Hello I'm back :)

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Hey everyone!

It’s been quite a while since I last posted something here :slight_smile:
Let me give you a quick update on what I’ve been up to:
Over the past months I’ve been busy with some payed programming tasks, but the most important thing is that I think I’ve finally found the perfect stable setup for my daily workflow.

Right now I’m using a dual boot system with Linux and Windows.

  • Windows 11: I use it mainly for gaming, audio editing, and working on some Office documents.
  • Linux (Fedora): For everything else — coding, system tasks, general usage.

Let’s talk a bit about gaming:

I recently started playing Oblivion Remastered (huge Elder Scrolls fan :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:). My NVIDIA 3070 Ti was struggling at ultrawide resolution with high settings — barely hitting 30–40 FPS. So, I decided to upgrade to an RTX 5070, and now I’m running at 80–90 FPS with DLSS 4 enabled and lower power consumption. Definitely a good move!

My Linux Setup

On a separate disk, I installed Fedora 42 (XFCE edition).
Everything runs smoothly — it’s up-to-date, stable, and I’ve had zero issues so far.

I’ve tried various Ubuntu-based distros in the past (Pop!_OS, Linux Lite, Mint, etc.), but they’re just not for me:

  • Package versions are too outdated
  • Snap usage is excessive and intrusive
  • Less flexibility in package and system customization

I also gave Arch Linux a try — it’s powerful, sure, but too geeky and lacks a centralized approach, which I found time-consuming.

With Fedora, I found a perfect balance:

  • Modern software
  • Great developer tools
  • Less overhead
  • A distro that feels like it’s built for people who know what they’re doing, but don’t want to build everything from scratch.

And yes — XFCE forever! It’s the only desktop environment I can really work with.

My Backup Strategy

I’ve set up a 4TB external hard drive (NTFS formatted) as my main backup device. Here’s how I handle things:

  • Manual backups roughly every 2 weeks
  • Windows 11:
    • Using AOMEI Backupper (licensed) for incremental disk backups
    • Specific incremental backups for important folders (e.g., VMs, code projects)
  • Fedora Linux:
    • I use dd to clone the entire disk, which gives me byte-for-byte assurance
    • Boot into GParted Live, then run:
      sudo dd if=/dev/sdc of=/media/ricky/BK/mybackup.img bs=4096M status=progress
      My Fedora install is on a 240GB SSD — takes ~30 minutes, which is totally fine.

I keep the external drive locked away when not in use — connected only during backups or emergencies.

Dual Boot Notes

Setting up the dual boot took a bit of work:

  • Windows 11 disk: manually partitioned with a large NTFS volume + 80MB FAT32 EFI partition
  • Fedora disk: large XFS partition + FAT32 EFI boot partition
  • I copied the Windows EFI bootloader into Fedora’s /boot/ and configured GRUB
  • Now at boot I get a GRUB menu that lets me choose between Fedora and Windows — and it stays updated after kernel upgrades too!

Final Thoughts

That’s pretty much it :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: I’m really happy with this setup — stable, powerful, flexible, and totally under control.
Feels like I’ve finally found my green zone.

How’s everyone else doing?
Cheers,
Ricky

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Hi Ricky,

That rig sounds dialed in! Fedora + XFCE on its own drive is a clean approach, and your 5070 upgrade clearly paid off for Oblivion Remastered.

One small idea you might keep in your back pocket:

  • Snapshots for quick roll-backs: A lightweight tool like Timeshift can take automatic Btrfs snapshots without replacing your full-disk dd image. It gives you a safety net for tweaks or updates while respecting the effort you already put into your backup routine.

Everything sounds rock-solid. Enjoy that green zone!

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eheh thanks, also I tried asking Chat GPT what he thinks about my situation, my needings about my workflow and what are my requisites on a Linux distro. He said exactly Ubuntu and Derivates are a bit tight for my usecase. He suggest me using Fedora or OpenSuse or Arch .., or vanilla Debian Sid. I ended up trying Fedora. That’s all and I did not regret my choice.

Snapshots for quick roll-backs: A lightweight tool like Timeshift can take automatic Btrfs snapshots without replacing your full-disk dd image. It gives you a safety net for tweaks or updates while respecting the effort you already put into your backup routine.

Thanks Hydn for the tip, but the problem about using those tools are that I need to have an Unix file system (XFS, EXT4, BRTFS etc etc..) for keeping the backups. I have just one 4tb external disk and I prefer don’t split it’s partitions, just one big NTFS partition is great for my usecase.
In this case I can mount without problem the NTFS disk through Gparted live terminal and launch the dd command for save the image on the external disk.

In the end I will backup one unique .img file of the size of nearly 220gb which is storing all information about disk, data, bootloader, freespace.. lol :slight_smile: If one day it’ll become a space problem I can starting rotating the backups, deleting the older ones.

I think it worth better using dd, 30 mins for a complete backup is an acceptable amount of time.

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