How I Switched to Linux

Screenshot of six files with the same name on Windows 7
I stumbled upon this while clearing out my old Win 7 laptop. And yes, those are all unique and in the same folder.

I’ve grown up on Windows 7 and 10, and for the most part, I’ve had no issues with them. However, recently I’ve been lucky enough to frequent communities where Linux was practically everyone’s daily driver, and it sort of began to rub off on me. At some point, I got bored of Windows and finally decided that I should try Linux for myself.

I spent a few days trying out different distributions. I wanted something practical: something less spoonfeed-y than Windows, but nothing that would be a nightmare to get into or troubleshoot. Towards the end of my trial process (which was neither systematic nor robust — I tried out only a small handful of distributions and judged mostly by first impressions), two distributions caught my eye: Solus and Zorin. In the end, I decided to go for Zorin, mostly because it was Ubuntu-based and so I expected that apps and support for it would be abundant.

Screenshot of the Zorin OS 16 desktop
Random but authentic screenshot I took while triaging Zorin.

It took me a moment to appreciate GNOME. Once I accepted that I wouldn’t be able to theme it to look like Windows 10 (I really liked sharp corners), it didn’t take all that long for me to warm up to it. The filesystem structure was a bit new to me, but I grasped it quickly and found a new workflow in a matter of days. Zorin wasn’t perfect by any means and I had to spend some time fixing various issues, but I liked it overall.

A year or so later, I gradually started questioning Zorin. There was nothing noticeably wrong about it at first, but the glacial pace at which it moved became more and more apparent as time moved on. Zorin is built upon Ubuntu LTS, meaning that it only gets a new release when a new LTS comes out: once every two years. That’s an abysmally long time, especially in the world of software. Zorin’s tendency to be constantly behind began to be irritating, and so I started looking for something new.

Shortly before I started considering switching distros, a friend of mine took the plunge and swapped out Windows 10 for Fedora Workstation. Furthermore, Fedora cropped up often in online discussions and was ultimately recommended to me by another friend. Needless to say, it caught my attention. After a bit of research, I decided that it was exactly what I was looking for: it was up-to-date, widely-supported and still user-friendly. I also considered Arch, EndeavourOS or Solus, but I didn’t want to make anything more difficult than it needed to be nor did I want to risk things with rolling releases. In short, Fedora was a perfect match.

Next, I needed to pick a desktop environment. GNOME was an obvious candidate, but KDE caught my eye thanks to its reputation as being heavily configurable, pretty and lightweight. I also wanted to try out Cinnamon, but the moment I booted up a Fedora KDE LiveCD, I knew that this was the one. KDE greeted me with the beloved Windows-like taskbar layout, and the default file manager, Dolphin, completely blew Nautilus and Thunar (the file managers on Zorin Core and Zorin Lite, respectively) out of the water. With that, I was set to switch once again.

The switch from Zorin to Fedora KDE felt even bigger than the switch from Windows to Zorin. Features that needed GNOME extensions under Zorin were built into KDE, and I liked KDE’s sharper, denser interface in comparison to GNOME’s lofty buttons and overweight corners. Fedora’s package manager (dnf) also felt friendlier and more complete than Ubuntu’s (and by extension, Zorin’s) apt, and I no longer had to deal with Snaps since Fedora’s package repositories are impeccably up-to-date, sometimes even surpassing Flathub.

One thing that I’ll admit Zorin did better was the initial installation and setup process. Fedora 38’s installer was somewhat confusing (thankfully, as of this writing, there should be a new and improved one coming out soon — if it isn’t out already). I also had to manually add/install Flathub, NVIDIA drivers and WINE, which wasn’t hard but was still something Zorin did for me (or let me do with a single click). I also set X11 as the default window system since I didn’t want to deal with yet another thing that could make stuff break. Just like on Zorin, a few residual issues remain, but otherwise, the process went very smoothly.

There were some hiccups, but despite that, Linux, Fedora, KDE and the things around them are phenomenal pieces of software; ditching Windows is probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. It’s been and continues to be a wild ride that never fails to teach me something new. If you, dear reader, are on Windows and are getting bored of it, why not try something new? Linux won’t disappoint.

Here follows a list of Windows-specific software I have (or haven’t) found Linux alternatives to, in case someone might find it useful.

And last but not least, the complete list of things that I’ve stumbled upon that needed some fixing. In general, these are things that didn’t or don’t work as expected on Linux compared to Windows (10) and are in no particular order. I’ve tried to detail what I’ve attempted and what worked for each issue.

You may notice that this list is fairly long and includes a non-negligible amount of items marked as "ongoing". However, do not take this as an indication that the Linux experience is janky; the positives far outweigh any drawbacks.