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.
My guess is you have an nvidia card and are using the nouveau (open source) module instead of the nvidia (proprietary) one.
Assuming that’s correct, here’s Ubuntu’s documentation on that. https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/nvidia-drivers-installation
I’m not sure what was wrong with the opensuse install, since I’m pretty sure I got the nvidia drivers to work, but I definitely have everything working with nvidia on fedora
You might have to tick “Force Composition Pipeline” in nvidia-settings.
Without it most UIs are laggy or tearing heavily on my rig.
For gaming performance, some games run better with Proton-GE which is a custom build containing some fixes that Valve/Steam can’t distribute as a US-based company, some games need it to run at all, some get better performance with it, some run worse, just depends. I’d recommend using GE when a game won’t run with vanilla Proton or runs poorly with it.
Also, checking your games on ProtonDB.com, clicking the PC tab on the game, you can see some tweaks other people did on the game to get the best experience with it, as well as a general idea of how well the game will run on Linux.
For non-steam games, those run good too with stuff like Heroic Games Launcher, Lutris, and Bottles but may require more manual intervention to get working in some cases compared to a lot of Steam games.
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.
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.
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.
have fun with fedora
For the office suite you can try Libre Office, in my opinion it works pretty well nowadays and if it doesn’t you can use Office365.
