Anyway, I guess I am interested in talking about this slow burning, but increasing more rapid, transition towards FOSS solution/alternatives. I fully realize that there are just compromises we have to make, but let’s talk about that.
A history. To start. I guess I would say it sort of started the time I first dabbled with linux. That wasn’t for any ideological reasons, per se, it was because a friend wanted to make on of the sand box topo tables things, and the instructions strongly recommended using Linux Mint. The table never happened, which is fine, but it created a small spark.
An aside, my disdain for apple will come into play. Why? I’m not 100% sure, there isn’t one single event. I remember macs in the 90’s at a friend house, playing Star Wars games and stuff. Those looked and felt like just any old computer. Later, while in middle school, the computer lab at the magnet school I went to had a computer in every classroom, one of those dumb bubble macs. They tended to crash a lot. I didn’t like them. They looked kind of stupid and childish (like they were made for kindergartners) and they just didn’t work great. The mouse was a stupid shape and it constantly worked poorly. We had to bring floppy disks to class to save homework. That was just stupid. Back then file formats weren’t compatible between windows and mac. And that also made the assumption everyone had a computer at home. And on top of that, a mac. Well, my disk regularly got reformatted, nullifying anything I did at school and vice verse for home. Stupid. Short sighted. Prolly not a real admin decision but an incentive from apple. We also had a rolling computer lab of those equally, if not even worse, terrible, mac books, the ugly clam shell things. Rerkris those were awful. That was macos 8 or 9. Never liked em. We had basic ass dells in high school running Windows XP. Never a problem, never a complaint.
I started trying out Ubuntu around ~2014 shortly after the table thing. I think I got it running on a drive (an old chonky mechanical) for a little while. I never committed.
Around this time I was also discovering QGIS because at uni Arc was not accessible unless you dual booted the nasty Macs in our department computer lab. I never understood why we had iMacs. I think it was literally because the dept. chair is/was a mac person, so there ya go. It instilled my dislike for apple.
Then I bought a Raspberry Pi 2, then another, the 3. They never really anywhere, project wise, but I did try learning to use the PI and Raspbian. That was neat. But, I never really went anywhere with em, but I did learn a little more about command line operations and stuff.
Now, here is where the dabbling met actual usage. I took a course in Python and Informatics and the professor strongly recommended a *nix system, i.e., Linux or Mac (I suppose BSD counts here, but none of use opted for that). He used, and maybe still does, takes/took old mac books and cleansed them of their disease, liberating them and giving them the gift of Linux. That’s where the Dell Inspiron began its journey and I started dual booting it, beginning with Kubuntu in 2018. I just didn’t like Ubuntu and GNOME at this time, so it was suggested I try Kubuntu instead. Good suggestion. (I would go back but snaps - so Tuxedo. Win win)
The Dell was superseded by the Lenovo as my main laptop as the extra ram really was a needed upgrade for using Adobe at the time. This is also when I started dabbling more with FOSS solutions, seeing how much of a day’s worth of grad school work I could get by with using only Linux. The Dell was fully converted to Linux by this point, running Kubuntu, later KDE Neon (which we don’t touch anymore). I’d say my experiments were mostly fruitful, but I wasn’t fully knowledgeable yet, and necessity and time scales collided and conspired, and I wasn’t willing to sacrifice graduating on time for not using Word and stuff.
MY dabbling continued, but slowed for a while. I did try in earnest to get Arch working on the Dell, to no avail. I didn’t realize back then the issue that nvidia drivers were, how much the partitions made a difference, etc. So, KDE Neon it stayed with for years, as my work room laptop. I wasn’t worried about it getting a bit of paint or dust.
Then, I started my current job. In grad school we pretty much only use ArcMap. I did wonder why we never bothered trying QGIS, and it seemed the same circular reasoning. No one used QGIS so no one used QGIS, or conversely, everyone uses Arc to everyone uses Arc, and this is where the pipeline begins/began. I did dabble more, and did try to push back. ArcPro was just coming into being at this time, and it really wasn’t great. Thin Clients are terrible, and ArcPro was trash on those, but even native it was pretty incomplete. And yet, ESRI was pushing it hard. And it was kind of shit. That one still boggles my mind.
Moving forward to my next job and I started using QGIS equally as much as ArcMap, but I am literally the only one who does. No one uses QGIS because no one uses QGIS. “You could be free of these licenses” I said. We constantly had to share the licenses, for which we did not have enough. Sometimes, stuff for a job could literally not be done, had to be put on hold, because someone else was using the license. QGIS won’t do that to you I said. Nothing changed. I still did whole projects in QGIS, and did things in there that I either couldn’t have in Arc or would have been overly diffcult. Huzzah! I was the only crusader in the place.
The I left, for a different pasture. And there I was and am one of a small number of GIS people handling geologic maps. This is definitely a realm where QGIS vs ArcMap becomes far less about the institutional vendor lock in or more about how willing one is to learn a slightly different way. So, after a year or so I decided to challenge myself to build at least one map (which became many more) using QGIS as much as possible to get to that GeMS Level 3. And we’ve discussed this part in enough detail I shouldn’t need to explain further.
And then, came the shutdown in Oct. 2025. I was really into MAgic the Gathering, and decided to not just have a database for my cards, which I did through Archidekt, which I learned how it’s query system works, I said “this isn’t enough. I want more!” So I built my own SQLite database. I was using the Dell, which I think I had finally nuked KDE Neon in favor of openSUSE Leap. I had tried that a few times with no luck, but sometime in the past, between 2022 and OCT 2025 I had success and got it to stick. Anyway, I used DB Browser for SQLite initially, then later discovered DBeaver. My Lenovo was was still sitting, infected with Windows 11. That laptop had been a journey. It had then optane stick, which I don’t think worked since I once tried to dual boot linux on it. I think I fucked up the optane, and the main mechanical drive never really worked that well after. It got slow, didn’t run well, on wandows 10, dick thrashing. I did a factory reset, no mcuh change. I upgraded to 11, not much change. I eventually, in Nov. 2025 and said fuck it and put something on it, and now I am shooting blanks as to what it was. Maybe it was openSUSE Tumbleweed. I think it was.
So, that restarted my Linux distro hopping journey. And that got me more interested in moving away from wandows, since I nuked wandows on the Lenovo. Things were going well, and in Jan 2026, I decided, hmmmmm, wait a minute, let’s get an nvme and put that in the desktop and put openSUSE on that. The Dell has been a constant rolling testbed for hopping. I’ve tried a lot. Once I got the Lenovo running, openSUSE Tumbleweed at first, then EndeavourOS, I started actually using my laptop for actual stuff. Exploring FOSS options at home. At work I am stuck with this over powered dumb truck of a wandows 11 laptop now deeply infected with copepilot. I think that was a bigger driving factor, when copepilot started appearing in everything, hovering, waiting, lurking, never leaving. Then it start just reading emails and chats without permission.
And so, I’ve tried many of the main distros. Arch, Endeavour, Manjaro (~2019 and not since), Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu 25.10 with GNOME (I could tolerate), Fedora 40 (I hated because of GNOME), Fedora 43 which I am on now with KDE, Ultramarine (which the desktop has), Tuxedo, Mint, Pop!_OS (a couple times, COSMIC is not ready), Void (that didn’t work), KDE Neon (couldn’t even upgrade itself, so nuked), openSUSE Leap (15.6 was good, 16’s installer is shit), openSUSE Tumbleweed (good, but not with nvidia cards, especially the only ones, driver and kernel sync is an issue).
And then we were forced to do ‘ai training’ which was a giant and terrible ad for copepilot at work or lose network access. That’s a big and insane threat. NEVER have I ever seen that as an ultimatum before. Not once. Not for super critical training. And then, all of a sudden, after all this stupid return to office shit, all the aI hype and all the current admin’s stupidity, this war in Iran, and all other dum shit, now they’re forcing this terrible copepilot down our throats. I think it is to spy. It reads emails and chat without asking, denies or gaslights when called out, doesn’t change its behaviour. It isn’t even good. The advertisements show it doing simple things that if you’re basically competent you could do on your own, and yet when you go to try to do a simple task, it can’t acutally do it. It will give you instructions, which is pointless when you prompted it. So. Any way. I’ve been running all FOSS stuff at home and strongly considering nuking M365 on the windows instance still running on the drive in my desktop that is preferentially always second inthe boot order. windows is now the ‘break glass in case of emergency’. I’ve killed off my adobe sub a while back. I’ve tried to avoid ArcMap and ArcPro at work as much as possible (again, see previous conversations for more info), installed inkscape and gimp on my work comptuer. I’ve stopped using Illustrator if I can. I’m kind of doing it to prove a point. I feel like our corporate reliance/lock in is becoming much more of a problem since trump came in and the ai hype has taken off the way it has. I feel like, and maybe I’m wrong, that the private sector can and has tested and mostly said no to copepilot. But we at the federal government, are just guinea pigs, a bunch of stupid sucker that have it forced onto to boost those numbers. A lot of folks in private industry tried the trial versions of copepilot (and now the windows 11 that is practically more copepilot than NT kernel at this point (obviosuly hyperbole)) and said…. no. It doesn’t help, it won’t stop snooping, it can’t produce much, their own engineers don’t wanna use it. It’s injecting ads into github. I’m now, slowly, seeing what people were complaining about with the start menu. It’s fucking damn near useless. I open it and all I see is suggested bullshit. Not the stuff I actually have, not the stuff I wanna use, but dumbass suggestions. This is a work station, why am I being suggested stupid shit like candy crush and tok tok? Seriously, wtf?
And so, I don’t know if this is comprehensive enough of a long rambling tirade and l’histoire. There is a a lot more as to nuance and opinion. But I just didn’t add it all. For raisins. So, there is that. It’s been a journey, mentally, physically, philosophically, workflow wise. I think I am in a lot better of a place to make the transition complete. Sometimes I feel like all my dabbling needed/needs to have had a purpose, a poitn, like this is some kind of movie and there is a point and something I am working towards. Maybe there is. I dunno. I also feel like there is going to be a big tipping point or event that shifts things. I’m probably wrong. This isn’t France. SooooOooOOoooOo. And, I’m blathering it all to an AI chat bit.