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.
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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.
- 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
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I used to, but when someone finally got interested, the usb media was so outdated, that I had to download and write a new iso :D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
Don’t be afraid to think for yourself.
You’re just using a computer. It’s not that complicated or religious.
Congrats! Just keep at it, Fedora is stable.
It gets easier with every solved problem!
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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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Originally read ‘from Linux to Windows’ and I was like, ‘What?’
Hey guys, my Dad was always a neck bearded Unix admin so I’ve grown up my whole life on FreeBSD, then moving over to Gentoo during my teen years.
I’m starting to have thoughts about switching to Windows given that’s what my new job uses, but I couldn’t find any instructions on compiling Windows outside of very outdated releases like 2000. Also, does anyone know if emacs and htop are compatible, as those are my most used applications?
… but I couldn’t find any instructions on compiling Windows outside of very outdated releases like 2000.
Damn! I was hoping to do it with Windows 7. Looks like that ship is doomed as well.
One of my friends did this. No clue how you can go from Arch back to windows… just wow. I found that insane.
That would be a wild experiment.
This can happen with people that refuse to learn!
I almost stopped reading at the first four words, tbh.
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
I second this. Also, taking time to partition correctly for your purpose, can make disto hopping easier.
I think partitioning was one of the first skills I learned and the one I took most for granted. I had started on Arch cause I wanted to be cool and I liked arduous things, but I just ended up reading on LUKS, TPM, LVM, mdadm, etc. and different ways to set up your partitions. I never really took time to appreciate past me for learning it lol
This is very good advice
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 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…
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.
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
podmancontainer.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
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…
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 👀👀
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.
Post-Snowden and post-Windows, I also started with Fedora, and, well, it honestly didn’t go all that well (this of course was my experience! If you like Fedora and it works for you, then 👍! Not here to dis the distro!). Actually, I think it had more to do with GNOME than with Fedora, so it depends on which desktop environment you’re using; when I switched DE to Cinnamon all my problems seemed to vanish into thin air. And from there, I just went straight to Mint and have been happy as a clam ever since and never looked back.
In my experience, running Windows as a VM inside Mint was overall much better than dual booting, which can really get to be a pain after a while (and also I think that the Windows partition will sometimes overwrite the Linux part so be careful!); it sounds hard, but it isn’t—if old and senile Erinaceus can do it, you can too! Always happy to provide recommendations.
EDIT: Also (and again not to step on anyone’s toes), I never had good luck using Wine; this is perhaps because I was trying to run Photoshop and other heavy, Adobe-type things in it (this was before Creative Cloud). Other programs might work differently with it, but in every case for me, a VM has worked better. I don’t play games (I know, boring), but I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t for people’s dependence on Adobe products that Windows might finally start losing a lot of market share and eventually end up on the rubbish heap where it belongs.
All I have to say is: welcome, good luck and have fun.
