Linux

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

i really wanted to set up passthrough GPU on my desktop so I could run little windows vms with full 3D acceleration and I got so close but ultimately failed. I really want to try again though because it would be so nice to be able to just blow away vms after I'm done with the game i wanted to play

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.

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.

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.

good on you! I just recently did the same thing as you (cos of some work apps that only work with windows right now)

small question, did you go with silverblue or workstation?

I went with silverblue and it's a bit annoying looking up guides/forums posts because they all use dnf 😭

Originally read 'from Linux to Windows' and I was like, 'What?'

Advice is to build relationships with others who also use Linux. Find a chat room that you can stay in and stick with for a couple of years. It will be invaluable. Don't try to do this purely from documentation, stack overflow, blog posts, and searching forums. Real live people is the way to go.

Congrats! Just keep at it, Fedora is stable.

It gets easier with every solved problem!