The Year of Linux on the Desktop - Part 1: Origins

In or around 2002 I got my first Mac, a white G3 iBook. Ever since, my main computer has been a Mac.

I’ve certainly not only used Macs since then. My day job has mostly had me using Windows (except for a brief and unsuccessful diversion into academia for a couple of years where I was able to use a Mac), but the computers I have bought myself and have control over have been Macs.¹

In recent years, however, I’ve been beginning the question the stewardship of the Mac by Apple’s current management. Apple just isn’t that into the Mac anymore, and I’m a bit wary of hitching my wagon to a platform that’s always going to play second fiddle (or third, or fifth) to cash cows like the iPhone.

As a result, every now and then I have a look to see how green the grass is on the other side. I’ll load up Linux on a VM or a Raspberry Pi or something and have a play and quickly forget about it. While my objective is usually to see whether Linux is now a viable replacement for macOS for my use, mostly I don’t get that far. Usually I’ll just get distracted by something and move on and back to the Mac.

I’m not new to Linux. I ran Linux as my main desktop OS before I jumped ship to Mac OS X. My memory is a little hazy on the details, but I think I was running a Linux desktop from the Debian Bo release (in 1997). Chances are I was a Linux user before you were born; certainly before it was easy to be one. I’ve also had a bunch of servers running Linux (and at one point OpenBSD, for some reason). But we asked less of computers those days, and the limitations of Linux better fitted within the limitations of computing generally.

A couple of months ago I upended my home setup and retired my old 27 inch iMac for a M2 Pro Mac Mini and an Apple Studio Display, and to be honest it’s a pretty great combination. And the Apple Studio Display works fine with my generic WinTel work laptop (including the camera, microphone and speakers on the Studio Disply), so I’m back to one monitor, one keyboard, and two pointing devices (because of course the Magic Trackpad does not work with the work laptop).

Once this was all working well my mind turned again to the Linux experiment. One idea I had was to get a cheapish micro PC and load Linux up on that, or maybe run some sort of VM or container on my Synology.² I had played around with the idea of a Raspberry Pi desktop at some point, but it was just too underpowered, but the idea of something small and silent with low power usage still appealed.

Eventually I decided to try out a UTM virtual machine running on the Mac Mini. And it’s actually pretty great.

I have used Parallels and VMWare on Intel Macs in the past, and both are pretty good at what they do, but UTM, while it may not have their bells and whistles, has enough bells and whistles for my purposes. You can full-screen the VM and copy and paste between the Mac and the VM. It looks like you can do other things like map drives betweem them, but I actually like to have a bit of separation – I don’t want to make a mistake in Linux and risk that affecting any of the files on the Mac.

The exact (and evolving) software setup will be the topic of a future post, however as a teaser the first distribution I tried was the ARM64 version of Ubuntu (24.04), with Wayland. It’s a pretty decent experience. There is a bit of weirdness around it being the ARM64 version – some packages are inexplicably missing (BitWarden, for example, doesn’t seem to have an ARM Linux version), which may be Ubuntu or may be ARM. I haven’t noticed anything in particular about Wayland; it doesn’t seem any less janky than X11, but it’s also hard to tell how much of my experience is because of Linux and how much is because Linux is running in a VM.

Part of what makes this both more complex and possibly more simpler than it might otherwise be is I pretty rarely use a desktop computer recreationally. The vast majority of my personal computing time is spent on an iPad, and I tend to only be sitting at the desktop when I need to do something a bit specialised (like a lot of typing).

The iPad is a pretty polarising machine, or possibly just a personal one. A lot of people who have an iPad complain that they never use it. My anecdotal experience is that people who have an iPad and don’t use it mostly use a laptop, so they do most of their computing on the couch with the laptop. The couch computing is where I use the iPad, and a lot of that is doom-scrolling social media and reading the bazillion RSS feeds that I subscribe to.

As a result, the number of things I need a desktop operating system to do well is relatively constrained. The flip side of this is that I need to either have Linux applications which work well enough with the Apple ecosystem to enable me to continue using my iPad for most things, or I need to find something that I enjoy using on the couch as much as the iPad. And then there is the whole iPhone thing too. This dilema will be the topic of a future post.

But, to be completely honest, I’m less looking for a solution than an excuse to waste some time sitting in front of a computer and maybe learn something in the process. There is no TL;DR here: the journey is the point, not the destination.

The plan is for this to be a series of posts, and you should be able to find them all under the The Year of Linux on the Desktop tag (assuming I don’t get bored with writing them and do actually finish).