Why I switched
I was getting frustrated by windows continuous usage of so much memory after only opening few browser tabs and 1 or 2 VS Code windows. Windows started to lag after 90% of RAM usage but my [[Hyprland]] only use about 70% of RAM after using more windows than that of windows.
How I installed
I remember that in my 2nd year my roommate was using mint so, first I tried installing Linux mint distro. I was following a youtube tutorial step by step, but ended up maybe corrupting my USB drive which I was using to boot into Linux Mint. I booted once into Mint but without installing it first I switched to Windows once and then was never able to boot into Mint again. So the Mint story ends here.
After failing once, I didn’t let it go. I then watched another fedora installation tutorial and installed it successfully in dual boot with another USB drive. I still have windows but I hate it when for some reason I’ve to boot into bcz it’s so freaking slow.
Linux Experience
Fedora 42 workstation comes with wayland and its comparatively modern, faster and secure than the traditional X11 which comes with Mint.
After installing Fedora, I explored the default GNOME, tried a few extensions, tweaked some keyboard shortcuts and installed few packages. I was exploring the default fedora but then I came across my friend’s [[Dotfiles]], he recently installed Arch + [[Hyprland]] with Omarchy script which deletes everything on your system and installs Arch linux.
Now you might think what are these things Arch, Hyprland and all so here is a basic overview of how our machine runs applications:
- Basically an app doesn’t directly talk to hardware, they talk to kernel (Linux).
- Then the apps display the content via monitors and here the mediator is Display server which can be X11/Wayland.
- And hyprland, i3 are compositer/windows managers they arrange windows on your screen.
- But GNOME is a complete Desktop environment like one which Windows provide.
So I had GNOME as default on my machine, but I was curious about [[Hyprland]]. And to my surprise fedora uses wayland and it supports [[Hyprland]], so I decided to give it a try. After installing it for the first time and loggin into it, I was like…what is this. The wallpaper was ugly, there was some warning at the top and that’s it.
So after reading about it, I understood how it works and that you have to configure everything according to it. This process is called ricing. So now I started learning about it more and added few things you can read at [[My Hyprland Rice]]. I’m still at it but it already looks & feel better.
For now that’s all about my Linux Fedora 42!