Linux Setup Experience

I recently reinstalled windows on 3 machines and dual booted 2 of them with Linux. I tried Fedora, MX and Mint, but settled on Fedora 33 using the Cinnamon desktop. This post is just a dump of some random things I want to remember should I have to go through this process again later.

• You will see discussions about the widespread use of UEFI motherboards making boot environments unnecessary, but I didn’t have that experience and wound up using the MBR version after the No-Grub & PBR versions didn’t work.
  • Way bigger fan of the Fedora setup process, only complaint is the contextual help links rarely took me to a place that properly explained an acronym I wasn’t familiar with. However, that wasn’t a huge deal since I had access to Firefox throughout the entire install.
• There is a maximum number of primary partitions a drive can have so I opted to use a logical partition for all the Linux stuff. I had no problems shrinking an existing primary disk partition with lots of free space using standard Windows UI interfaces and then setting up the following logical partitions in advanced mode of the Linux installs: (advise assigning volume names you can identify)
  • 500GB logical volume to house the various partitions Linux wants
    • /swap (64GB since I had 32GB of memory, I went with ex4 specifically because the swap specific type didn’t let me specify the mount point)
    • / (aka root also 64GB, ex4)
    • /boot (1GB, ex4)
    • /home (371GB, ex4)
• Cinnamon was the best of the 3 desktops I tried, but none of them are perfect and this link has great information for resolving a few things:
  • ​DebugPoint Post - 10 things to do after installing Fedora 33
• I would add Snaps as another must install that the link above didn’t cover. This is where you can get things like VSCode & Typoria. Here is are some fantastic posts on that:
  • TecMint Post - A beginners guide to Snaps in Linux - part 1
  • TecMint Post - How to manage Snaps in Linux - part 2
• There is another interesting package store called FlatHub, but it seems like most if not all of them are “sandboxed”, which is fine, but you won’t wind up with neatly filed App Icons from them. Anyway, the FlatPak installer comes pre-packaged with Fedora so these are worth checking out.
• ShiftKey has been maintaining an unofficial Linux ​GitHub Desktop fork and it totally works
• Don’t try to install other desktop environments until after you’ve updated everything else.