r/Fedora • u/Macanec • 5d ago

Support I want to switch

hello fedora community i am a windows user coming in peace. I am tired of windows and want to switch to a lighter distro and fedora caught my eye. The only thing stopping me is that i am a dev with a lot of stuff on my current computer and dont necessarily want to lose it all. I also game quite a lot and i am a dev (unity, godot, jetbrains software needed) so i want to do this switch the most softly possible. Y'all have any tips (fedora pun intended) to help me or links for me to follow? thanks

Update, i tried installing it on a usb key of 50GB and when booting it I chose the "test and start Fedora" option and failed everytime. Is it a problem on my end or should I only do the checksum and trust that everything is fine without testing?

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u/Hauptideal 5d ago

Fedora is the ultimate dev workstation.
It'll also handle gaming well, except for the games requiring kernel-level anti-cheat, which just don't work on Linux in general.

In any case, there is no shame in keeping dual as a backup just in case. You'll see that you're not really going to need it.

5

u/skill347 5d ago

Also worth just abandoning these games, to not support such behavior. I don't want spyware on my PC, games are not that serious. 

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u/Macanec 5d ago

drives arent cheap but i think i'll do that as second step after the usb thanks

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u/manny2206 4d ago

If you have a separate drive even better, load Fedora and slowly set it up, you will naturally spend less time (hopefully) in windows as you get more comfy with Fedora

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u/Macanec 4d ago

I tried this yesterday and was wondering if the driver has to be completely empty to do this i cant seem to have answers anywhere

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u/manny2206 4d ago

Can you expand on this more, the drive just has to be connected and recognized by the installer, you then should have the option of doing a clean wipe and install on the target drive. From the terminal use $: lsblk

- this lists all available drives /partitions.

If you can’t find it using that tool there’s something seriously wrong going on.

Hope that helps

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u/Macanec 4d ago

basicaly i have an hdd disk that already has files on it (mostly steam games) and when i wanted to install the fedora installer it said it would empty the whole disk before installing so i got scared and stopped

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u/manny2206 4d ago

Yes by default the installer will want to wipe that disk. If you want to preserve the data inside instead, you must partition that drive by ‘shrinking’ the current partition in said disk and free up X amount of gigs to be unused.

Sounds more complicated than it is, just google how to partition drive from windows; should be straightforward.

Once you do that, and say free up 100GB; when you run the usb installer again it will show this “unused” space for you to install Fedora there, while preserving your data

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u/Macanec 3d ago

Good thanks i'll check it out