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.
I made the switch in 2010.
I dual booted for a while, one day I realised that I hadn’t booted into windows for 3 months. At that point I reinstalled, no more dual booting. I haven’t looked back.
I keep a windows VM, currently has Win10 installed, I haven’t had to use it in about 3 years.
My advice is, keep dual booting. One day you’ll realise that booting into windows feels like a chore, you haven’t done it in months, so why keep it around…
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It’s not a race, take your time to read and understand what is what and how things are functioning together.
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Enjoy your stay, it’s going to be your next home, take care of it; make it beautiful, make it efficient, make sure to get rid of all what is irritating you.
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Start with the minimum and build from there.
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And, FFS, make backups ;)
And, FFS, make backups ;)
Here’s a good tutorial for an easy to use backup solution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W30wzKVwCHo
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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…
Advice is to build relationships with others who also use Linux. Find a chat room that you can stay in and stick with for a couple of years. It will be invaluable. Don’t try to do this purely from documentation, stack overflow, blog posts, and searching forums. Real live people is the way to go.
A lot of distros have their own Discord communities these days. It’s pretty easy to find people who can help in real time.
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!
I’ve been wanting to take the leap, too. I’ve got Linux installed on my gaming laptop and I’ve been trying games one by one to see if they work. Next step is dual booting on my desktop and only switching to Windows when I absolutely can’t make something work. My biggest concern is that I have a bunch of games installed on various drives that are all Windows (NTFS?) formatted and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to run them on Linux. I really don’t want to have to reinstall all of them.
My biggest concern is that I have a bunch of games installed on various drives that are all Windows (NTFS?) formatted and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to run them on Linux.
I’d check https://www.protondb.com/ and if they your favorite ones are native/gold/platinum then… move on. I’d initially NOT erase my drives and, assuming you have either patience and/or a fast connection, just let it re-download and install overnight, then enjoy. If need be bring the saves back (but again via Steam, should just work) and only once that’s done, erase the Windows partitions. This is a no risk process. Honestly some games will not work but IMHO this isn’t the question. The question rather is… will you have more playable games than time left, if so, then considering moving even without 100% coverage.
You will probably have to reinstall all of them under Wine or Proton or whatever. I don’t think it can import existing installations.
You can read NTFS drives; I still have shared drives from my Windows install despite barely using Windows at all.
You can generally import steam libraries, and then steam can do the proton work.
And you can sometimes run other programmes in Linux from the windows install - i.e. it can have it’s own Wine prefix in Linux and use the installed files on the NTFS. But this doesn’t always work - if the programme’s or game’s installer makes significant system changes or installs other software then they won’t exist in the Wine prefix and the game may not work. It’s better to install windows games fresh so everything is installed into the wine prefix.
And Lutris is well set up with scripts for installing a wide range of games from their installers; it will avoid problems reinstalling games fresh.
Linux can read and write to NTFS drives just fine. Just make sure you’re using the newer native (in-kernel) driver, ntfs3. The older user-mode driver, ntfs-3g, still works but has much worse performance, which I guess should be a concern if you’re going to run games off of it (ntfs-3g is fine for casual use)
Also, make sure you have backups. I don’t care how stable NTFS drivers are I don’t fucking trust them for daily use, especially writes.
I recommend copying files off of NTFS and onto ext4 if you’re able. If you can’t, try to keep operations to read only.
I’ve lost too many drives due to stupid issues (sometimes me making an error, sometimes the driver not working properly).
Backup:
- 3 different locations
- 2 different media formats
- 1 offsite
ntfs drives do work in linux, but there may be some issues sometimes. i switched alnost 2 years ago and i have distrohopped a bit. fedora and nobara had intermittent issues with the ntfs drive, it suddenly became unmountable and it takes some fighting to get it back. in mint, the drive constantly corrupts files and entire folders, and the only way to delete those is to boot into windows and delete them there.
There is a linux NTFS fix package, I forget the proper name, it tries to clean up the filesystem like windows would
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.
I haven’t, this is cool 👀👀
The best piece of advice I was given, that I seldom see repeated is this: learn how the filesystem is structured.
It makes everything else easier
What the shit - this is how I learn ‘cd’ without parameters takes you home?!?!
The amount of times my dumb ass has typed “cd ~/.” Or something stupid instead of a simple cd… Gaht dang
I second this. Also, taking time to partition correctly for your purpose, can make disto hopping easier.
This is very good advice
Keep a cloud-synced notebook of bugs, ideas, and fixes. That way, you can help people in the future or know how to do things for yourself if you ever need to reinstall. I have notes for fixing things like my keyboard layout on GDM/SDDM or how to set up certain software in a privileged
podman
container.Yeah i keep a nextcloud synced Obsidian vault and I have a entry for fresh installing my popos system with a list of all the software I install and from where with an Obsidian link to a note of each individual software if it needs more info, like config settings of rapid photo Downloader so that my photos are always imported and named the same or how to add the repository for tabby so that it updates along with all the stuff when I do apt update
I did this a few months ago. I haven’t found replacements for everything, but I’ve found that it’s really come down to my not actually using those things very much in the first place, so I haven’t had to do the work.
When I look, I find something that works. What are you still looking for?
I find the array of installation options a little overwhelming or intimidating sometimes. If I can just do the equivalent of apt-get, that’s, of course, easy enough. But sometimes things are just realeased as tar balls, and I have to go and look up WTF I’m supposed to do each time. Nothing comes up often enough for me to internalize it.
I do find myself chafing against just the fundamental differences of the *nix environment from the DOS-based heritage of Windows. And I find it difficult to get help with certain things sometimes because the installed user/developer base isn’t super interested in supporting different modes of interaction (“just use the terminal, it’s so much faster [for me]” is a common refrain that makes me want to get stabby). But 99% of the time, it’s been smooth sailing.
At this stage, if you have drivers for everything, and there’s nothing mission critical that’s still tied to Windows, the best advice I can give you is to copy your important files over from your Windows partition, and then dump it. If you have a 2nd computer, leave that one running Windows for now. The duel booting can make it tempting to just reboot into Windows “just for this one thing”, and stay there until you next have to restart.
Bash is always there, and bash scripts and snippets are precise. Describing gui manipulations when the GUI keeps changing is also quite hard… what if the person you are interacting with has a 2-yo system and you have the bleeding edge? Even knowing which menu the settings are in can be frustrating for the helper.
Windows users (e.g. me at work) get grumpy when Microsoft starts changing the menu structure after keeping it consistent for 20 years and start thinking of powershell scripts to create consistency between our engineering workstations.
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, @bpt11@sh.itjust.works and welcome to the community!
- Always keep a live USB of your distro handy
- Don’t ignore the terminal, you’re doing yourself a major disservice if you do. Terminal is life
- The ArchWiki isn’t just for Arch users
Don’t be afraid to think for yourself.
You’re just using a computer. It’s not that complicated or religious.
i always do have a distro live USB in my bag at all times. you never know who gets interested in the question “which distro do you use?”
I used to, but when someone finally got interested, the usb media was so outdated, that I had to download and write a new iso :D
Carry a dual USB A/USB C drive. You then flash distros from your phone. Distros on the fly!
Thanks for the tip, but my phone still uses micro usb lol
Bruh
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.