Moving to Linux

Two weeks ago, Tailwind CSS reached version 2. There were plenty of features under the hood, and one of them is Dark Mode. I haven't tested the feature yet, but I'm going to in the future, as numerous people have enabled dark mode in either their operating system or their browser.

Renovate Bot created a PR to upgrade my Tailwind CSS dependency to v2. I was excited to upgrade only to find out that they have dropped support for Node v10.x. v10.x is still LTS until the end of April 2021, and I was baffled as to why they dropped support this early. I regressed to v1.9.6 and ignored the next PR that would upgrade it to v2.

It took me a few days to realize that eventually, all of my dependencies will cease to support Node v10. There is no assurance that I could have my own computer yet, and I will be definitely stuck using a still-running old laptop with Windows 7. Then the upgrade to Windows 10 failed; that is when I finally decided to use Linux.

I've shopped a few distros that I feel comfortable using, and I finally decided to use AntiX. This distro is based on Debian and is designed to work on older computers. It also has a small memory footprint, which is great because this machine only has 3 GB of memory. I initially installed the 32-bit version, but Node.js only supports 64-bit versions of Linux, which prompted me to change to 64-bit.

So far, so good, and I've never been happier. I'm currently using Node v14. The last time I used Linux was in 2007 when I was curious about using it. That time, I really did a distro hop. When I'm not satisfied with the current distro, I would reformat my hard drive and change to another distro. I really don't play games with this laptop, and most of the time I'm using VS Code because I'm constantly updating my website internally or I'm working on another personal project.