• It’s not a race, take your time to read and understand what is what and how things are functioning together.

• 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.

• Start with the minimum and build from there.

• And, FFS, make backups ;)

Originally read ‘from Linux to Windows’ and I was like, ‘What?’

Congrats! Just keep at it, Fedora is stable.

It gets easier with every solved problem!

• 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

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.

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

I switched aid after windows 10 was launched. It was kind of tough in the beginning, but after a couple years any and all concerns about this or that not working or how to do something on Linux had disappeared.

Nowadays the os feels like a powerful tool that can do anything I need, and never gets in the way. It’s truly a pleasure to use.

So I guess id say that there is light at the end of the tunnel, even if the transition seems hard at times.

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

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 😭

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.

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.

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.

Lessons learned when switching:

Some things I didn’t expect just work differently on Linux and it took time to figure out those differences. For instance, a change to a network interface config on Windows usually takes effect when you hit the “OK” button. Linux requires toggling the interface for that change to take effect. That one took me a couple of frustrating hours to figure out. There are lots of other examples like this so keep it in mind if things aren’t working as you expect.

Trying to do absolutely everything on Linux right away was a mistake. I started switching back to Windows for quick tasks and then learning how to do those tasks on Linux when I could spend a few minutes figuring them out. Over time I spent more and more time running Linux and one day realized I hadn’t started Windows in months.

In addition to (or instead of) dual booting, create a virtual machine to allow you to use what you need in either OS without rebooting.

Lastly, if you find that you’re spending a lot of time fixing OS problems don’t be afraid to try something else. Haven’t spent much time with Fedora, but I use Mint daily because I don’t have to fuss with the OS much. Others in my household have more problems with Windows 11.

Cool. In a little over a month, I hit 3 years.