i run nobara (a fedora spinoff) for a few months now, and it’s a great experience, i learn a lot about how the os works and it’s all visible! i feel like i modded my pc into a transparent machine - i can read up about simply every part of the os. i freakin love it :-D and all this while i can use it as before.
my last experience with linux was debian jessie - i was not so happy with that, and after i landed in dependency hell for the first time, i switched back. nowadays, with flatpaks and appimages, all those issues i was having in normal operation are gone.
gabbath@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Ah, no worries. I’m just sharing for folks who might need Windows for one reason or another. It’s a one time thing to upgrade either way, not a hassle at all. They might be weird niche unrepairable devices like my SP4 which may not handle Linux well or who knows. For clean installs there’s that nifty place with serial keys and builds whose name I forget right now.
As for Linux, I’m kinda torn. I had my fun tinkering with config files in the early 2000s in the days of Fedora Core 3 and KDE 3.x before all this Plasma stuff. The whole “year of the Linux desktop” thing left me disillusioned, although I did enjoy the Compiz/Beryl days. It’s probably better now but I’m too comfortable nowadays. We’ll see if things get dire enough that I need to jump ship again, I hope not.
HunterLF@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
It’s true, I know from experience that running Linux on old SP’s is not easy, I also have an SP5 and I installed Linux on it, it took me a long time, time that not many people are willing to give just to experiment with stuff. What I can say about it is that it’s working amazingly well, after I installed the Surface kernel… my pen works ok, the touch is weird, you can’t press with the tip of the finger, due to how it reads touches, but it’s a work in progress. Now, I use an SP8 with Fedora KDE for university, which works great. It took me just a few hours to install, due to me tinkering before with the SP5.
In my opinion, you should give it a try on a virtual machine, just to try it before installing it directly, and just give it another go. KDE came a long, long way now. It’s not perfect, but it works very well.