the family pc runs ubuntu now

03 May, 2026

In addition to moving off streaming last week, I also moved our not so old family PC to Linux. Apple Music was the last remaining indispensable proprietary piece of software on that computer aside from Windows itself. My little sister used the service there since the PC is her only device that could run that app. Her emerald green Nokia flip-phone has some of her library loaded as mp3s, but Apple Music was where most of what she liked was. Since the subscription had now lapsed, I fetched all that I knew she liked for her in preparation of this move, put Ubuntu 26.04 on a USB, and removed the abomination that is Windows from the family PC.

I went with the most mainstream that wasn’t Linux Mint because I personally prefer GNOME to the Cinnamon desktop and aside from that, the two distributions are largely the same. I found KDE as a desktop environment to be too visually overloaded with options that I appreciate, but my sister and parents would be overwhelmed by. I also needed something with the widest possible hardware compatibility because the PC has a shitty built-in Realtek WiFi and Bluetooth card that I recently augmented (because I won’t touch the insides of that PC again) with a USB WiFi and Bluetooth card from ASUS. I didn’t want to risk those not working by default. The only other alternative I considered was Fedora and that one requires a couple of extra steps to install the Nvidia drivers in addition to the WiFi drivers and I’d have to sign them myself to get them to play nicely with Secure Boot. Done that in the past and it was hell, no thank you.

As you can imagine, going from a single taskbar layout to one panel on the side and another menu bar-like panel at the top was a bit disorienting at first, but my sister found it prettier and, after a few minutes, was right at home. She is the main user of that PC in the living room, so if she likes it, that’s all I care about. My parents only use the browser; as long as that were recognizable (the same Firefox icon), they accepted the move. When I installed the GNOME Music app for her and pinned it to the side panel, she was ecstatic because it was just like her beloved Apple Music. It even had a very similar icon!

This transition is better in nearly every way. Not only is GNOME’s design a lot friendlier and accessible than Windows 11, its core apps and those of the community¹ are much more thoughtful and reminiscent of the default macOS apps in their balance of simplicity and feature set. Our favorite thing about them is that they’re often designed to do one thing and do it well which makes them more reliable² and easier to learn. Aside from a different music client, every app stayed the same and new ones were added to the lot. Firefox, OnlyOffice, KeePassXC and Signal all work the same. What’s better, many great and small utilities like Ear Tag for tagging her music, Blanket for rain sounds and the like, Keypunch for typing practice, and Iotas for her journaling are really nice additions that she appreciates.

I’m surprised of how well all this went. If it weren’t for one ridiculous issue, the transition would be perfect. Wireplumber, the new media session manager, or Pipewire, which handles audio among other things, refuses to detect when cabled headphones are plugged into the headphone jack on a running session. I have to restart the Pipewire and Wireplumber services on a running session for them to detect the new output device. The issue has been reported on Pipewire’s Gitlab for three months with no activity. So our workaround is that we make sure the headphones are plugged in on system start, which is ridiculous and inconvenient, and switch output devices manually. I can’t have my little sister typing stupid systemd commands to do something so incredibly simple. Did we fix Bluetooth issues on Linux in favor of fucking over cabled headphones?

Anyway, aside from that annoying thing, it’s all been great so far.