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
You might have to tick “Force Composition Pipeline” in nvidia-settings.
Without it most UIs are laggy or tearing heavily on my rig.If I ever feel like going back I may do that. In the meantime I’m very happy with what fedora has to offer me so far. Just finishing installing the software I use regularly now!
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!
For gaming performance, some games run better with Proton-GE which is a custom build containing some fixes that Valve/Steam can’t distribute as a US-based company, some games need it to run at all, some get better performance with it, some run worse, just depends. I’d recommend using GE when a game won’t run with vanilla Proton or runs poorly with it.
Also, checking your games on ProtonDB.com, clicking the PC tab on the game, you can see some tweaks other people did on the game to get the best experience with it, as well as a general idea of how well the game will run on Linux.
For non-steam games, those run good too with stuff like Heroic Games Launcher, Lutris, and Bottles but may require more manual intervention to get working in some cases compared to a lot of Steam games.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll have to look into Proton GE sometime
Don’t forget Retroarch too!
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.
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.
The nobara tweaks and configuration can be done on fedora but op is unlikely to know what they are or how to do them. If I remember correctly there’s quite a few important gaming things that fedora doesn’t ship with but I don’t know what they are cause I loaded fedora then switched to nobara after a few hours.
Maybe pop os is a good choice since it’s a mix of gaming related and beginner friendly.
They use fedora repos so it shouldn’t have much impact.
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
based
Could always triple boot, use the third to play around to see if’n something else is even better than what you have, or use a container to test run different linuxes… linii? Personally I’m enjoying LMDE, and don’t like Gnome either, but that’s the great thing about Linux, so many different options.
I may at some point consider. I’m gonna rock out with this for the time being though, and later down the road if I feel like exploring I can set up a third boot partition. I appreciate the suggstions!
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.
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.
I tried nebora after I effed up my kunutnu install. I was doing some super weird stuff. (Tried to remove snap)
Nebora for me was the worst experience out of every distro I’ve tried. I went back to kubuntu and manually applied what nebora did with much better results. (This time around I removed snap before doing anything else).
Kububtu with snap removed has been perfect so far.
I tried Nobara recently and had awful difficulties with it, probably because I have a NVIDIA GPU.
My GPU (3080 Ti) is compatible with the drivers it specified but it would get stuck on a blank screen.
have fun with fedora
Thanks! The only thing I’ve gone to windows for all day is to retrieve files
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.
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
Nice! What graphics card do you have? AMD generally works well out-of-the-box, but if you have NVidia you may need to install drivers
It is an nvidia card, but I did manage to install the drivers and they seem to be working great.
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
For League of Legends, that one surprisingly works, even has a wine-ge build made specifically for it https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/wine-ge-custom/releases/tag/GE-Proton8-27-LoL
For CS, that’s one of the rare games that has native Linux support and runs without needing anything at all
The website was last updated 3 weeks ago while the fixes were a few days ago.
That’s awesome news! I’m gonna look into this now!
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
I hate suggesting another distro as a solution but if your main intention is gaming then you may be interested in nobara. It’s fedora but with gaming tweaks applied.
If you’re using nvidia and like Fedora, try Nobara. It’s gaming focused and comes with nvidia drivers.
Why not just installing the drivers?
Because it’s not about installing them, it’s making them work that’s not intuitive. I have an nvidia card and some linux experience, it was hard for me to set it up. If you have no background on linux, making it work might make you abandon it. In those cases it’s better to go with something that has everything figured out for you.
I seem to have the nvidia drivers working without having had to fuss too much. I think I may have tried running games before rebooting after graphics drivers were installed because I tried just now and it worked completely fine with the same framerate as on windows!
It might be because I’m using Arch and everything has to be done manually 🤷
Good for you if you have it figured out ! Welcome to Linux !
Easier for a linux noobie. Some people want easy, some people like to fiddle. It’s good to have choices.
In every distro I Trier in the past few years, “setting up drivers” was just installing the
nvidiapackage and rebooting.I’m very happy that you had success and such an easy time. Yay, linux! Yay, you! You’re the best!
Thank you so much! 😊
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
