Last week, I open-sourced Hatrick. Hatrick is an opinionated installer designed to get .net developers up and running on default Fedora Workstation in no time. This is a personal project I share with the community to encourage contributions and promote Linux and the open-source philosophy to the wider .net community. If you are not already on Linux, this can be your guided first step.

As I shared in one of my previous posts, my journey into Linux began with Zorin OS this year. It’s a fantastic starting point; while it's Linux, it feels like home for Windows users mainly because of the familiar user interface and their Wine configuration. But as I delved deeper into Linux, I realised I wanted something closer to the core experience. In my case, that meant vanilla GNOME, and a faster upgrade cycle. Zorin OS, while excellent, is a modified version of Ubuntu, which itself isn’t as close to vanilla GNOME as I’d like and the Zorin release cycle is kind of slow.

That’s where Fedora comes in. It’s a distribution focusing a bit more on Linux defaults and developers in general. It has different flavours to choose from. But its Workstation variant uses GNOME as intended by the creators. That's something you hate or love, but I love it. Otherwise it’s good to know there is also a KDE flavored version of Fedora (plus many others, all with their own pros and cons). With Fedora there is definitely something to choose.

Fedora gets frequent updates, and aligns with Red Hat’s enterprise-grade Linux and open-source server distributions like Rocky and Alma Linux. The latter I use on my VM's. It offers a good balance: it’s stable enough for daily use, but still lets you tinker and customise from a vanilla install rather than a more bloated one. A small downside? You likely feel the need a little more to tweak the setup here and there, while with Zorin all that thinking is done for you. That's exactly where Hatrick bridges the gap. It automates the setup process, so you can start using Fedora without the hassle and still feel the flexibility Fedora is offering.

Join me on my journey. Install Hatrick with that single command line and start contributing via Github to this initiative by submitting your pull requests. Contributing is simple, because the plugin system is as close to normal bash scripting as I could make it. This is my attempt to get other .net developers to join the Linux ecosystem for their day-to-day work with a bit of stubbornness. I like to welcome you!