I wanted to follow up on how my Linux adventure is going so far. It’s pretty good! I will say though, after living with Xfce for a while and struggling with tasks that should be relatively easy, I’ve made the switch to the Fedora KDE spin. Xfce is great in a lot of ways, but it is definitely showing its age. That’s not to say KDE hasn’t been around for a while, but it is evolving with the times a lot more gracefully. The recent addition of support for Wayland fractional scaling in Plasma 5.27 was what really made the decision easy for me.

This has been a long time coming, with a lot of preparation and research involved, but it’s finally time. I’m switching to Linux for my everyday computing after using Windows almost exclusively on the desktop for the majority of my life. I’ll explain a bit more about why, but if you’re just curious about my new setup, here it is:

• Framework laptop, refurbished edition with a Core i5-1135G7
• 2x USB-C ports, 1x USB-A, and 1x HDMI
• SK Hynix Gold P31 2TB SSD for lots of fast, power-efficient storage
• Crucial RAM from the compatibility list, 32GB of DDR4-3200
• Fedora Xfce

I’ve been using restic for backups for a few months now, and there are a lot of great resources out there to get started setting that up. However, most tutorials will have you store application keys and passwords in plaintext, which is not ideal from a security standpoint. I spent some time figuring out a better way, and I’m sharing what I discover on Github!