A few years back I wrote a post about how I had to leave Linux for the time being due to Nvidia's driver support being utterly awful. You can read all about that here.
However, since then, I've actually been back on Linux since around...August of 2024? Somewhere around that. At my (now former) job, one of my friends who I was working with at that job with mentioned how he would be interested in trading his RX 5700 XT for my RTX 3060 that I had at that time. I ended up taking that trade, actually.
Ever since then, I went back to Linux and have been on it ever since. This year, in a few months time, will mark 2 full years of me being on Linux. It's gotten to the point where I only ever use Windows these days for a few very specific things, such as modding old games where the tools don't really work on Linux. I have an entire secondary PC next to me with a Windows 11 install on it and it gets booted up like, at most, once a week.
However, since then, I've actually been back on Linux since around...August of 2024? Somewhere around that. At my (now former) job, one of my friends who I was working with at that job with mentioned how he would be interested in trading his RX 5700 XT for my RTX 3060 that I had at that time. I ended up taking that trade, actually.
Ever since then, I went back to Linux and have been on it ever since. This year, in a few months time, will mark 2 full years of me being on Linux. It's gotten to the point where I only ever use Windows these days for a few very specific things, such as modding old games where the tools don't really work on Linux. I have an entire secondary PC next to me with a Windows 11 install on it and it gets booted up like, at most, once a week.
So how's Linux been treating me over the last 2 years?
Honestly, ever since I made the graphics card switch from Nvidia to AMD, it's been...fantastic! I'm genuinely just shocked at how good AMD graphics cards work on Linux.
Granted, I did have to switch from that RX 5700 XT to an RX 7600 about 1 year into the trade. That reason being because the RX 5700 XT ended up kicking the bucket. But it wasn't because my former co-worker lied to me though, no. The graphics card was genuinely in good health when we did the trade. The reason the GPU died was namely due to how tiny my case is and I think I ended up suffocating it.
Hey, if anyone from Lithuania is reading this and they want a broken RX 5700 XT to tinker around with and try to revive it, let me know, could arrange something I guess.
The RX 7600 I ended up getting fits into my case much nicer, has a lot more breathing room and it has been a treat ever since I got it.
But the Linux experience has been honestly great. I've gotten to the point now where my Fedora install now does absolutely everything, and I mean everything, that I need it to do. Everything to the last minor detail now just works as if I were on Windows.
I've experimented with a few desktop environments, namely GNOME, XFCE and Cinnamon, but I honestly still find KDE to be the best one for my personal needs simply because it requires re-learning things a lot less than other desktop environments.
I've also dabbled around with other distros, namely Arch, Linux Mint and Ubuntu, but I still personally find Fedora to be the one I'm most comfortable with. So I've stuck with Fedora.
I've run some more fun things on Fedora, you can check a video down below where I ran TUFU (2Unreal5Underground) on my Fedora install. Still using that same install, by the way! Only difference is that I'm currently on Fedora 43 now.
Granted, I did have to switch from that RX 5700 XT to an RX 7600 about 1 year into the trade. That reason being because the RX 5700 XT ended up kicking the bucket. But it wasn't because my former co-worker lied to me though, no. The graphics card was genuinely in good health when we did the trade. The reason the GPU died was namely due to how tiny my case is and I think I ended up suffocating it.
Hey, if anyone from Lithuania is reading this and they want a broken RX 5700 XT to tinker around with and try to revive it, let me know, could arrange something I guess.
The RX 7600 I ended up getting fits into my case much nicer, has a lot more breathing room and it has been a treat ever since I got it.
But the Linux experience has been honestly great. I've gotten to the point now where my Fedora install now does absolutely everything, and I mean everything, that I need it to do. Everything to the last minor detail now just works as if I were on Windows.
I've experimented with a few desktop environments, namely GNOME, XFCE and Cinnamon, but I honestly still find KDE to be the best one for my personal needs simply because it requires re-learning things a lot less than other desktop environments.
I've also dabbled around with other distros, namely Arch, Linux Mint and Ubuntu, but I still personally find Fedora to be the one I'm most comfortable with. So I've stuck with Fedora.
I've run some more fun things on Fedora, you can check a video down below where I ran TUFU (2Unreal5Underground) on my Fedora install. Still using that same install, by the way! Only difference is that I'm currently on Fedora 43 now.
A few snags on my journey
When Fedora 43 was released, myself and a lot (and I mean a lot) of other people started experiencing issues upgrading from Fedora 42 to 43. The reason? Wine, for some reason. Here's my Reddit post about it when it was relevant. I had to delete Wine & reinstall it after the upgrade to 43. I did have to fix a few Wine prefixes, mainly osu-winello, but that ended up being far easier than I anticipated.
(note: even though I said "for some reason", the actual reason being that 32-bit WIne has been deprecated and is no longer supported, so that was the reason the upgrades were being blocked)
One thing I never ended up getting working on Fedora was, sadly, my Hauppauge HD PVR 2 capture card. I ended up giving up on it and put it away. Thank you crafciak31 for the HD PVR 2 that you gifted me ages ago at this point, I still really appreciate it as a sick as hell donation, but now the thing is currently in a box, piled on top of other misc. tech that I have but don't use.
DaVinci Resolve...never got it to be stable on Fedora, sadly. I could not figure out how to make it stable and not crash every time I tried to do a timeline change. I ended up giving up on that as well. I heard there are video editors that work fine on Linux though, so I'll have to look into those when I feel bothered to. Not right now though, it's not a priority at all for me at the current moment.
(note: even though I said "for some reason", the actual reason being that 32-bit WIne has been deprecated and is no longer supported, so that was the reason the upgrades were being blocked)
One thing I never ended up getting working on Fedora was, sadly, my Hauppauge HD PVR 2 capture card. I ended up giving up on it and put it away. Thank you crafciak31 for the HD PVR 2 that you gifted me ages ago at this point, I still really appreciate it as a sick as hell donation, but now the thing is currently in a box, piled on top of other misc. tech that I have but don't use.
DaVinci Resolve...never got it to be stable on Fedora, sadly. I could not figure out how to make it stable and not crash every time I tried to do a timeline change. I ended up giving up on that as well. I heard there are video editors that work fine on Linux though, so I'll have to look into those when I feel bothered to. Not right now though, it's not a priority at all for me at the current moment.
Steam Deck!
I actually got a Steam Deck in October 2025! And I've been enjoying my time using it so far. I don't have much to say about it, other than I think it's a really cool piece of tech.
My Steam Deck ended up replacing my Lenovo Thinkpad E490, which I recently donated to a friend of mine. I'll miss that laptop but I'm also much happier knowing that it's off to a new home where it'll continue to be used.
My Steam Deck ended up replacing my Lenovo Thinkpad E490, which I recently donated to a friend of mine. I'll miss that laptop but I'm also much happier knowing that it's off to a new home where it'll continue to be used.
Would I recommend Linux to an average user though?
Honestly...still no. Despite how many advancements Linux has made, I still don't think Linux is at a point where an average user could just jump into it and have everything work. It's still very much a platform for nerds who like tinkering around to get stuff work.
Granted, I don't think Linux is that hard, it really isn't. It's just time-consuming. Anything and everything you would want to do is one simple internet search away from figuring out, but the problem is that it just takes a lot of time, especially if you're new.
Sure, setting up a new web browser and surfing the net is easy enough. Most Linux distros come with Firefox packaged in, most Chromium-based browsers work fine on Linux too, including the crime to humanity known as Google Chrome. Getting Steam to run and getting your Steam Library to work out of the box is also super simple and super easy. I get that. Even non-Steam games that utilize Wine are also not that much of a hassle to get going, especially if you use something like Lutris.
But the main thing is that the moment you decide to step away from doing anything that isn't already working out of the box, figuring that stuff out genuinely takes more time than it's worth for some people. Linux still has ways to go in making things just work. That's where I think Windows still has an advantage over Linux. It's in software support. All you need to do on Windows is download an installer, install it and off you go.
On Linux, I wish it were that easy with some stuff. I really do.
With Linux, it's still a case of where I have to ask my friends "well, what exactly do you want to do on your PC?" when it comes to recommending it to them. For people like artists, music producers and such, as I do have a few friends who do that kind of creative work, I still cannot recommend Linux to them. One for a lack of experience doing that sort of stuff so I don't know whether they could get their software to reliably work on Linux, the other...is hardware. Nvidia is still, to this day, the biggest roadblock for me recommending Linux to others, purely based off my own experience. And a majority of my friends have Nvidia GPUs. I earnestly still cannot recommend Linux to anyone with an Nvidia GPU.
If all you need out of your PC is a web browser, Discord and Steam for all your games, then yeah, Linux is a good fit for you. But if you want to do anything beyond that basic set of stuff, then no. I don't think I can earnestly recommend Linux to you.
Granted, I don't think Linux is that hard, it really isn't. It's just time-consuming. Anything and everything you would want to do is one simple internet search away from figuring out, but the problem is that it just takes a lot of time, especially if you're new.
Sure, setting up a new web browser and surfing the net is easy enough. Most Linux distros come with Firefox packaged in, most Chromium-based browsers work fine on Linux too, including the crime to humanity known as Google Chrome. Getting Steam to run and getting your Steam Library to work out of the box is also super simple and super easy. I get that. Even non-Steam games that utilize Wine are also not that much of a hassle to get going, especially if you use something like Lutris.
But the main thing is that the moment you decide to step away from doing anything that isn't already working out of the box, figuring that stuff out genuinely takes more time than it's worth for some people. Linux still has ways to go in making things just work. That's where I think Windows still has an advantage over Linux. It's in software support. All you need to do on Windows is download an installer, install it and off you go.
On Linux, I wish it were that easy with some stuff. I really do.
With Linux, it's still a case of where I have to ask my friends "well, what exactly do you want to do on your PC?" when it comes to recommending it to them. For people like artists, music producers and such, as I do have a few friends who do that kind of creative work, I still cannot recommend Linux to them. One for a lack of experience doing that sort of stuff so I don't know whether they could get their software to reliably work on Linux, the other...is hardware. Nvidia is still, to this day, the biggest roadblock for me recommending Linux to others, purely based off my own experience. And a majority of my friends have Nvidia GPUs. I earnestly still cannot recommend Linux to anyone with an Nvidia GPU.
If all you need out of your PC is a web browser, Discord and Steam for all your games, then yeah, Linux is a good fit for you. But if you want to do anything beyond that basic set of stuff, then no. I don't think I can earnestly recommend Linux to you.
What's next?
Well, I don't plan on leaving Linux anytime soon. It's been treating me very, very well and I have no complaints. I've been slowly but surely de-Windows'ing my life, ever since I made that decision in June 2024 to leave Windows behind due to Microsoft's shift to making Windows an "agentic OS" with all of the unnecessary AI crap no one asked for and no one is using, on top of being an insane privacy risk. I couldn't stand Windows becoming even more like spyware than it used to be.
As for my next post...I promised something relating to Windows XP and I still intend to make a blog post about a particular piece of hardware I received. And that's still in my plans! On top of writing about a mod pack for Need for Speed Most Wanted (2005) that I'm working on.
Safe to say, I have things I want to talk about. But until I find the motivation to do so, this little blog post is what you're getting for now.
Thanks for reading!
- huu
As for my next post...I promised something relating to Windows XP and I still intend to make a blog post about a particular piece of hardware I received. And that's still in my plans! On top of writing about a mod pack for Need for Speed Most Wanted (2005) that I'm working on.
Safe to say, I have things I want to talk about. But until I find the motivation to do so, this little blog post is what you're getting for now.
Thanks for reading!
- huu
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