# Switching desktop Linux from Debian to Fedora

Last week I switched the operating system on my daily driver (Lenovo ThinkPad T14s) from [Debian](https://debian.org) 12 to [Fedora](https://fedoraproject.org/workstation/) 40.  

About 2 years ago I tried Fedora 36 and I was really impressed by it, but ultimately I went back to using Debian pretty quickly. I have been seriously thinking about making the switch to Fedora ever since. If you were to ask my wife about the speed at which I operate, she would probably say that 2 years is a very short amount of time for me to make a decision and action it. Seriously though, I would not class myself as a distro hopper and I have been using Debian as my desktop OS for a long time, so making a decision like this is not something to be taken lightly.

## Why switch?

My reasons for the switch are pretty simple, I am a GNOME user and I want the best out-of-the-box GNOME experience with the latest goodies that the GNOME developers are providing. The Debian developers do a great job at packaging GNOME, but having kept an eye on the Fedora developer's efforts over the last couple of years, I think they do an equally good job but have the ability of being able to move faster with 2 releases per year.

As a real-world example of how it benefits me to be using the latest GNOME desktop; I have been keeping a Windows machine on my home network that I can access via headless RDP. I only really need access to the web browser on that machine and I would much prefer it not to be running Windows. The latest GNOME desktop allows for easy set-up of headless RDP, so I have now replaced Windows on that machine with Fedora and headless RDP connections to that machine work great. To be fair, I could have waited for the next version of Debian for the same feature to become available, but with all the Microsoft AI nonsense that is currently happening, I really wanted to get that Windows installation off of my network sooner rather than later.

Another real-world example; several of the machines I use have NVIDIA hardware, the latest GNOME releases feature improved NVIDIA/Wayland support that fixes graphical glitches when using the latest NVIDIA driver. It is trivial to install the latest NVIDIA drivers under Fedora. Again, I could wait for the next version of Debian to be released, but I have found NVIDIA/Wayland support under Debian to be less than stellar in the past and it is not guaranteed this will improve with the next release.

## How the switch went

For anyone who has been using desktop Linux for a long time, switching from one distro to another is not actually too difficult. I have a list of software titles/tools that I use and all them are available on both Fedora and Debian. Also, I opt to use Flatpak to install most of the applications that I need, so I created a list of installed applications on my Debian system and just reinstalled them once I had performed the Fedora installation. I then performed a restore of my project files and dot files and the job was done. All-in-all, the switch takes an hour or two at most and apart from different default desktop wallpapers, it is almost impossible to know whether I am using Debian or Fedora.

## Caveats

Where it is possible to know the difference is with my local web development environment. As a web developer, I like to use the same environments for both development and production and whilst I am happy to use Fedora on the desktop, I am not switching away from using Debian on servers anytime soon. With this in mind, I use Virtual Machine Manager to create and manage a Debian virtual machine, which I use as a local development environment. I set-up Apache under Fedora as a reverse proxy pointing to Apache on the Debian VM, this allows me to access *.localhost domains on the VM as if they were located on the host. I also mount my Projects directory on the VM under my home directory on the Fedora host using SSHFS. The VM is set to automatically start with the host. It's a bit convoluted, but it works for me.

## Conclusion
  
I am really happy with Fedora Workstation and it is working really well for me. The installation was easy and the switch was straightforward. I am enjoying using the latest GNOME desktop and I like the thought that it will get updated with a regular cadence. I like the progressive nature of the Fedora Project and I'm looking forward to seeing future improvements.