My Windows 10 install broke, but I'm hesitant to switch to Linux.
My Windows 10 install broke, but I'm hesitant to switch to Linux.
As the title say's, my Windows 10 install broke, but I'm still unsure whether or not to reinstall Windows 10 or install Linux.
Context:
A few months back, Windows 10 updates started to fail on my desktop. I had considered just reinstalling the OS but as my machine was working just fine I simply tolerated it.
Today, when my machine auto-updated it broke something. At first I thought the update worked. But soon I realized that the taskbar was acting odd. All the shortcuts I had placed on my taskbar were working as usual, but when I right clicked them nothing would happen. I clicked on the start menu and the search bar but nothing happened. Most of the widgets on the right side of the taskbar weren't working such as Volume, Wi-Fi, Date & Time, and Notifications. I assumed it was just the taskbar that was broken but when I tried to use the windows key to open the settings menu, it didn't work either, nor did it's keyboard shortcut.
It seems the update had broken some apps that, though didn't prevent Windows from starting, made navigating it a lot more difficult.
I've used Linux before. I had a Linux Mint, and EndeavourOS virtual machine installed on my computer. More recently, I installed EndeavourOS on an old laptop I had lying around, and have been using it daily for about a month now. Although I've had my difficulties, I've been loving my experience.
Though I'm still a Linux newbie I've been meaning to give Linux a real shot on my desktop for a couple weeks now, but as my machine was working just fine I didn't really feel any necessity to make the switch.
But with my Windows install breaking, I feel like its time to give Linux a real shot.
My Questions:
I want to install Fedora on my desktop but I still have a few questions pertaining to Linux and my desktop specs.
I'm running a GTX 1660. I've heard a lot of bad things about running Linux with an NVIDIA GPU so I'd like a few things clarified.
- How would I install NVIDIA drivers?
- Does Wayland work with NVIDIA?
- A lot of distros are moving to Wayland. How would I ensure I stay on an Xorg session?
- I enjoy modding Bethesda games. Does Mod Organizer work fully on Linux?
- I've had difficulties running my steam games through proton on my laptop. Does proton work with Fedora?
- With said difficulties with proton, would installing Steam as a flatpak work or will it cause issues?
- Can you really not play any games with anti-cheat?
If you believe Fedora wouldn't be the best distro for me I'm welcome to hear any suggestions, though I'm not enthusiastic about running anything Debian based nor installing vanilla Arch.
I'm sorry if I'm coming off as lazy for not doing my research. I've tried to research many of these questions before but found no concrete answers.
To all those who took the time to respond to my post.
Thank You!
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Fedora is a great foundation for stability and up to date software. I personally use Ultramarine Linux; it's a general purpose distro based on Fedora, but with more desktop environments, more available packages, more media codecs (plain fedora leaves out a bunch of codecs that you need to play audio or video files), and some more sane defaults. Even with all that, it isn't noticeably more bloated than Fedora; it just gives you more options and makes it so that you don't have to follow a "Things You MUST Do After I stalling Fedora" article.
Wayland works with Nvidia in my experience, and Wayland is remarkably stable and xorg-compatible. Folks will argue about that, but it's been great for the few years I've used it on my laptop and desktop. I know at least Ultramarine installs both, and you can switch between them on the login screen, so give it a shot.
If your games don't work, it's quite normal to dual boot windows just for gaming.
Also, you might consider making your home folder a separate partition. That means you can reinstall and switch distros while leaving your documents and media and such in place. That said, partitioning manually is hard to get the hang of; let me know if you want some help on that front.