I’m currently on Win11 but I’m getting that familiar Linux itch and want to dual boot a while again. I tend to gravitate towards Ubuntu simply because it’s so big and well supported by most things.
I’ve run Arch in the past but I’ve gotten too old and lazy for that if I’d be completely honest. I have played with manjaro and endeavour though… and opensuse tumbleweed, rolling is kind of nice.
Not sure what I’d try out first this time so I figured I’d get some inspiration from you guys!
Debian
gentoo!
i love the versatility it offers, but it’s very much so DIY. it has great documentation. anyone who considers themselves a “linux enthusiast” should try an install in a VM at some point or another, if nothing else it’s a great learning experience.
for gaming in particular: flatpak steam / lutris / bottles. it’s great because it’s completely distro agnostic. i can take the $USER/.var directory and put it on any distro with flatpak installed and it’ll just work.
I am starting to realize how handy flatpaks can be!
I’ve been distro hopping like a madman these last couple of days and it’s gotten so much easier to get going with my games now!
All of my workstations are now running Fedora Silverblue. Steam is installed via flatpak, and GPU is a Radeon 6800 XT. I also have a Steam Link for couch co-op. All is well on the gaming front!
Debian Sid and Arch have run equally well with this setup. Your choice of distro matters much less now compared to a few years ago, especially if you favour a flatpak workflow.
Edit: typos!
Save yourself a lot of trouble and get a secondary SSD to put Linux on instead of doing a traditional dual boot. Normal dual boots with windows suck ass and lead to problems.
As for a distro, I keep going back to endeavourOS. It’s just so minimal out of the box, and I still can’t find anything to match the convinience of the AUR + Pacman for package management.
I’m using Manjaro KDE - working well with Steam Games with Proton for must games.
In the past, I had been using Ubuntu LTS releases for my main HTPC. That original install had been upgraded many times, but actually started out as an Ubuntu spin-off called Mythbuntu. Of course since Steam on Linux was first released, Ubuntu was the most well-supported distro at the time, and still technically is (Look in Steam’s
.local
install directory and you’ll still findubuntu12_32
,ubuntu12_64
folders which are pre-packaged dependencies & libraries forsteam-runtime
built against Ubuntu’s core libs for each architecture). It ran many games fine, and the added bonus of a distro focused on being an HTPC meant that I could usemythgame
as a frontend for emulators, steam, or whatever else needed a launcher. Meanwhile, the main focus of MythTV was being an OSS DVR that supported TV capture cards, commercial skip, and transcoding.It ran all those things well, except trancoding (no VAAPI, only VDPAU & not many codecs), up to a point when my original Nvidia GT240 card became deprecated by Nvidia’s binary blob drivers. Thanks to the version-pinned
340
proprietary drivers not being well supported on newer kernels, I have been forced into a hardware upgrade cycle. Decided to go with AMD this time around, but the first card has some kind of hardware issue (9 times out of 10 after a reboot, theamdgpu
driver says the SMU won’t init properly… same on windows but no helpful error messages, just doesn’t work at all). The card arrived without an OEM box, and seemed suspiciously in used condition although it wasn’t sold to me as a used model. Thanks to testing in a rolling-release distro based on Arch, I was able to prove that it wasn’t due to software, but instead was a hardware issue. I’m going to send that GPU back and get another one to replace it once prices get less insane.I tested out various Manjaro LiveCDs to check if it was a software or driver problem, and did get the GPU working about once every 10 reboots. I decided to go with a full install of Manjaro Sway edition to try and test out wayland & a more minimal window manager. I didn’t think I’d like it at first, as I’d always avoided using
i3wm
in the past… but actually it’s starting to grow on me and I think I’ll try this out as a daily driver for a while. After following some instructions on the Arch wiki to identify missing steam-runtime dependencies and installing them viapacman
, everything works, including Proton-based games. Technically Steam is still running underXwayland
, as evidenced byxlsclients
output, but it works and seems much snappier than running on Ubuntu with X11.Geez… you guys are making this hard… now I’m bouncing between ubuntu, pop, endeavour and manjaro…
Nicely formatted post by the way :)
Fedora, KDE spin. Been working great, and I’m kinda liking DNF
I use Arch with KDE Plasma for that comfy desktop environment feel but switch to BSPWM ever so often for productivity or to use my pc as just a media center
Been gaming on Gentoo for over a year, even if I haven’t found much time for gaming in the last few months.
Don’t do it if you’ve gotten too lazy for Arch though. Try Pop!_OS or Linux Mint or something. Enjoy an easy distro for a bit, till you get the itch for Arch back.
Oh I’ve tinkered with Gentoo plenty in the past (I still miss OTW if that rings any bells) and no, I really don’t have the patience for it these days. :)
And yeah, I’ll probably end up installing something a bit more fancy soon-ish… for now I plopped Kubuntu 20.04 on there and Diablo IV is downloading as we speak!
I use Arch with XFCE. Yes, it took a while to get running properly, and just the other day I went to print something and realized cups hadn’t even been installed yet, so I spent 15 minutes getting my printer up and running, so I totally get that it’s not for everyone. I like it because of the detailed wiki with great tutorials and instructions on getting things working, like the one I used to get a nextcloud installation working on my computer. And I like it because of the extensive Arch User Repository, so I know I can install whatever I like. I mostly just play Stardew Valley and trackmania on it. I’ve used Manjaro before and enjoyed that too, and it comes with all the benefits of arch.
I installed Mint on my friends computer, which works totally fine, but I don’t know how it is for gaming; she definitely doesn’t game.
Arch really is a documentation project rather than a distro, their wiki tops most everything out there :)
Seriously, ArchWiki has taught me most of what I know about Linux.
Yeah, that’s basically where you go if you ever have some obscure problem, it’s incredibly useful really.
Arch Linux. Been using it since long ago and play most of my games on it.
PopOS is best for out the box gaming, its similar to Ubuntu so you’ll be familiar with it
What’s their biggest advantages against Ubuntu?
Truthfully it comes with nvidoa drivers pre installed.
Personally I run mint and its just a couple of clicks to get it installed in mint. I tried pop is didn’t like it that much and gave me less stability with some of my use cases
Yeah, that’s basically what I figured. Plus some bells and whistles in the design department. Might just as well go with *buntu and install drivers then.
Don’t know how different it is with buntu I know mint does extra things. I’d you like the cinnamon desktop mints the best bet
Fedora but I’m about to move to NixOS Unstable or VanillaOS if it gets better NVIDIA integration.
I am on Vanilla OS with a NVIDIA gpu and its running pretty well.
Awesome. I’ve heard there are some problems with hardware acceleration.
On my gaming desktop, I am using Fedora currently with the Awesome WM. That might change though with all the RH stuff going on. On my gaming laptop I switch between Arch and Void with Qtile on both.
I use Arch with KDE. I don’t recommend Manjaro because it has historically had some serious problems, so for people who want Arch without as much hassle, I’m recommending EndeavourOS. It’s what Manjaro should be like.