I am Officially a Full-Time Linux User

It is official — I am a full-time Linux user now, since I have switched from Windows to Fedora Linux as my personal computer's operating system, with KDE Plasma as the desktop environment.

This was not my first attempt to use Linux on desktop, but for the first time since my first time getting my hands on Linux in 2020, I decided to make Linux fully replace Windows for my daily PC use.

My first attempt at using Linux desktop was in 2020, after I became more aware about the concepts of free and open-source software and data privacy. When I researched into Linux at the time, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I could use both Windows and Linux on the same computer via dual booting, and that there were Linux distributions created to be friendly to beginners who switched from Windows or macOS. Therefore, I set up my PC, which is a gaming laptop that I am still using at this moment, to dual boot Windows and Linux, and chose Linux Mint as my very first Linux distro for the similarities its interface design was to Windows to make my first foray into Linux easier.

I enjoyed Linux Mint, and later I tried out Manjaro Linux, but I was hesitant to fully migrate to Linux, mainly due to me being a PC gamer, and at the time I was working as a graphic designer. There were already good progress made for gaming on Linux in 2020, and I was aware of the existence of Wine, which allows us to run Windows software on Linux, but I was still worried about not being able to run Adobe software, especially the latest Creative Cloud versions, and some of my favourite or most-played video games on Linux, by looking at the reports of running those pieces of software on WineHQ. Furthermore, after dual booting Windows and Linux for around a year, I gradually found dual booting tedious, so I uninstall Linux and went back to Windows.

When I tried to dual boot Windows and Linux in 2020, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) did not exist yet, so that was the only way to be able to use both Windows and Linux on the same machine. When WSL was released, I was excited because there's finally an alternate way to use both Windows and Linux to dual boot, so I enabled it and set it up. WSL had served my needs well, but the desire to use Linux desktop on a daily basis never went away, especially after starting to learn software development and computer science in the early 2020s, and realised the advantages Linux has over Windows to developers.

Eventually, my second chance of using Linux desktop came when I attended my local campus of 42 the computer science school, starting with their bite-sized bootcamp in February 2025. The campus computers use Linux, specifically Ubuntu as the distro and GNOME as the desktop environment. Later during 42's official 26-day bootcamp, their curriculum started with shell, and that was when I got interested in shell scripting too.

Meanwhile, I was also learning how to use a virtual private server (VPS), with Debian being the Linux distro installed in my server. Later, I succeed in setting up my VPS for self-hosting, including my own websites. Working on my VPS gave me a lot of practice in using command lines and navigating a Linux system. As I became more comfortable using Linux even just with command lines, and how that made me become a better developer, I started to consider switching to Linux desktop full-time.

Preparing myself to migrate to Linux desktop full-time mostly involved researching about Linux gaming, ways to run programs that lack native Linux support, and Linux alternatives to such programs.

I briefly set up dual boot again to properly test a Linux distro. Initially I tried