Goodbye 2025

Baby Liz!

The biggest event of 2025 was, of course, the birth of my daughter. When you welcome your second child many changes in your life are the same as they were with your first one, but you also have to learn a lot of new things, because going from one to more than one still changes your mindset (less so than when going from none to one, but nevertheless). And in our case since it's been almost 12 years since we were parents of a newborn, even those already learned habits had to be re-learned.

Both of us, but especially the mum, have had much less free time this year even considering we didn't have a lot of it in the first place that due to our son's disability. But it's something that feels both tiring and rewarding. Simply speaking, nothing else you could have been doing instead feels remotely as important.

All of the points below are absolutely dwarfed by the baby's arrival, but with this in mind there were still a few things that happened in 2025 that I'd like to reflect on.

Learning to swim

I didn't learn to swim as a kid and then it always felt embarrassing to start learning - and it wasn't like there were good facilities for that where I used to live. So I convinced myself that I simply don't need it and I don't even enjoy seaside vacations (which remains true to a degree even today).

At the same time my son loves swimming, and so my partner used to take him to a swimming pool and swam with him in the sea in summer while I was watching from the beach. And then the baby was born in April, and Maria could no longer go to seaside with our eldest in August as we used to do every year. So in order to not let him down I signed up for adult swimming lessons in our local Leisure Centre, and it turned out to be surprisingly comfortable experience. I never felt judged despite being 43 and having to learn from the very first steps.

I started with weekly classes in late May but then signed up for another track (and another direct debit) to do it twice a week. 13 sessions later, I got on a train to Margate and had my first proper dip in the sea.

In August, I was able to go swimming with my son. It was very joyous, and I got both upset that I missed out so much and excited for new experiences unlocked for the rest of my life.

I still go to swimming classes regularly, but at this point mainly for technique, and am enjoying it very much. From nothing to a regular activity in a relatively short time - this doesn't happen every year!

Switching to Linux

My old Macbook's battery bulged after about 10 years, and I decided that to try a 'Linux first' replacement, eventually buying an OEM laptop shell with only Linux (Pop_OS!) on it. There are more details and first impressions in my earlier posts here and here, so I'll skip that now and proceed straight to how I feel about it almost a year later.

In short, I still think Linux is not ready for an average user. It isn't even ready for an average user from 20 years ago (when most people still remembered what e.g. Windows registry was). It got massively better, but still isn't quite there, and if it didn't happen already, it is unlikely to ever happen at all.

My own experience is exacerbated by the fact I am running a brand new window manager (Cosmic) that was written from scratch by a small team and is still unstable, so there are not just smaller bugs like incorrectly scaled application icons, but also stuff like launching the application and seeing nothing because it didn't get allocated a window somehow.

Or, to give you another example, Firefox recenly stopped loading pages after my system wakes up from sleep. Chromium based browsers work, but I don't wan't to use Chrome, and other clones have their own problems (Vivaldi, for instance, handles fonts terribly on Linux).

But even outside of that, on the basic stable Ubuntu level, there are still problems I regularly run into that aren't something you even think about on Mac or Windows. To give you an idea, the latest one is that suddenly my system volume became linked to hardware volume of my DAC, and so I can no longer max out DAC's power for the best resolution while still keeping the volume at the comfortable level. And when I try to fix it, the system volume detaches from hardware and stop regulating anything at all.

Apparently it has to do with 'pipewire' update and the way different applications use its 'sinks', and that I no longer use 'pulse audio'. Whatever that means (I'm still learning).

Did I mention that applications installed from different sources (snap, flatpak, native apt) may not be able to communicate with each other (such as accept drag and drops or open each other's associated links)?

The list goes on. And don't let me start on GPU drivers!

But you know what's weird? I can't image going back to a commercial OS. Moving to Linux on my personal machine was the best thing I done in years in personal computing. If someone gifts me a Macbook or a Thinkpad today, my first step will be installing Linux on them with zero hesitation.

It is probably just my age and professional background, but... I feel fully in control. Yes, there are endless bugs and incompatibilities, yet each of them is either solvable or has a way around that (and by the way dealing with that had become enormously easier with modern LLMs - interrogating them is a much better experience that rummaging through abandoned forum pages). I know that I can change everything if I want to, and that every component of my system is replaceable. I don't mind having to deal with all the bad stuff above in exchange for that feeling. It's like moving to your own house from a hotel.

Don't do it on your only computer or a computer your work depends on, but otherwise... just do it. 2026 IS THE YEAR OF LINUX ON DESKTOP.

Photo and sketching

I continue to enjoy shooting on film, and in addition to my Yashica camera I wrote about last year I have re-united with an even older fully manual Practica SLR that I have bought more than 20 years ago in the uni. Most of that time it sat on a shelf on my parents' unheated garage, and to my surprise it still works flawlessly without any service.

Which is something that on its own feels special, because what piece of modern tech (that has far fewer moving parts) would be able to spend 20 years abandoned and then start working as if it never happened? Mind boggling.

I have also discovered that I dislike grainy 'real' black and white film and that the C41 process ones are actually better. Also that Kodak Gold is the most common colour film for a reason. More niche and original is not always better - and you're already using an obsolete technology, you don't have to keep digging deeper!

As to sketching, I think I'm getting bored of digital and may try paper and pencils again next year.

I find 'traditional' drawing asymmetrically different from the digital one. Obviously you have no undo button or layers, so you have to think more about every new line. At the same time you have much more precision and control when drawing that line. So they don't quite replace each other in terms of experience, and it should be fun to go back to that again.

I also need to draw more women's faces. I find that much more difficult because smaller imperfections are less forgivable in how we perceive female looks and what doesn't really break the likeness of a male portrait will ruin the female one. Which is without a doubt just a small manifestation of a much bigger cultural phenomenon, but nevertheless, I pledge to draw more women in 2026.

Here are my different attempts at capturing young woman's face, and I am not happy with any of them (for starters, she is always older than I'm aiming for!)

Thank you for reading, and happy New Year! You may also want to read what I wrote about music, books and theatre that I enjoyed in 2025.