After more than a decade in the Windows world, I’m finally taking the step into the Linux world, specifically considering Ubuntu or Fedora. I’m looking for advice on making this transition as seamless as possible, with a focus on improving my coding experience and ensuring a smooth gaming setup.
What are the key things I should take into account for a good transition? Any must-have tools, software, or tweaks? Additionally, I’m keen on maintaining a good gaming experience – any tips for optimizing gaming performance on these distros?
Your insights, recommendations, and personal experiences would be immensely helpful as I embark on this exciting journey. Thanks in advance for your guidance!
Don’t worry about looks that much. You can change everything by either theming the DE (icon themes, extensions, etc.) or by installing another DE. But partly, you’re right. Installing another desktop can be messy.
That’s why I specifically recommended Mint first and Silverblue second.
Cinnamon (Mint’s DE) is also themeable and highly customizable and gives you a great entry in “How Linux works”.
And then, after you got familiar with Linux a bit, go to Silverblue if you like.
On SB, you can always rebase without reinstalling.
What does that mean? SB is image based/ immutable. It works completely different.
There’s basically “your stuff” (cat pictures, coding stuff, etc.) and “the OS” (desktop, pre-installed software, and so on), similar to Android.
Therefore, you can easily swap out the OS-part with something else.
If you use SB (Gnome) you can rebase to Kinoite (KDE) with one command and one reboot in 5 minutes and keep all your stuff while having a clean “reinstall” and the ability to always revert any changes.
Therefore, you prevent distrohopping and just hop desktops instead.
Also, don’t worry about the “constant updates”. Fedora and Ubuntu have the same release schedule and don’t bring out many updates in between.
It’s only a problem when you use a rolling release like Tumbleweed and have bad internet, like myself.
I only update my Fedora (normal) every 2-4 weeks and my Silverblue updates itself without me noticing. The updates there just get staged and I boot into a fresh OS every restart.