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.

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…

I did the switch a few months ago and I did it cold turkey. Turning off secureboot and reformating my steam library drive solved all the issues I had. I also reccomend using timeshift or .tar and a bash script to make backups of your os when it’s stable, that way you can experiment in peace.

• 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 ;)

If you play PC games (and already familiar with Fedora), check out Bazzite. The whole immutable thing is an adjustment, but I really like it.

Though not really an adjustment from Windows, more of an adjustment if you’re coming from another Linux distro.

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…

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.