gnome. Maybe one day I’ll slap together the patience to get Arch up and running with something like KDE, but that is not this day.

In the recent years, my Windows usage at home has been to play games like GTA-RP via FiveM, The Red Dead 2 equivalent, RedM, the spaghetti code battle royale PUBG: Battlegrounds, the super old Star Wars MMORPG “Star Wars Galaxies” via private servers on SWGEMU, and finally, the asynchronous horror game Dead By Daylight.Some of those work natively on Linux, some work with some tweaks, and others do not work at all. Especially spaghetti code. After 1200 hours in Dead By Daylight (DBD), I don’t want to say I’m done, but it’s not a relaxing pastime. I get competitive with it, which is fine, but it’s not recharging or replenishing me. It’s not helping me unwind from the day or de-stress in anyway. I don’t find myself wanting to stream it.

Am I ever gonna get to the point? Jesus. Currently I’m excited about a bunch of things in the tech space. The main thing holding me back from having my office desk just linux was gaming. DBD might, maybe, work with linux with some tweaking, but I don’t feel like figuring that out right now. I’m also interested in testing some FiveM (GTA) scripts that my friends are developing for Blackjack, another hobby I’d like to discuss at another time.

Sellout warning, this paragraph has paid links to Amazon that you can support me with So, I think I’ve come to a compromise of sorts. In the mid-late 2022 timeframe, I splurged on a Dell XPS-15 laptop, and I specifically got one with integrated graphics, not a fancy GPU for gaming/streaming because I want to use it for development and tech work. I’m punching this up on it right now (in VIM of all things, I know)! I also got a docking station so I could hook this thing up on my desk to the monitors/keyboard/etc. The final thing I needed it to work with was my TC Helicon GOXLR-mini, which is an external usb device that does a lot of fancy cool things but the most important is take in my Shure SM7B microphone. I love that microphone but it seems very silly considering no one sees it anymore because I haven’t been streaming. I said “sees” it not “hears” it because I do still use discord on the laptop, and to be honest, you can sound just as good on discord with exteremely cheap usb microphones.

So what’s the compromise? I could have installed Fedora on the existing gaming tower with the fancy GPU that I’ve been using, and I have tried that before, but I just can’t bring myself to say goodbye to DBD and FiveM forever. So. The plan is to have the laptop docked as the main setup for everything, and to have the tower just plugged into power and network (no keyboard, mouse, or monitors). If I want to access the Windows tower, I will RDP (remote) into the tower from my linux laptop and use it that way.

That’s the plan. I’m not sure if it will totally work or not, but I at least want to try it!