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
The sluggishness you experienced has a lot to do with Ubuntu itself. At its base it’s a very good OS, but canonical is messing up on the details.
Ubuntu derivatives like Linux Mint or PopOS have spent a lot of time resolving this. They perform very well for most and have got excellent stability because their software stack is a little older.
For gaming, fedora is probably the base OS that most prefer at the moment. It’s at a good balance point of stability the latest tech.
The other option if you want to go more bleeding edge is Manjaro, but expect some things to break on occasion.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Most excellent. I’m glad to see things are working out, and that you’ve found something that works well. I hope your experience is as beautiful as mine was - mine pushed me to pursue computer science and programming.
I recommend at this point learning Flatpak and exploring Flathub for your favorite apps. Flatpak is treated as a first-class citizen on Fedora, so its my go-to recommendation. Should be super easy. Here are the instructions: https://flathub.org/setup/Fedora
Have fun!
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Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll have to look into Proton GE sometime
