For the new workstation dedicated to Keppytronics consulting work, I chose Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.

Long story short, I’ve mainly been a Windows user since childhood, starting with Windows 3.1. Looking back, I think everything since Windows 2000 has been a mistake, slowly ramping up the heat like the usual frog-in-boiling-water metaphor. Windows 2000 was great, Windows XP was fine, Windows 7 was OK, Windows 10 got on my nerves, and Windows 11 was intolerable. Every little thing was too slow, too web-obsessed, too privacy-invasive, too pushy about AI. When every patch makes things worse, I know I’m not in their target audience anymore. Unless Microsoft completely changes its tune, I’m never giving them another dime if I can help it.

I dabbled in various flavors of Linux over the years, but used Windows for my primary machine until 2025. That’s when I switched my gaming PC to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. After some initial pain with NVIDIA drivers, it’s been an absolute joy. Everything I need either “just works” or can be fixed with guidance from StackOverflow. I’d forgotten how liberating it feels when software actually respects its users and prioritizes performance over pushy marketing.

When I purchased a workstation specifically for consulting work, I naturally chose Ubuntu again. The 24.04 installer didn’t work with the new GPU, so I upgraded to 26.04. My thoughts:

• The easy option for full-drive encryption was a big plus. I previously used Veracrypt to secure confidential documents, but a blanket policy of “just encrypt everything” is much simpler and easier in practice.
• Official NVIDIA drivers were dead on arrival. Every version I tried resulted in black screen on boot, even with nomodeset and related flags. The simplest workaround was to choose the open-source Nouveau GPU drivers during the initial install. I will need to revisit this if I ever need CUDA support for a work project.
• Rebooting repeatedly to test GPU drivers (see previous bullet) is a time-consuming pain. It’s made worse when GRUB automatically boots to a broken black-screen configuration, the time window for various keyboard overrides is short, and the mainboard requires me to hold the power button for ten full seconds for a forced shutdown. (I’m not bitter. 😅) To make fixes easier, open /etc/default/grub and set options GRUB_TIMEOUT=3 and GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=menu to give yourself a few seconds to make changes with minimal impact during normal operation.
• On that note, I’ve had problems with GRUB being unresponsive on 4K monitors. This can be fixed by setting GRUB_GFXMODE=1280x1024x32,auto to set a more reasonable resolution with a decent response time.

In other news, the new business cards arrived.