I'd been thinking about it for a while. As an IT consultant who builds automations, runs Docker containers, and spends most of the day in terminals and browsers, Windows was starting to feel like a platform I was working around rather than with.

So on a Sunday in March 2026, I just did it. Fresh Fedora 41 install on an ASUS TUF Gaming A14. Here's what actually happened.

The hardware reality nobody tells you

Modern laptops aren't plug-and-play on Linux. My TUF A14 has a hybrid AMD/NVIDIA GPU setup and a MediaTek WiFi card. Two classic Linux headaches. Before touching the installer I had to:

None of this is rocket science, but it's the kind of thing that sends people back to Windows. With the right preparation it's 15 minutes of work.

The WiFi card turned out to be MT7922, better supported than the MT7925 found in newer ASUS models. It worked out of the box. I had a USB-C to Ethernet adapter as backup anyway, which I'd recommend to anyone doing this migration.

Installation was faster than expected

Fedora 41 Workstation. Full disk encryption with LUKS. Third-party repositories enabled during setup which added RPM Fusion automatically. This matters because it's where NVIDIA drivers live.

Post-install the NVIDIA driver setup was three commands:

sudo dnf install kernel-devel
sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda
sudo reboot

Wait five minutes after reboot for the kernel module to compile. That's it. No manual driver downloads, no INF files, no Device Manager.

ASUS-specific tools for fan control and GPU switching came from the asus-linux.org community project: asusctl and supergfxctl. Two more commands and my hardware was fully supported including keyboard LEDs and performance profiles.

The RAM difference is not a myth

This was the most immediately noticeable change. My typical work setup:

On Windows 11 this combination regularly pushed me toward my 16GB ceiling. On Fedora the same setup sits at 6.3GB used. Nearly 10GB free.

The reasons are straightforward: no telemetry services, no antivirus scanning, no Windows Update polling, no Cortana, no OneDrive sync running in background. Docker runs natively instead of inside a WSL2 VM that pre-allocates memory. The difference is real and it compounds over a full working day.

The developer experience is genuinely better

Things that just work better on Linux for development:

The workflow I ended up with: four tmux panes on one monitor, Claude Code running in terminal, VS Code or Cursor for editing, Docker containers in another pane. Everything talking to each other natively.

What actually broke

Honest list:

None of these were showstoppers. Most took one command to fix.

What I didn't expect

The speed. Not just RAM. Everything feels snappier. The system gets out of your way. No "preparing Windows", no random background processes spiking CPU, no update notifications at the wrong moment.

After one day I had:

On Windows that setup took weeks to accumulate. On Fedora it was one focused day.

Who should do this

If you're a developer or IT professional who lives in terminals, runs Docker, and uses browser-based tools for everything else, the migration cost is low and the daily gains are real.

If you depend on specific Windows software that has no Linux equivalent, do the math carefully first.

For me the timing was right. M365 runs in the browser. Cursor and VS Code have Linux versions. Docker is better on Linux than Windows. Claude works in the browser and terminal.

The only thing Windows had that Linux doesn't is Cowork. And the community is already working on that.