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.

  • Nia [She/Her]
    11•7 months ago

    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.