Ordinary users can benefit from ditching Windows

First, I want to get this out of the way. Yes, there is a highly engaged community of Linux users who are very technical in the way they engage with their operating systems. This post is not meant for them, and I will not be making any apologies for not adjusting my glasses while saying “actually, what you refer to as Linux is…”. There are already a plethora of resources for those who choose to go down the more technical path and honestly, for the everyday user those kinds of resources serve as points of friction when it comes to Linux adoption.

When I started my journey ditching Windows in 2024, I had just heard about the issues revolving around Windows memory issues leaking user data. Data leaks happen all the time, but between this issue and my personal feelings on operating systems collecting & selling data for in-OS ads I decided to take a stance & dump Windows. Admittedly, I had some linux experience previously. I ran both macOS & Ubuntu on my macbook during a brief stint studying computer science as my minor in college. Since then, there have been major developments that make linux a more friendly option for the more (respectfully) “normie” computer user. My requirements for making the switch included being able to do the following:

1. Word Processing/ Office Productivity
2. Emails & Communications
3. Creative & Website work
4. Gaming

Points 1 & 2 can basically be covered by any flavor of Linux that exists. To my surprise Photoshop, Lightroom, & Canva all ran perfectly fine in a web browser, so that takes care of point 3. Point 4 was the one that concerned me most. That was until I heard about all of the progress that Steam’s parent company Valve had made with translating games for linux users via a piece of software known as Proton. Awareness around this software was elevated when Valve came out with the now popular Steam deck, which runs a version of linux known as SteamOS. Assuming I could get Proton installed on whatever flavor of linux I landed on, this would cover point 4. After digging for my goldilocks OS, I found Nobara.

According Nobara’s maintainer Thomas Crider (better known online by the username gloriouseggroll), Nobara “to put it simply, is a modified version of Fedora Linux with user-friendly fixes added to it.” Fedora’s primary sponsor is Red Hat, which for those who don’t know is a subsidiary of IBM that provides open-source software for the enterprise. Why should you care? Well, for me this means that the foundation for this project strikes a good balance between being on the bleeding edge & being very stable. Anything that can be done for Fedora, can be done for Nobara. After testing out Nobara alongside Windows and watching multiple YouTube videos, I felt comfortable backing up my data and saying goodbye to Windows.

What I like about Nobara is how many pieces of software come included in the install. This includes everything you need to get games going as well as video capture & editing software, for those who want to go down the content-creator route. There are a few versions of Nobara that you can go with, but for me, I liked the way the Nobara custom themed version looked & felt, so I went with that. I just selected the Nvidia version, which included drivers I needed for my RTX 3070 video card, burned the installer to an 8GB USB thumb drive, and then off I went. Once everything had been changed over, I was surprised to see how little I had to use the dreaded command line to get other pieces of software installed. Don’t get me wrong, I have definitely been personally going down the road of compiling my own apps, installing flatpaks, & running system updates via command line. But the reality is the casual/ regular computer user will never want or need to touch it. And even if you really need to, the Nobara wiki spells everything out.

So yea, cool Tim. You achieved a new level of nerd. How is this relevant to the regular person? Well the thing is: I am still a very novice user when it comes to the world of Linux, and all it took for me to make the switch away from Windows was one final Microsoft error, and a couple days of research to make the switch. The experience for me has been pretty seamless, which is quite the contrary to what people believe the Linux experience is. Maybe you are the type of person that is tired of data leaks. Maybe you are tired of your data being used for ads in the operating system that costs $200. Or Maybe you just don’t like the idea of your keystrokes being used to train Microsoft’s Co-Pilot AI. I promise, you don’t need Microsoft anymore. Most of what people do with a computer is or can be done in a web browser anyway. Then again, I guess you can always go the Apple route or the dreaded…Chromebook.