Thanks for the response. I’m doing great now. Got a new job as a sysadmin making about 35% more than my old job, and I get to work on Linux a bunch, and my team is really solid.

Still sucks that I lost all that work, but I was able to get some of the old hardware back for free, so my old servers can live again in my home lab.

Make sure to use Steam cloud save, and be aware that Cities skylines can run both natively on Linux and through Proton, so be sure to try both to see what gives you the best performance.

I use a handful of mods and haven’t had any issues beyond just mod weirdness.

Lol this is somebody’s hackerman fantasy post, the chain smoking, the terminology, I can practically hear the early 2000’s drum n’ bass/nightcore in the background.

Yeah, especially because Cities Skylines runs great on Linux.

Sorry, typo, I fixed it now. Pseudo-VM is what I meant.

It’s alright now, does what it needs to do. It’s kind of a pain because of the weirdness of running as a pseudo-VM, but better than no Linux at all.

Sorry for your loss :( Same thing happened to me about a year ago.

I was the sole IT admin for a small company. Used Debian with KDE on a snappy little Thinkpad. No issues managing all the infra with it, even though most of it was MS trash. I used Reminnia for RDP into the Windows servers, and the Browser for all O365/Entra administration. A Windows 11 VM for the rare times I needed to test Windows-only apps or configs.

Worked like a dream, but then we got bought out by a huge competitor. Their IT team took everything over. I had to decommission my on-prem Linux servers, Ansible automations, Open Project tracking and FOSS ticketing system. Finally, I had to give up my Sweet little Linux Thinkpad and use their standard-issue HP Windows 11 garbage laptop. They were slow, clunky, buggy, and ugly, it was awful.

I quit a few months later after securing the job I have now. It pays about 35% more, has twice as much PTO, and about 50% of my workload is Linux stuff. It’s so much better.

My advice, if it’s truly non negotiable, install WSL first thing. It’s not nearly as good as having actual Linux, because it’s running inside of Microslop’s horrid OS, but it’s better than nothing. Try to be an advocate for FOSS at the company, see if you can convince leadership to let you implement Linux-based solutions wherever they might fit, make yourself the de facto expert on them so you at least get to work on Linux and FOSS infra.

Aside from that, start job hunting. Try to find a job that will let you be more Linuxy.

Linux Mint. Everything including full system version upgrades and GPU driver installations can be done via GUI.

The default look and feel is Windows-y, and the Mint team does a great job of pre-loading their distro with all the basic apps most people need, including a good printer app, scanner app, PDF viewer, media player, etc.

I’ve been liking vanilla Debian more and more lately. It takes a bit of time to set up properly, and there are some drawbacks for certain software stacks. But in general, rock stable, no muss, barely any fuss.

Once it’s set up, it’s awesome for workhorse servers.

And as long as you don’t need anything cutting edge, it’s not bad as a desktop OS. I used Debian12 with the Plasma DE for a while at a job I had and it was very usable. A few weird issues, but nothing terrible.

All we want is a really good FOSS browser and email client…

“A great commander secures his victory before entering into battle. A poor commander first rushes into battle, then searches for victory.”

~Sun Tzu, The Art of War

If I want simple and super stable, Cinnamon. If I want sexy, custom, and slightly less stable, Plasma.

Ooh yeah, that is better 🤌

Slopilot

Brotato…so much Brotato…

Yeah, it’s a neat little tool. I used it recently at my work. We had a big list of endpoints that we needed to make sure were powered down each night for a week during a patching window.

A sysadmin on my team wrote a script that pinged all of the endpoints in the list and returned only the ones that still were getting a response, that way we could see how many were still powered on after a certain time. But he was just manually running the script every few minutes in his terminal.

I suggested using the watch command to execute the script, and then piping the output into the sort command so the endpoints were nicely alphabetical. Worked like a charm!

The watch command is very useful, for those who don’t know, it starts an automated loop with a default of two seconds and executes whatever commands you place after it.

It allows you to actively monitor systems without having to manually re-run your command.

So for instance, if you wanted to see all storage block devices and monitor what a new storage device shows up as when you plug it in, you could do:

watch lsblk

And see in real time the drive mount. Technically not “real time” because the default refresh is 2 seconds, but you can specify shorter or longer intervals.

Obviously my example is kind of silly, but you can combine this with other commands or even whole bash scripts to do some cool stuff.

I’ve been lucky, at two of my previous jobs, I was permitted to use a Linux laptop instead of the default Windows ones, it was wonderful.

Sadly you’re right though, at least in the US, even in the IT world, unless you’re working specifically at a Linux company, you’re almost certainly using Windows.

My current job is all Windows, even though my team spends a significant amount of time maintaining Linux systems. I just open up WSL and try to pretend It’s running on bare metal. 😞

~/Repos (For all the github and other code repositories I work in)

~/Scripts (All my random Bash scripts, sometimes for testing out stuff)

~/Junk (Mostly used for testing programs or small project components that aren’t mature enough to have their own repo)

One reason: It’s not FOSS, and because of that, it’s not protected from the Capitalist profit motive that’s always pushing the creators/owners towards enshitification.

The same forces act upon FOSS too, but the difference is that FOSS has structural immunity built into it. If the software enshitifies, it can be forked and maintained by a community that values software freedom.

We’ve seen it happen time and again. Terraform, CentOS, RHEL, The Xen Hypervisor, etc. When companies try to take freedom away from FOSS, they fail, because their users and maintainers are empowered by FOSS licenses (especially restrictive ones like the GPL) and can fight back.

With proprietary software, the users are powerless, only the owners have control.

Don’t trust promises, good intentions, or corporate slogans. Trust free software and the open ecosystems they thrive in.

PS, Jellyfin is amazing ❤️