Day 1: Choosing an OS and setting up programs
Hi, I’m Heathen. I’m starting The Odin Project today, and as I prepare to install an OS to use going forward, I thought it would be a good idea to make this blog to sort of log my journey through the project.
I’m currently on Windows but decently versed in both VMs and WSL, and I’ve also used Linux as my main OS/daily driver in the past, including Ubuntu, so this is not exactly an overwhelming experience. Right now I have WSL2 running Ubuntu 24.04 w/a Unity desktop on my laptop, and a VM running Pop! on my pc. Because I plan to do most of my work for the project at my pc, and Pop! is not officially supported, and also because I want to treat the pre-requisite of running linux as an assignment for setting it up, I’ve decided to create an environment specifically for this assignment instead of defaulting to an existing one.
With a new hard-drive for my homeLab currently shipping (and the intention of installing Linux on it being ~90% the point of ordering it in the first place), it seems silly to partition my current system to dual-boot so that leaves options 1 and 3, spin up a new VM, or use WSL, which I currently do have installed on my pc as well, just without the graphical environment attached like it is on my laptop. WSL is marked as the “advanced” option for this course, but ironically would require zero set-up on my end, and since again I wish to treat this as the first proper assignment, this feels like a cop-out, so I’m going VM.
I looked through the official Ubuntu flavors, as that’s what is supported for use by the project, and narrowed it down to Budgie and Unity, and I’ll have to admit I debated these options for a minute and read up on pros and cons of both. Still stuck, I bit the bullet and installed both as VMs and messed around with them enough for basic set-up. In the end I’m going with Budgie, because it felt lighter/less clunky and ran better at identical specs, but who knows, all of this could change and I could decide to simply stick with running WSL through Hyper terminal and call it a day. Time will tell I guess, but even if that ends up being the outcome, at least I completed the set-up as an assignment and got a little more experience under my belt.
The next section was on editors and I was pretty surprised to see we were only given one option, and not one I’m super thrilled about considering it’s proprietary and full of telemetry. I install Windows offline on my computers and I keep a usb stick full of scripts to run right after install that rip out all the AI/telemetry/bloatware. I often joke that Windows is a decent system once you remove all the Microsoft from it. This was a tough call for me, as I want to approach the program as a complete beginner would instead of assuming I know everything and deviating from the lessons, but in the end I was just wildly uncomfortable with the only supported editor. I went with Codium instead, there’s a good chance I still won’t receive any help if I get stuck(see note below), because it is technically not the “correct” editor, but at least this way it should still be straight-forward to follow along which will hopefully make it easier to not get myself stuck in the first place. And then despite all my good intentions, I did the same thing and said no thank you to Chrome. Instead of my goat Vivaldi, I did go with Brave to stay as close to the lessons as possible, then ran the de-bullshittifier script to yank Leo out. We’ll see how closely I can manage to follow along with these choices, hopefully it won’t become an issue down the road. sigh
Note: To be honest, I’m not planning on joining the discord unless I get severely stuck (and can’t google my way out of it) anyway, as I am actively trying to leave that platform entirely, so adding a new server to the mix isn’t exactly on my to-do list.