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
Oh I totally misread, Ubuntu was what you had in the VM.
If you open the Nvidia settings and it sees your GPU(s), then it should be working, if you hadn’t already come to that conclusion.
Fedora is a solid choice!
have fun with fedora
Thanks! The only thing I’ve gone to windows for all day is to retrieve files
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.
There’s also onlyoffice, it has better support for microsoft office document formats, though I use Libreoffice most of the time.
I’ve been using LO for the past few months in preparation. I was only stuck on MS office for group work
Just out of curiosity, what games do you play that dont work on linux?
League of legends, sadly lol. Also a touch of CS, while I haven’t tested it, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work
CS2 specifically supports Linux. They have a build just for Linux you can download from Steam.
you can download from Steam.
To be clear Steam will download the Linux build by default on Linux. No user intervention required.
(If you need to for some strange reason you get run the Windows build in Wine via the “Compatibility” menu but that is unlikely to work better than the native build.)
Probably some online multiplayer ones
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!
I already have a few flatpak apps since a handful of the software I use isn’t in any repo natively. Definitely good advice to check it out
If you’re using nvidia and like Fedora, try Nobara. It’s gaming focused and comes with nvidia drivers.
