So I’ve been wanting to try to move to linux for the past few months but have been waiting to be done school, so I could the MS office suite behind me. I’m mostly writing this to share my experience for people who are considering switching.
I finally wiped my laptop to use as a test environment and installing and using it went really well so I went straight to dual booting my main PC with windows (some games I play need to be on windows for now). I started with trying opensuse tumbleweed because I wanted to try to KDE since gnome didnt vibe as well with me in my experience with Ubuntu VMs. It worked great on my laptop but the experience felt quite laggy on my desktop (if anyone has any ideas as to why, I would love to hear them). After fiddling around with installing codecs for a few hours I decided to try out KDE fedora.
This has been working super duper well so far out of the box. No sluggishness, everything’s been easy to install and whenever I need to change any settings a quick search gets me what I need. The main thing I have left to figure out is gaming performance. I’ve launched 1-2 games without too much difficulty but it does seem there maybe be a performance hit. Gotta test more before coming to any conclusions there. Hoping all the games work well so I can decidedly move to Linux without leaving too many games behind.
If you are in the fedora mood, try nobara os. It’s fedora but with a spin on gaming, patches and some gui tools also. You can also try an inmutable distro like bazzite, which is also fedora and also focused on gaming. My advise would be to try a couple of things now that your system is clean and stick with whatever you like best.
To be honest, most things in Nobra can be installed/done to regular Fedora. And, unlike Nobra, Fedora has more than 1 maintainer: goof for the bus factor.
The nobara tweaks and configuration can be done on fedora but op is unlikely to know what they are or how to do them. If I remember correctly there’s quite a few important gaming things that fedora doesn’t ship with but I don’t know what they are cause I loaded fedora then switched to nobara after a few hours.
Maybe pop os is a good choice since it’s a mix of gaming related and beginner friendly.
They use fedora repos so it shouldn’t have much impact.
TBH, I don’t really super feel like moving around since I now have something that works. While I do like setting up an environment, I can’t say I wouldn’t rather use it than set it up :P
Could always triple boot, use the third to play around to see if’n something else is even better than what you have, or use a container to test run different linuxes… linii? Personally I’m enjoying LMDE, and don’t like Gnome either, but that’s the great thing about Linux, so many different options.
I may at some point consider. I’m gonna rock out with this for the time being though, and later down the road if I feel like exploring I can set up a third boot partition. I appreciate the suggstions!
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For sure. Lots of people here are enthusiasts that like trying out different things and different distros. Most people will just find something they like and stick with it for years. Don’t get me wrong, it can be fun to jump around, but don’t feel compelled to. Fedora will likely serve you well for the forseeable future.
I tried nebora after I effed up my kunutnu install. I was doing some super weird stuff. (Tried to remove snap)
Nebora for me was the worst experience out of every distro I’ve tried. I went back to kubuntu and manually applied what nebora did with much better results. (This time around I removed snap before doing anything else).
Kububtu with snap removed has been perfect so far.
Honestly just use Fedora or Linux mint. Nobara has a very small community so if you run into issues we may not be able to help you.
I tried Nobara recently and had awful difficulties with it, probably because I have a NVIDIA GPU.
My GPU (3080 Ti) is compatible with the drivers it specified but it would get stuck on a blank screen.