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.
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
maybe not dwl
Why so you care so much about point 6? Feels like overkill.
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
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.
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
I run Wayland, too, but this recommendation seems out of true with the other ones. I would think that even now x11 is still the tried-and-true, safe option.
1: Agree, mostly. I bought a Thinkpad E16 for its Linux support, though I accidentally got a Realtek one that had few bugs that I’ve since ironed out. My only thought is if you own existing hardware that is still usable, it is worth your time at least trying.
2: I somewhat agree. On my note taking laptop, I go by this philosophy. On my desktop, though, I theme away and still get lots done.
3: I sort of agree with you; I think like you said, if you have one drive for each OS, you won’t have problems - dual booting is fine. I’ve got 2 internal drives in my Thinkpad, though honestly, I hardly use the Windows one. I remember 2 partitions being livable on my Surface Go, but again, I barely touched Windows, so I don’t think it had much chance to bork the bootloader.
4: I agree on the Arch and Gentoo part - after trying to use Debian Testing on several laptops, I found rolling release just isn’t conducive to a no-frills productivity device. Honestly, though, I don’t see that much problem with immutable, especially if you go with Flatpak. I also think any stable distro you like should work so long as it has a backports kernel - I’m using Debian 12 that way on an E16 and it’s been pretty smooth (besides the Realtek thing at the beginning, but I fixed that months ago).
5: Wholeheartedly disagree, mostly because XFCE was excluded. 😭 I feel like X11’s still not that far off the beaten path. This feeling will probably change when XFCE switches; 4.20 comes out with preliminary support in a few weeks, and my bet is 4.22 in 2026 will have full Wayland support.
6: I don’t totally agree with this either. I feel like when it works well natively, go for the native package. If you’re having trouble, switch to the Flatpak. I’ve actually had problems with the VSCodium Flatpak on my laptop not using system environment by default, though there is a fix.
The all flatpak thing took me aback but, you are right the app maintainers fix their stuff there first.
Solid advice.
Excellent post. I agree wholeheartedly, especially with having a separate box to play with. I’ve gotten away with using a separate partition for experimenting but it isn’t as good as another machine, plus great computers are dirt cheap these days so there’s little reason not to have one.
what would you say to blender users on the first point
Though if you’re for stable and minimal fuss, you should rather go with the XFCE or Mate version.
Who hurt you?
greybeards dunking on you because you’re not a “real” linuxer
Oh, right. I see.
Disagree. If you are suggesting not to theme and keep things close to stock (because you rightly mention that things break) under the guise of stability, why would you suggest that no one use an immutable distro? They’re way more unbreakable than your standard Ubuntu install.
Because it’s less standard
The more default and mainstream you go the easier it’s gonna be to do things and get help
I tried getting a friend of mine on silverblue a while ago, worked for a bit but he hated how the package manager worked and I wasn’t able to help him much because I’m on nix
Maybe because your friend isn’t the average user (specifically when you mention they don’t like the package manager).
In Fedora silverblue on KDE, all updates are handled through the discovery store which is similar and as easy as on windows.
With all due respect, the biggest takeaway would be that you should never recommend a distro before you’re comfortable with it yourself.
Make me
Actually don’t it’s hard enough with certain web apps
Based as fuck.
90% of those are nvidia related.
I’m not a Fedora user (Debian and Mint are my go to) but I don’t have a similar impression. Also, my own NVIDIA GPU has always worked OOB (even without installing its proprietary drivers, it just works better after installing them) and still is, but it’s also considered old being a 970.
Imho, a simpler advice would be along the line of what you mentioned already. Something like: don’t rush for the latest/greatest hardware. Often, new stuff will lack support.
- 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.
I agree with the idea of not wasting time but configuring the theme/look (which is part of the OOB experience, on Mint and Debian at least) can be essential to work in decent conditions.
As a matter of fact, theming is one of the technical reasons why I switched to Linux from Mac. The ability to have the text as large as I wanted it to be: getting older, one slowly realizes that small thin light-greyish designer cherished fonts lose a lot of their appeal in favor of those non-fancy but larger and bolder dark fonts that are more easy to read :p
So, I would object that theming can be a very legit, like 100% legit part of the process of turning a Linux machine into a usable working machine one will be able to work on for hours (like tweaking the keyboard layout would be for anyone, like me, writing in more than one language). And that is not even mentioning people with disabilities.
- don’t dual/triple/whatever boot.
Unless one has too, sure. Try running any recent edition of Photoshop in Wine and do real paid work…
My own solution was to keep a dedicated machine for anything like that: Photoshop and video. Note that for video one may decide to let go of FCP or Premiere and switch to DaVinci Resolve, instead.
- 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
Why would that be a good idea?
I mean, I do my best to avoid all those third-party installer (like Flatpak) because they are not as well integrated to the system as the native installer is (in my case it is ‘apt’), and because they also waste much more disk space for the reason that, like you said:
the apps include everything they need to work,
Which, sometimes/often, means a real lot of extra stuff.
the setup is easy to maintain and recreate
That’s the exact reason why I use the native installer and not those third-party ones. That and the faultless integration with the system (menus, themes and stuff like that).
And in the odd case I would have to reinstall Linux (an even stranger need on a work machine, since that machine I would not tweak it beyond what I deem necessary for me to be able to, well, work on it and therefore it would be rock stable), even in that case I would need to reinstall it, I find it so quick to reinstall all my apps by typing a single line: “sudo apt install app1 app2 app3 app9999”, no matter how many apps.
I am keeping such a list in a text file, I update every time I start using a new app, just in case one of those days I truly am forced to reinstall my system. So, I know it would only be a matter to copy-paste said command line in a new shell. Not pretty but real easy and quick ;)
Flatpak (…) upgrades are better (no reboots necessary)
Once again, I’m not a Fedora user but does Fedora really need to reboot after updating a bunch of apps? I have hard time imagining that.
Sorry if my comments sounds critical, it’s not my intention. But while I was reading your post I was very surprised how affirmative you were on certain decisions/choices and how much my own personal experience was different.
greybeards dunking on you because you’re not a “real” linuxer?
And if you’re wondering, nope, I am not one of those ‘real user’ either even though my beard would be grey, if not plain white now… if I had one. I come from 35+ years (happily) using Apple hardware and software for work and for personal stuff ;)
Edit: clarifications.
I don’t know man, I run Linux on all my stuff and I am lazy as shit.
I run Arch on my desktop with a 3090 and xfce (forced xorg) and have had no issues.
I run Opensuse on my laptop that gets really great battery life and isn’t even listed in the Wikis. This is my primary work laptop
I dual boot Asahi on a MBP.
I agree with the sentiment of your post being doing go balls out on a work machine but it’s not nearly as bad or unstable as you make it sound
I can’t tell if you’re serious, but if so - you’re the literal opposite of a noob transitioning and making their first steps. if you’re like any of the things you mentioned - arch, nvidia, xfce, let alone all of them combined - is something a noob should even entertain of doing, then I don’t know what to tell you.
the post is aimed at people a) transitioning and subsequently b) doing actual work, based on a bunch of people I’ve converted over. the input of dudes like you, while welcome, is in no way indicative of the path they should be taking.
Nice personal list but I almost do the opposite of everything. I only do the not using dual boot part from this list.
Afaik it’s not a personal list it’s a list for end users
It’s a personal list for newbies and it’s probably a good idea to follow this list for them. However end users are a much bigger cluster, I’m an end user too. Last time I checked I didn’t have a grey beard.
It’s my workstation and I’m using it as how I’m comfortable with it. It just requires a familiarity which newbies don’t have.
