---
title: "New Year New Desktop"
slug: new-year-new-desk
date: 2026-01-05T15:20:44-06:00
draft: false
---

🖥️ 🐧 ⌨️

Around Christmas I decided that it was time to install a Linux distro again as my daily driver. I opted for [Fedora 43 KDE](https://www.fedoraproject.org/kde/download).
I am so totally fed up with Windows 11, whose quality has declined so much in the "AI era" that edges that it beat Linux on have basically disappeared. Furthermore, the quality of Linux desktops, especially for gaming experiences (thanks to Steam and its Proton layer) have improved so massively that basically all the games I play work.
The few games that don't mostly fail to work because of Windows kernel-level anticheat. I either avoid those games or I play them on my Playstation.

I have been solidly daily driving it since Christmas and I have an exciting declaration: I don't miss Windows. Like, at all.

The last time I attempted to daily drive was about the spring of 2021 and things were still pretty painful back then. A lot of desktop crashes, weird device hiccups that were unexplainable. Lots of stuff never worked, and gods help you if you had an nVidia GPU. I've owned AMD GPUs exclusively since 2018 which helps.
As I have been setting up this desktop I have been documenting the packages and configuration, within reason, into a file which I am slowly turning into a setup script.
The advantage of doing this is to make my life easier if I distrohop (which I plan on not at all or very sparingly) or need to do some sort of reinstall.
Right now, I installed an old Samsung 840 PRO SSD just for a device-filled partition install but that device, while healthy, is 12 years old so I do not want to run my primary OS from it forever.

Something that has made this migration significantly less painful is the fact that my Media and Games drives (NTFS formatted for windows) are independent from the OS drive. This has made the access of things that matter to me much more seamless.
Even Steam can read that NTFS drive of games, provided you mount it and give it some solid default permissions to read/write because of course Linux doesn't know what to do with Windows file permissions and ACLs.

Right now the edges I am hammering on, that are not perfect:
1. Split tunnel VPN (either OpenVPN or Wireguard) ... can't quite get this the way I had perfected it on Windows
2. VS Code themes appear to be less dark than their Windows counterparts, might be a KDE behavior.
3. Samba shares to another machine....need I say more?

Anyways I am pretty happy with the setup and I am sure I will work through my current issues but if anyone has any suggestions hit me up on socials!
I will continue to blog my progress as ideas come to me.