Just yesterday, I decided to set up a dual-boot for Fedora on my Windows tower. I’m writing this blog post from Fedora as a way to play around and break in the new OS.

I started this journey into Linux because my PC hardware does not support Windows 11. Whether or not I would enjoy using Windows 11, the straw that broke the camel’s back was the fact that Windows 10 will soon cease being a secure operating system. I am now exploring Linux to see if my PC should make the change full-time.

On my new Fedora Workstation, here are a few things I’m noticing right away:

My Terminal Knowledge is Increasing Dramatically

When picking up any new OS, there’s a learning curve. With Linux, the learning curve is steeper than most. The biggest hurdle is that Linux commands are everywhere. When you have driver issues, they’re there. When you want to install or remove software, they’re there.

There has been a terminal open on my screen for about 75% of my time spent on this OS and I don’t really see that number changing very drastically as I continue to use Fedora. In just the last day, my knowledge of terminal commands has jumped through the roof. If I keep to Linux, I’m sure I will quickly become extremely versed in its terminal.

Linux is for Power Users

This seems obvious, and it’s something I knew going in. However, I did not anticipate just how true it would be.

There are a seemingly endless number of keyboard shortcuts to be discovered to speed up your control of windows, workspaces, and more. It’s not hard to imagine that going back to another OS after learning all of Linux’s powerful controls would feel lethargic.

The Linux Terminal is Fast

Many things you can do in GUIs are much faster in the terminal.

For example, Gnome has its Software application for installing applications via flatpak, but it is generally rather slow and the terminal is just so much faster.

There is Less Desktop Customization than I Thought

Perhaps this is just because I’m using Gnome, which has a pretty intense design philosophy, but I really imagined I would be able to change the design of my shell however I wanted. The amount of customization possible is reasonable but is not nearly as intense as I imagined it would be.

The curious thing is that with my current knowledge of customization on Fedora, it seems to have less customization than a jailbroken iPhone. That seems anomalous. How could a closed-source mobile operating system offer more customization than an open-source pc operating system? Does the iOS jailbreak community just produce more tweaks than Linux Gnome/Desktop extensions?

My only conclusion is that I must be missing a way to customize my Linux experience. Perhaps Arch has the openness I was thinking of, but after tweaking a couple of things, I’ve settled into the Gnome shell quite nicely. I don’t expect to switch distros purely because of Gnome.

Linux is Not that Well Supported

A lot of the software you use on MacOS or Windows are distributed by companies. Linux holds such a small share of the market that it doesn’t make a lot of sense for those companies to spend money supporting it well. Many of the projects that are well supported on Linux are open source alternatives to more widely used software.

Ubuntu is by Far the Best Supported, Arch has by Far the Most Software

When choosing a distribution, I was warned that Ubuntu has the most community support and Arch has the most software support. Again, I was blindsided by the impact of these facts. Every issue’s solution online has an Ubuntu solution and every package I install has an Arch version. Meanwhile, support for Fedora is not guaranteed.

This is currently a minor foresight to problems with difficult solutions, but we’ll see if it spirals towards the eventual installation of a different Linux distribution.

MacOS is Really Good

Using Linux has given me the view that Apple has done something special with MacOS. Clearly, there is less control over the OS in Mac than there is on Linux, but the desktop, ecosystem, and availability to resources is special.

Access to the *nix terminal only improves the experience.

Windows is Still Important

As aforementioned, Linux does not support everything. Having a spread of operating systems available to me is important so that I can use the tools I need. Who knows, perhaps my need of windows will become so miniscule that I will only run it as a virtual machine.