That’s pretty much it, after several months, maybe even a year of wanting to take the leap, a couple days ago I finally did it. I just wanted to share this cuz I think it’s an absolute win, and I guess just see if anyone has any general advice to keep in mind during the process. I ended up choosing Fedora, right now I’m dual booting while I’m still in the process of finding software alternatives and getting everything set up, but trying to minimize my use of windows as much as possible, and so far I’ve been loving it. I love this community and I just wanted to thank everyone that has given any advice or suggestions in the past, i’m really excited about this and grateful that I could get to this point.
All I have to say is: welcome, good luck and have fun.
its amazing how nice it is now and makes sense for most people. I should have way before this but it was a thing with my wife. still can’t get her to take the plunge though.
Welcome!
Don’t be afraid to experiment relentlessly. Even if you break your OS, that’s just more experience fixing or reinstalling it. Also back up your important files locally and remotely.
good on you! I just recently did the same thing as you (cos of some work apps that only work with windows right now)
small question, did you go with silverblue or workstation?
I went with silverblue and it’s a bit annoying looking up guides/forums posts because they all use dnf 😭
That’s what Distrobox is for. It’s super useful.
Have you looked at any of the Universal Blue OSs based off of Silverblue? You can rebase to them extremely easily and try them out with no risk.
Cool. In a little over a month, I hit 3 years.
For some of the last really stubborn pieces of software that kept me locked it to at least dual booting windows, I’ve found running them in bottles is working really well. Bottles has a community preset for Fruity loops Studio, but it wasn’t really working. Oh it would run, but with massive input and audio lag, most VSTs just wouldn’t work with FL in that install. What does work, is creating a bottle for gaming, and then just installing everything through the “run exe” at the bottle prefix page. After 8 years of dual booting, I finally nuked my windows installs.
I did the switch a few months ago and I did it cold turkey. Turning off secureboot and reformating my steam library drive solved all the issues I had. I also reccomend using timeshift or .tar and a bash script to make backups of your os when it’s stable, that way you can experiment in peace.
My advice having made the move (but with a fair bit of linux tinkering before hand):
- Don’t rush to delete Windows; you’re doing the right thing keeping it about while you adjust to a new OS and in case there are some things you just can’t do in Linux
- If you want to understand your OS and enjoy tinkering / learning, think about using a virtual machine to play with a linux system to get used to it. As you’re on Fedora, you can install KVM and Virt-Manager, make a virtual machine and inside it install another Linux OS which you can practice with. It can even be Fedora - and this can let you make changes in a disposable environment before you do them for real in your whole OS or just to see “what happens if”. I’ve even built an Arch system within a VM just so I can understand more of how linux works
- Back up your home folder before making really big changes - this is where everything that belongs to you is kept, and even contains all your personal config files. Back up and restoring the Home folder can make things much faster to fix if you accidentally mess things up
Having made a switch almost two years ago now, I strongly support all three pieces of advice
I did the same thing about a year ago, going to fedora (KDE) from windows. I’ve booted into windows about 5 times in the last year or so
Congrats! Just keep at it, Fedora is stable.
It gets easier with every solved problem!
Welcome. Sounds like you’re going to be very happy here. Fedora is a great choice. I love what they’re doing with atomic desktops.
Before you know it, it will be over a decade post-Windows like me. This week I have been trying to get a Linux phone to a satisfactory state to leave the mobile duopoly behind…
i really wanted to set up passthrough GPU on my desktop so I could run little windows vms with full 3D acceleration and I got so close but ultimately failed. I really want to try again though because it would be so nice to be able to just blow away vms after I’m done with the game i wanted to play
I won’t deny, it’s refreshing to see posts like these, and I’ve seen a few of them around the web. Perhaps we’re really going to slowly see some positive change in the tech world.
Good luck, @[email protected] and welcome to the community!
