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.
Great job doing the switch!
About gaming: in my experience, almost everything works the same or sometimes even better than on Windows (also Nvidia here). I’m still playing Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer and it runs so much better than on Windows, it’s astounding. I even stopped checking ProtonDB before an install and assume I’ll just get it to work with one of the launchers I’m using (Steam, Heroic Games Launcher and Lutris, very rarely Bottles). But some games do not work at all, that’s mostly because the studios do not enable anti-cheat for Linux (example: Bungie with Destiny 2) or some other reasons. But that is really a minority. There are so many good games out there. And I wouldn’t install an invasive kernel-level anti-cheat on a Windows machine anyway.
Have fun and I’m sure you’ll be impressed how well everything works in Linux! And if not, keep asking questions!