after trip-digit linux installs in the past year or so, here’s my list for a seamless transition for people escaping windows/macOS who need to get work done:
1) don’t tailor linux to your hardware, do it the other way around. get hardware that works OOB. no nvidia. no latest hardware. no weird realtek chipsets in budget deal-of-the week e-waste, no gaming (i.e. nvidia) laptops.
that don’t mean breaking the bank, a thinkpad with 8th gen or newer CPU can be had for $100ish; add $50 or so to expand RAM and storage and that covers like 90% of use cases. a competent all AMD desktop a gen or two behind current tech that can game almost anything can be easily assembled for less than $400.
fedora and adjacent forums are littered with cries for help about stuff breaking or not working at all; 90% of those are nvidia related. can you make it work - absolutely. is that something you’re willing to dick around on a deadline - hell nah.
2) no theming. no icons, no fonts, no plymouth screens, nada. as few extensions/plugins as you can, run it as close to stock as possible. shit’s gonna break, this is a work device, you can’t afford downtime because the single dev maintaining the thingy hasn’t updated it for the newest Gnome of Plasma. Gnome don’t feel like macOS? you’ll get used to it; muscle memory is a removed but it’s a tameable one.
an additional moment, especially if you’re on a laptop, is to make the thing as fungible as possible. that’s an easily breakable/losable thief-magnet, you want a setup that can be reproduced with as little fuss as possible so you can be operational again.
3) don’t dual/triple/whatever boot. that’s an advanced scenario, it’s gonna break eventually and if that’s a device you depend on for work or education, you don’t want any of that. run it as a single OS occupying the whole disk; encryption on a mobile device is mandatory. if you absolutely need multiple OS, a 2nd device is stupid cheap and it compartmentalises your shit, i.e. one for work, one for private/gaming, etc.
4) no weird distros. no arches, no gentoos, no immutable thisisthefuture shit. when it becomes mainstream, we’ll switch. until such time, middle of the road - fedora for newest hardware, mint for ancient stuff, ubuntu for everything else. a lot of people made sure they’re operational OOB, it’s less likely stuff will break and if it does, there’s an army of folks who asked and answered whatever’s bothering you.
5) no weird DEs. wayland only, gnome for laptops and tablets, plasma for desktops, there is no third option. you’re transitioning from an infinitely polished UI and the best tech that money can buy, you want the closest possible experience and the widest used environment, worked on by the largest dev community aware of the widest possible usability issues, working towards fixing/implementing them. you’re already relearning shit, invest that time wisely.
6) separate your system stuff from your applications as much as possible. purge all user-facing apps, like firefox and media players and such from the system’s package manager (apt or dnf) and reinstall them from flatpak. that was a headache a few years ago, nowadays almost everything works OOB on wayland. the apps include everything they need to work, the setup is easy to maintain and recreate, upgrades are better (no reboots necessary) and all your settings and data are in one place.
this covered 90% use cases of 90% of the users I’ve dealt with. naturally, edge cases are gonna have a bad time - you want to ollama this and that and rock bleeding edge hardware and have a normal desktop experience? it’s gonna hurt. you need mac-like power management and days away from power? doable but that needs work.
remember, this is a work device. for the same reason you don’t decide to “upgrade” the suspension on the car that’s supposed to get you to work the morning of, you don’t mess with what’s likely the only device you need for work/education.
greybeards dunking on you because you’re not a “real” linuxer? enamoured with the spicy screenshots from linuxporn? get a $20 thinkpad and go wild - arch it, sway it, have the scrolling text on boot, rice it till it bursts. but leave your workhorse be.
Pop OS works with zero issues on gaming laptop with NVIDIA card.
May be the problem is Fedora.
really bad advice
- you can make nvidia work just fine, considering most linux users are software developers, you might even be better off for cuda support
- theming will not break your system
- dual booting is not an issue when using multiple storage media
- arch is one of the most widely used distros for good reason. you can make any mainstream distro work. universal blue/nix also is perfectly usable.
- no, there are more options, sway, niri, i3, river, awesome, dwl, dwm, bspwm, cinnamon, xfce, lxqt are all perfectly usable, window managers are great for a software development workflow and often more stable than DEs
- if you choose a sensible distro like fedora, arch, opensuse, etc. this doesn’t apply at all, this should only be a consideration for immutable distros
Immutable was the only thing that got me to switch back from QubesOS on my desktop. I was doing Qubes with a win10 HVM with my 3070 passed through and it was a couple frames off from native performance. Still keep Qubes on my T480 for infra specific work but my “dev” machine with no creds is the desktop now.
Couldn’t get the performance quite right for a Linux based HVM and was wanting the HW accel for some of my work (CAD, figma) so I loaded Bazzite with KDE which runs Fedora Atomic and it’s been amazing for both gaming and work.
Distrobox with boxbuddy and rootful containers where needed has been extremely pleasant and they all live as a subdirectory of my home with a ZSH install script I have to load the terminal styles I want into any new containers. Any apps you install in the container you can export to your start menu and launch seamlessly without tainting your host with any weird dependencies you might need for a project.
We use ddev a lot so needed a rootful container for Docker but other projects I just treat like a VM almost (R projects for instance), install whats needed to get an env going real quick and fire up the IDE in the container and get to work.
EVERYTING I care about is in /var, including my home which makes backups and snapshots stupid simple which I love coming from a traditional Linux distro
Why so you care so much about point 6? Feels like overkill.
I’ve addressed it in another comment; it’s not a big deal as such, but the result is a huge distraction for people who just want to open their laptops in the morning and start working and I hear about it constantly. the standard install has a barrage of notifications to update this and that and it wants to restart for every tiny little thing, be it necessary or not. by separating all “apps” and putting in a systemd timer that auto-updates all flatpaks, all user-facing apps are always the latest version and then the system stuff can get updated bi-weekly, when they eventually reboot.
edit: this is them, to the letter - https://redd.it/1gyirfw
I think I agree with most of what you said. My one doubt is about Wayland. I was under the impression it was still a relatively new/niche thing that had problems. Is this no longer the case? I ask because you recommended against things like immutable distros because they’re not super mature yet.
Note: I’m technically inclined but don’t use a Linux distro daily. My personal laptop is my old work Mac and my work laptop is a Mac. My older personal laptop runs Xubuntu.
wayland is default on fedora for 5+ years, similarly on ubuntu and is plenty battle-tested and more than ready for everyday use, edge cases notwithstanding.
there’s an argument to be had against every major switch in recent years (systemd, pipewire, etc). progress isn’t achieved by waiting until there’s full feature parity, it’s by forcing it onto users and working out the issues in vivo; those who won’t deal with it can keep using the old stuff, either by using conservative distros or ripping out the new stuff and replacing it.
be that as it may, the point of the post is directing converts to the easiest, safest, and most straightforward path through this scary wonderland, and preventing them from wasting time on “true scotsman” endeavors, not changing the habits of seasoned veterans.
If you’ve used it in the past it’s MUCH better now but there are still hiccups and certain apps you have to force to use X but they do typically run well still, at least the ones I’ve encountered
