After some encouragement, I’ve been making an effort to switch much of my computing over to Fedora (at least, on weekends until it’s got everything I need on it).

My (Framework) laptop fully supports the OS, and even booting it up on an external SSD has been easy, and it works fast and smooth.

But, it’s absolutely not as easy to settle into compared to windows.

With Windows, the only “tweaks” that a user might make is installing a different browser, but everything else will work as it should.

Power Windows users will spend more time removing bloat and ads, I won’t deny that!

But on Fedora, I had to scour the internet to find out how to get a minimize and maximize button on a window (had to install another utility, then an extension…). Then I had to do the same to move things down to a dock.

Annoying, but it wasn’t a huge deal. These small add-on, tweaks, and personalization options all require that you know where to look and how to actually apply these fixes. Thank god I didn’t have to fuss around with device drivers.

Then, as I happily watched the Para Olympics while multitasking, my screen just went black. No warning, no way to recover it. Hitting my laptop’s power button throws up a series of errors and !!! “FAILED TO EXECUTE SHUTDOWN BINARY”.

If this is the equivalent to a BSOD on Windows, then it would be my first BSOD in many, many years.

Now I need to figure out how to get some Windows-only software to run, if that’s even possible, which adds another layer of time and aggravation.

If I were a novice computer user, I wouldn’t even bother with any of this and just stick to Windows. Hell, I wouldn’t even know where to begin with any of it!

But I’ll see how long I can ride this out, and perhaps I’ll be a full-time Linux user some day.