I’d use Arch if only my GPU wouldn’t just die in the middle of a game and I’d have to restart the whole system. So unfortunately im forced to game on Windows
GPU is an RX590 and i can’t for the life of me get it to work on Linux as a whole rn.
I’m not a complete newb when it comes to Linux but I am a newb for running it as my main desktop OS. I ran Mint for a few months but the game I play just stopped working. I kept booting back into Windows as a work around. I eventually wiped Mint off and went with Arch. I gotta admit I was expecting to run into issues but I’ve had no issues at all. I’ve always been a fan of minimalism so Arch has always been on my radar. I’m glad I sucked up the courage to try Arch as it really has worked out well for me.
Hate saying it, but Ubuntu just works for me. I’d rather focus my computer configuration and maintenance efforts on clients rather than my own laptop. If I have to reinstall for whatever reason, its pretty easy because I’m already very familiar with the (shitty) installer, and I don’t do much customizing because I’d rather not have to go through that every time I reinstall.
Granted I’ve never even bothered to run Arch, or any really other desktop distro for that matter. Ubuntu + Gnome looks nice, seems to just work, all I need to do is apt install nvidia drivers and firefox post-install and I’m up and running. I don’t want to do work on my laptop, I want my laptop to enable me to do work.
I think you can install nvidia driver by clicking on “third party driver and codecs” check box during install? It should even register the secureboot key automatically.
Ubuntu installer is pretty good IMO, at least much better than the current fedora installer.
I haven’t used ubuntu for a while, maybe these are outdated impressions.
I dont really fuck around with the GUI stuff tbh…I’ve always just done ubuntu-drivers autoinstall
I guess my issues with the installer have mostly stemmed around the software raid and manual partitioning. Simply installing on a single drive isnt bad.
dont forget to turn of telemitry when using ubuntu
I don’t hate saying it. I have used Linux professionally and personally for 20 years now, and Ubuntu is just a solid choice for productivity. It has wide hardware support and even better user support. People hating on Ubuntu are Linux hipsters and their opinions can typically be dismissed.
There are many ideological reasons to hate ubuntu but I agree it was a solid choice and still is for people just wanting to get shit done without caring too much for the stuff underneath
Arch is like making your own cookies, starting from growing the wheat.
Mint and Pop! are like buying Oreos.
I’m done threshing in my life, never again.
I like Oreos.
And not at all sarcastically, mint Oreos.
Mint Oreos are good, but lemon Oreos are great
Damn you and your mouth-watering memory inducers!
I had a phase of making shakes with milk + mint oreos + mint ice cream
ChOcoLaTE tOotHpAstE
mint has the same problem that butyric acid has in american herseys chocolate. if you associate the ingredient with toothpaste/vomit first, then you come in with a much more negative view of it.
Hershey’s chocolate is gross though.
Goddamit, now you made me buy and try out mint oreos for the first time.
Make sure to have a glass of milk with them!GUZZLE MILK WHILE YOU EAT THEM.
Edit: I sounded too much like an ad.
They’re one of my many one weaknesses
Right up there with table legs in the dark and white cheddar cheezits
Arch beat the wheat
Arch is like making your own cookies, starting from growing the wheat.
This is really more like LFS. Arch would be having all the ingredients and doing the baking.
I agree. and I happen to enjoy baking. arch was my first distro and after a whirlwind tour of other options at some point, has remained my daily driver os for the better part of a decade.
i don’t suggest arch to just any newbies. I suggest it to the ones who are overtly interested in baking. I don’t suggest it to people asking the best way to get tasty cookies, who are perhaps the majority, but not by as much as people seem to naturally suspect. sometimes I think some people giving answers don’t remember or realize that there are many kinds of people interested in learning about Linux and therefore many right answers for a starting distro.
For the new readers never heard of LFS : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_From_Scratch
I think LFS means you also need to build the stove.
LFS: Here’s an empty planet and a bunch of minerals and shit, bake a cake.
If you wish to
make an apple piecompile Linux from scratch, you must first invent the universe-Carl Sagan
Arch would be having all the ingredients and doing the baking.
After being forced to watch a 3 hour documentary.
Arch has an installer script now. It’s literally 1 command and you get a fully working system
So? You can install Windows with 0 commands
Doesn’t mean it is setup how you like it
You maybe get a working system. archinstall is nowhere near foolproof or even complete.
If you want a really painless install of something that gets you the closest to Arch use Endeavour.
Alright so I got a steam deck and that seems cool. Windows has sucked for awhile and now it blows too so can I just install the steamdeck’s version of linux on my PCs too? Or do I choose a different distro? Or uhhhhhhhhhhhh wtf do I do I just wanna play games without being spied on and advertised at
MintLinux and Pop!OS are normally the two front-runners for new users. Basically, if you use Steam and you don’t play online-only games with bad implementations of anti-cheat software, you are good to game on either.
Make a USB that you can “live boot” from, so you can test out how they work with your hardware before you actually install the OS. Generally speaking, Mint works better with AMD, and Pop! works better with Nvidia.
Here’s the official basic guide for Mint:
https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/And here’s the official basic guide for Pop!:
https://support.system76.com/articles/install-pop/Awesome, thanks for the guide links, definitely bookmarking this whole post haha. The Nvidia vs AMD thing is good to know too, I scored a great deal a few years back on a RTX card and I really want that thing working properly if possible
It’s only a general rule. In my experience, Nvidia has kinda been all over the place on how Linux-friendly they are. Do a couple searches on the exact card you have, you might be lucky.
I hope you have fun with finding what works best for you and your hardware!
Don’t know how it’s going to go for you, but Mint has been going really well for me gaming-wise on an Alienware with Nvidia RTX. Pretty much all the Steam games I care about work, and all my Blizzard games through Lutris. All through simple GUIs, and if you like the Windows feel and setup, there’s a Windows 10 theme you can try out, and tutorials on how to get a Windows style mouse cursor too. Again - all up to you, but it worked really well for me and is amazingly customizable. Just… remember to do Timeshift backups regularly, just in case. You never know if you’ll need one.
Other comment made great points on MintOS and PopOS for beginning a Linux journey.
SteamOS isn’t available for a full PC release (that I am aware of), but Bazzite was made to be a full-distro alternative to SteamOS. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but it has good reception from what I see.
Linux Mint is very easy to pick up, though, and I highly recommend for someone coming from Windows. It is fully functional through GUI and has several different flavors for the desktop environment. I’m a fan of KDE, but Cinnemon was also very nice. A version of KDE Plasma is what SteamOS 3.0 uses. I’m not as big of a fan of GNOME, but a lot of people love it as a mor elegant, modern desktop environment.
Bazzite is pretty good, as are Nobara and ChimeraOS. I’ve got HoloISO (SteamOS reimplementation) running and it’s pretty ok. It does what I need but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it due to the Bluetooth issues I’ve had and the on again/off again support.
Funny enough, instead of fixing the Bluetooth issues I just wrote a script a week or two ago that runs on startup. It removes btusb and btintel then reloads them. I hate janky fixes like that but I don’t have the time or energy to tinker with operating systems anymore.
Awesome, thanks! I have some homework to do looking into these now, so many options!
Use Gentoo, add -telemetry to FLAGS, so every software will be built without it - no spyware.
You can /s me later.
I recommend nobara
If you like traditional desktop approach, just go with Linux Mint. If you wanna try something different, go with PopOS. You can always use Steam’s Big Picture mod if you want Steam Deck UI.
Obviously the distro choices are limitless but it’s a good idea to start with one of these.
Archlinux is very similar to steamdeck so i recommend either that or EndevourOS. Lutris + Wine-GE lets you play basically any game, from Windows or other hardware, on linux so i recommend that
I use AAAAAAAAAARCH, btw
You should do your own research which linux or unix distro will work for you. Don’t ask someone else. What works for them may not work for you. Without first doing research and trying various distros yourself you will fail. If you are not willing to learn don’t even bother just stick with windows.
If you think doing research doesn’t include asking questions, maybe you should do some better research on doing research.
If you think asking questions first before doing your own research and learning on your own you doing it wrong. You will never be successful anywhere not just linux.
You’re making a lot of unfounded assumptions here. Also, either your reading comprehension sucks or you’re being deliberately obtuse by claiming I said any such thing.
“Hey New User, shut up and come back when you’ve read the documentation for each component of every distro and studied how they interact with each other. I am too burned out from maintaining my rare and arcane DIY configuration to answer your stupid questions.”
I would appreciate it if they would glance at the features page of 3 popular distros, even if they don’t understand what a brtfs or LTS is.
@bastonia
Metro map zu deiner perfekten Distro:
🇩🇪 heise.de/downloads/18/3/2/5/8/…I lol’d. From what I gather, the bird in the last frame is showing annoyance but powering through with their calm advice on possible distros to choose. The loud bird is the usual Arch recommendation that gets shouted out and over the other recs.
I’m an arch user myself, chose it because i wanted to get familiar with command line and force myself to learn a bit more about linux. Since choosing a DE was also paralyzing, I opted for i3 and now use sway and learned more about config files. Great part about linux is you can try and use what you like and works for you.
Was that the joke? I don’t know if I was misunderstanding, but I thought the loud crow was supposed to be a new Linux user complaining that the few-mentioned easy-to-use distro’s being too many options.
I misinterpreted, the loud aarch is shouting out (arguably) less friendly distros over what the first bird started suggested.
No. It’s someone responding to questions for what distros to try as a new user. That’s why it starts with “new user?” to identify the subject of who it’s speaking to. The crow is giving it’s own advice for harder distros that a Windows user would switch to.
KAAAAAAALLLLLLIIIIIII
“I saw it on Mr Robot”
Only complaint is… FUCK CANONICAL.
Beyond that, heh. Sure.
(Don’t be shy if you don’t mind the learning curve, there’s nothing wrong choosing a distro that meets your needs.)
What’s wrong with Canonical?
Among other things? They have a restrictive licensing, they’re a for-profit company, and though it’s now disabled by default (maybe, see for profit company bit,) they got j to cahoots with Amazon for Spyware
They’ve always skeeved me out with their MS-like approach to UI.
Among other things? They have a restrictive licensing,
Thanks for that link and on the way there reminding me of the Firefox versus Debian conflict over branding :)
It was a bit weasel-y of debian, but like, I understand branding issues being “important”; the issue with Ubuntu and branding is you can’t do that. You have to get approval to repackage/brand Ubuntu.
What’s wrong by a for profit company? Theoretically that is the best option
For profit companies are solely motivated by profit.
Inevitably they will choose profit over what’s right. In the meantime, there’s nothing wrong per se, but, for example, I don’t trust Canonical to not try and slip unity-lens or whatever it was back in all quiet like.
Or, duck duck go to not quietly expand what it tracks and sells on you. (Mobile browser app caved for Google money,)
If you are paying them to to the right thing then they don’t want to lose your money.
There’s always someone with more money willing to pay them to do the wrong thing.
Yeah that is true. In that case jump ship and go elsewhere
There are better options then Canonical.
OpenSUSE is backed by SUSE, and Fedora is backed by Red Hat. SUSE and Red Hat are both for-profit companies, and both are better FOSS citizens.
Agreed although Redhat prohibits you from sharing the source code or else they will terminate your service
RH doesn’t allow sharing of the spec files which generate the RHEL rpm packages. The program’s code is still under whatever license it is licensed under.
Besides all the RHEL code is public and upstream in CentOS, which makes more sense anyway.
Same as IBM, but everyone rushes to suck their dick when they’re not even much useful for the ecosystem anyways
What makes you think I’m fond of IBM? What about IBM being creepy makes Canonical not creepy?
Just an interesting thing in the community, how everything canonical does is immediately hate mongered by all relevant Linux media and Red Hat is given free reign
Everyone is a slave to systemd. But they seem to kinda like it, whereas Snaps are just raw garbage.
LOL.
So. Fun story. My dad is a Unix SysOps guy. I grew up on Red Hat. he went out to REHL’s HQ in Raleigh, NC, to get pitched their enterprise services for his org. (they were soliciting bids from several places,). In any case, he came back with, for him, a new hostility towards red hat. (“I regret setting you up with red hat…” lots of other comments that could be described as “fuck them”, he’s far less crude than I am.)
the most hilarious part is the some of the swag was this nasty-ass 1 pound chocolate bar that they made a big deal out of. he put it out at his office and not even the office grazers that would eat 3-week old pizza left in the fridge would touch it.
RH has fallen from grace.
Ubuntu is the Windows 11 of Linuxes.
I have never really seen arch or gentoo unironically pitched to new users. However, I have seen new users try to use arch because they didn’t get the joke.
Literally the top comment at this time from KubeRoot:
I will happily recommend Arch to a new user… If they’re interested in learning Linux, and not dependent on it working reliably, while warning them of the risks and telling them about the advantages.
Then a bit lower by mac:
I think Arch is a good distro to learn for new users who are interested in tech, it gives an amazing example of good documentation and teaches you a lot about how UNIX-Like filesystems work.
Both are heavily upvoted
Recommending one of those obscure diestros should be considered a crime
To be fair to those users, the joke isn’t funny…
I have seen arch recommended to first time Linux users more times than I can count. It’s usually said that installing it is a learning experience. If that’s a joke it’s a really stupid one.
Read the top comments in here again, it’s full of people recommending it with a straight face.
Yes. Arch is not actually hard. It’s just a meme.
I will happily recommend Arch to a new user… If they’re interested in learning Linux, and not dependent on it working reliably, while warning them of the risks and telling them about the advantages.
I wouldn’t recommend it to somebody who wants something that just works, but for tech-inclined people looking for a system they are in control (and responsibility) of, willing to learn how to set it up, I think a manual installation is a good experience.
But they will be warned.
I recommend arch to a first time user…once. because he said he wanted to have Linux as a new hobby of sorts. Everyone else I recommend Pop! Or Fedora most of the time.
What would be a good source of info on this, for someone who only knows windows but isn’t afraid to learn a lot of new stuff if that means doing it right.
I feel like i should move away from windows with their shenanigans. I use my pc for gaming and messing around with my 3d printer(and everything that comes with that), photography, design work.
As others mentioned, archwiki is the information source if you want to use Arch, and a great source of information even if using other distributions.
For other distros, I’ve seen people mention Linux Journey.
All that said, you might not be able to drop Windows entirely - if we’re talking CAD software, the Adobe suite, that kind of stuff, you might not be able to find suitable alternatives for Linux. That said, you can always dual boot, or you might even be able to work with a VM.
If you do want to try a dual boot, I strongly recommend setting up the Linux boot partition on a separate physical drive, to minimize the risk of Windows overwriting it… As well as you accidentally messing up your windows install. I’d also recommend using rEFInd as the bootloader, since it’s very easy to set up and will automatically show a boot option for Windows.
Feel free to ask questions, I’m no expert, but I’ll try to answer when I have time.
I love REFind. I spent ages faffing around with a fedora/arch dual boot when I was trying to learn how it all worked; when I got sick of learning things the hard way, REFind had my back and gave me a straightforward solution
The arch wiki is the gold standard for Linux, not just arch. But it definitely talks specifically about arch.
So, there are built in install scripts now. There’s no GUI installer, but it’s 1 command to get a full arch setup installed with a desktop environment. Arch is a 100% reasonable choice for a new user.
That’s why I use endeavourOS: behaves like arch(or is arch) but easy to install and with easy grafic driver management. You can use ArchWiki so well with it
The Arch Linux wiki is considered, by several Linux users including myself, as the best reference for troubleshooting and learning more about Linux, even when you’re not using Arch Linux. For a gamer (which I’m not,btw) have a look at https://bazzite.gg/ and https://nobaraproject.org/ and there’s Lemmy communities for linux_gaming
Manjaro Gnome on a Raspberry Pi 4 4Gb + SSD is just fantastic.
I liked Ubuntu prior to snap. I’ve gone back to Debian and aside from a slightly complex install, I think that the distro is the epitome of stability and “just works”, especially for the normal software stuff I do. It’s 30 years old for a reason.
My experiences with arch are that it just broke if you looked at it funny and I like stuff that doesn’t require the constant tinkering. This is the same reason I don’t do smart tech and still own dumb and mechanical watches.
I feel like I’m in the minority in this community lately.
You’re in the majority in general society though, IMO. And I’m with you as well.
agreed
