linux_migration.md

yeah, windows sucks.

For the past 6 years, I've been using my old laptop as a server, hosting nearly every digital service I need on a day-to-day basis. It's an Acer Nitro 5 from 2017, and for some reason, it still works. This laptop has hosted many things, ranging from the first version of my discord bot J.Y.N.E, to several Minecraft servers my friends and I played on, to my own personal Netflix and Spotify (Plex). That laptop has been through A LOT. I even used to daily drive it! Playing games on it's puny 1050ti. It worked, and that was all that mattered.

Towards the end of this year, Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 devices, meaning my server would be exposed to any security vulnerabilities going forward. Microsoft also said that they will not be allowing that laptop to upgrade to Windows 11 because it does not have a TPM 2.0 module. Silly, but maybe it was for the better. I decided to get rid of the GUI and the slow load times and latency in favor of a fresh Linux install.

I called up one of my friends and we got to work. He has done Linux installs in the past, so I figured it would be a great idea to bring him on on this. He showed me how to get Ventoy and GParted on an external drive we'll plug into the Nitro 5. We then downloaded openSUSE Leap and took the external drive to the laptop to get it setup. Then, our problems began.

When attempting to boot into the drive to get Ventoy, the laptop started fighting with us, saying it was afraid of the drive. I figured Secure Boot probably needed to be disabled, so we went to disable it in the BIOS. I found the Secure Boot setting, but I couldn't disable it. I couldn't figure out for the life of me why! We booted back into Windows, then the BIOS, and over again, until we just asked ChatGPT. It turns out, for this specific laptop, you have to set up a 'BIOS Password' before you can access all of the settings in the BIOS. How silly.

Once we got Secure Boot disabled, we booted into GParted and partitioned the drive, reserving 32GB of space on the tiny 256GB internal SSD the laptop has. After that, we finally booted into the openSUSE .iso, running through the setup process. Here, I was debating on installing the version of openSUSE with a GUI or without one, and my friend, Nathan, petitioned for me to go terminal only. In the end I decided to go terminal only, and boy am I glad I did.

After running through the installation process and booting into openSUSE, I thought we had done something wrong! It was just a black screen and some warning text. Then I saw it, a small, white text cursor awaiting input. That's all openSUSE Leap for servers is- a terminal. I was shocked, and a bit afraid. I only know very simple Linux commands, I didn't think I was ready to just jump in like this! I was wrong.

Nathan and I quickly setup SSH and even downloaded and installed Plex. After learning how to mount my drives, we started the Plex service and all my media was there instantly. Easy enough, right? All the metadata and preferences didn't copy over via the drive unfortunately, but it's not too too big of a deal, I'm sure I can get it working later.

Satisfied with the work done, Nathan left, and the rest was up to me. I mounted my network drive and navigated to my servers folder, so I could see if I could get my shared modded Minecraft server back online. Yup, I could. The .sh script was already in the server's root, and it was as simple as running that to get everything up and running again. And the load speeds, the latencies, everything is so snappy. My CPU IDLES at 0.6%, 8-10% below what Windows 10 was giving me. It's all insane.

So yeah, switch to Linux, kids.