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!
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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!
I’ve been running Pop for a bit over a year now and am (mostly) satisfied with it. The only issues I had were due to kernel updates, it would cause flickering on my screen and (like someone else mentioned) had to revert to an older kernel until the situation was resolved.
Pop here also. I tried several different distro’s, pop worked out of the box. Only issue was my cheap little Bluetooth USB wart, but five minutes of searching showed me how to get it working. That’s it. I like it. Familiar enough for a windows refugee, plays enough steam games without issues to keep me happy. No crashes, no freezes, unlike windows 10/11.
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!
I would take a look at pop_os. It’s Ubuntu, but without Snap and a closer to mainline kernel version. They have a lot of great usability tweaks too.
I run Arch BTW. I just like to make things difficult :)
I installed Kubuntu… I couldn’t be assed to resize my efi partition to a gig and disrupt windows… Done that in the past with varying results. Wish they didn’t require it to be that big tbh.
I do miss Arch… wouldn’t surprise me if I’ll install it again soon.
Kubuntu works. But where’s the fun in that? :)
It’s like… I installed it, messed with lutris a bit (needed a newer version) and installed Diablo 4, everything works… and now I feel like I’m missing out somehow. :)
You’re missing out on chasing the dragon for the latest and greatest. :)
Arch is fine once you get it setup, but I feel like the nerd in us can never just leave it be. I’ll probably go back to pop_os next major release they have.
Sometimes I wish I had a machine dedicated to nothing but reinstalling different distros. :)
It can get a bit disrupting to do it on your main rig too often.
Use a VM?
I know, I do that too but it’s just not quite the same for some reason.
VMs are great for that
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.
I use Void Linux. I like how much more up to date the libraries and apllications tend to be, it’s quite similar to Arch in that regard, as it’s a true rolling release just like Arch.
It also tends to be very stable as well, with couple minor issues I had ever experienced got fixes within 48-ish hours. One was hugin not launching, and the other a transition issue between pipewire-media-session and wireplumber being the default.
Void uses runit for service management, and is still multithreaded despite taking a more similar approach to just plain shell scripts, and constantly monitors services. What I like about this is more much simpler services are to write compared to SystemD, and then you just put a simlink to them from /etc/sv/ to /etc/runit/runsvdir/default/ to enable or disable.
Void also uses their own XBPS package system, which operates similar to pacman, and is equally fast. Void is basically a rolling release like Arch, with the latest updates, but instead has a more “classic” system management style, which I for one greatly appreciate.
After nearly a decade of distro hopping, Void is where I landed for at least the past several years, and I see no reason to leave. Just sharing incase someone else out there thinks this sounds like the system for them, and if so, Take a Step Into the Void, it might be what you’re looking for. That’s what I like about there being so many distros, there’s choice to match each one’s needs.
That’s another one I’ve heard of but never tried. Sounds pretty nice. Rathet Arch-like in a KISS approach l?
Yup! That’s my kind of approach too. And Void boots just as fast. Up to date, boots very quickly AND is a install what YOU need, without tons of preloaded choices, distro. Arch and Void are at the top of my list for that reason. My personal file server runs Arch, my “client” computers run Void. I was surprised the touchscreen on my laptop (Ideapad 5 Pro, Ryzen 5600U version) worked without any configuration honestly, so hardware support is quite good on Void too.
Sounds pretty nice tbh!
Currently running Fedora on my laptop and Arch on my desktop, though I’ll probably migrate from Fedora to openSUSE next month.
Oh, an openSUSE fan! There’s dozens of us! :)
I do really enjoy Tumbleweed with Plasma to be honest. It just feels so polished.
While I like Tumbleweed and Plasma, I can’t for the life of me figure out why KDEWallet keeps asking for my password to get on wifi every time I reboot.
Yeah, that happens sometimes for me too. I usually just disable it in the settings, but irrc, if you set the kwallet password and the user password to be the same, it shouldn’t ask for it.
Yeah I remember it happening for me at some point as well and I think this fixed it. It was quite some time ago though so I’m not sure at all. :P
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.
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!
Not at all an expert, but I’m doing fine with most games on Manjaro. Most things worked out of the box with Proton on Steam. I also liked Arch before I got old and lazy, and Manjaro seems to be a good way to get most of the benefits of Arch with lazier upkeep.
Win11 is worse than a phone vis a vis spying. Finally made a switch. could not install popOS, so ended up with mint.
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
I use Arch, but I have two graphics cards in my system and I run a stripped windows VM for any game that I want ray tracing or 4k in.
My arch setup has an older Nvidia Quadro card and can run everything on like medium settings, but my virtual machines have a 3080ti. I didn’t want the wear and tear on my 3080ti just to watch YouTube or play indie games that don’t need the horsepower, but I still want to try stuff like portalRTX or stable diffusion and the like that needs an enthusiast graphics card.
This to me is the best of both worlds. I can run the VM in the background so I can use my desktop(connected to the TV) as a media center and have cyberpunk playing totally hidden and streaming to my steam deck for ray tracing maxxed settings.
Hell I even play Half life:Alex VR in a virtual machine and stream it over wifi to my Oculus quest.
With some of the news going around about the new windows versions and what-not, this sounds really interesting. I have a couple questions if you could answer them, that would be awesome!
How does a new release of Windows affect the compatibility of this set up? I know programs with for a while on older releases, but after a time, that version will be phased out. That might be more about the VM than your setup, but I don’t have a lot of experience with those either lol.
Does this introduce some system lag for input in any way? If I ever do get the confidence to abandon my system to go to Linux, it would suck if this really cool sounding method added response time to inputs.
So the only problem is you’d have to update every VM over time to get security patches, this is mainly a problem if you’re on limited internet(like me). Im capped at 100gb a month and my download speed is almost always less than 1mb/sec.
Windows has a feature that if one system on your network is updated, other systems on the network can download locally from that one and save your data, which is wonderful. But you still need to update Nvidia drivers for each VM, and update games, etc. You can connect a hard drive(virtual or physical) to multiple VMs, but only run VMs with a common hard drive one at a time.
And mind you this isn’t to save compatibly, for me once it works it works. I just like to keep security patches updated because I download a lot of sketchy programs lol.
Latency is non-existent. I use a program called lookingglass, which allocates like 32mb of GPU memory to be dedicated to passing frames between the VM and the host. Or non-existent for my level of perception. If you’re Spidey senses tingle more easily you can pass through a secondary keyboard and mouse and just literally have two screens two keyboards two mice one box. It would have the same latency as bare metal. And even have two people play multiplayer games together off of one box if you have the horsepower.
So, there are a couple of things that have happened recently. I have an old laptop that I’ve messed around with different distros of Linux on. I installed Arch on it and am trying to do some different things. It’s not a good laptop, so the VM set up I’m really interested in won’t happen until I get a few more drives for my main PC and set up a dual boot abd some other things. I am really interested in this set up because it just sounds neat.
Are there some things I should try to do to help me get better at working with this OS? I’m currently seeking up a server with a reverse proxy using nginx and its… Going. The server works I think, but the proxy doesnt yet.
How’s your vm setup?
Depends on my needs, my desktop itself has a 8core @ 5GHz, around 50Gb ram, a Quadro and a 3080ti.
For gaming I’ll usually pass through 6cores, 30Gb ram and the 3080ti to a windows VM, leaving 2cores 20Gb and the Quadro for my linux host.
sometimes I’ll do more of a 50/50 split or if I’m just updating windows or downloading a game I’ll only pass 2 cores like 10Gb ram and no gpu.
But if you mean how did I do the initial setup, any arch based disro will be the easiest (but you can do it on others if youre more technically inclined) by following this guide:
Ive done this process on so many systems I can do it off a fresh install in probably 30 minutes now.
Once the Linux host is finished, I install windows in the VM, strip as much bloat from it as I can, install my universal programs(Firefox, 7zip, VPN stuff remote desktop stuff, GPU drivers, etc)
For gaming, the best programs I’ve found are Looking glass to pass the VM GPU’s video to a window on the client with no latency, and SCREAM audio for the same with sound.
Once that’s all set up and windows is fully updated, I make a backup of that VM, and basically never open the original again. If I need a new VM, just clone that setup and everything’s ready to go. I can rn clone the original setup, and use my private collection of interesting viruses on that windows VM without fear of it damaging anything.
Was running the same setup pretty much, I really miss it. Was running arch with an 8c/16t cpu, with 32GB ram, a 2070 Super (for passthrough), and a cheap GT710 (for i3wm on host). I’ve heard of Looking Glass and SCREAM but never tried it, instead I would switch inputs on my primary monitor and keep i3 on my secondary. Just used an Elgato Stream deck with Streamdeck_ui and would set attach and detach commands for peripherals, and others like power/pause.
Ended up helping someone troubleshoot their PC, which turned out to be a dead GPU, and I gave them the 710 as a better then nothing card. Was still able to play a lot of my games native or via proton on the 2070, but some new games had performance/compatibilty issues and I couldn’t use RTX. Ended up installing Windows over my Arch to play them, you know just till I could get a new host GPU.
Now I have a GPU for the host again, but I’m using Microsoft Storage Spaces for my RAID 10; and, being lazy as I am, I just keep putting off copying all of that to spare drives and rebuilding with mdadm. Plus the fear of losing terabytes of data during migration is intimidating.
Ok, I want your setup. Can I have it? Please? :)
Sounds pretty nice!
I can help you set yours up like mine if you want!
But you’d need to make sure you have two graphics cards. I have the 3080 disabled from Linux until a VM starts, so it won’t load the Linux desktop or anything. Even a CPU with integrated graphics works, but a physical GPU is obviously better.
I really like the Quadro series for this as its physically thinner, lower power, and has the performance around a 1060. They’re on ebay for like $60
I’m currently stuck with a laptop thats creeping towards potato status so it’s a bit hard to upgrade parts of it. :)
I’m happy just being able to run it almost to the ground as it is!
Here’s my config (no hardware):
- OS: Arch
- Kernel: linux-zen
- Window Manager: i3-gaps
- Compositor: picom
I’ve been running this for several years now across multiple PCs, all with different hardware, including Nvidia and AMD for graphics, and Intel and AMD for CPU - and it’s been working really well for me right up until recently.
After this paragraph, I will talk about the issues I’ve exeprienced as a gamer using my particular config. Please note that it’s just a couple of minor issues, and the rest of the experience has been more than wonderful, convenient, functional, and beloved, and I do recommed Arch as a gaming setup as someone who’s been running it to play games for several years in a row.
The most recent Steam Next Fest (June 2023) has revealed several demos that behaved like they launched, i.e. Steam changed my status to “in-game”, changed the Start button in library, updated the playtime properly, etc., yet the game did not, in fact launch at all. I managed to play the affected demos when I switched to the KDE Plasma desktop environment on the same PC… and back on the same config after that as well.
I would consider that a one-time error that was gone by, essentially, reloading the X server, but there’s been another consistent issue that I have only managed to observe in this i3+picom config. Ever since Steam’s most recent UI beta, the floating elements, such as the buttons that let you install the game’s demo, wishlist it, or navigate the store by the tags applied to the same game, all of which appear when you’re hovering your mouse pointer over the game’s thumbnail in Steam, are basically ignored; when clicking any of them, the click registers on the element that is supposed to be underneath the element you’re actually trying to click: for example, if you’re hovering your mouse pointer over a game and want to click the green wide “Install Demo” button, which is floating over another game’s thumbnail, you’ll click that thumbnail instead and open its Steam page. This particular issue persists between full PC reboots, X server restarts, i3/picom restarts, etc., and never occured in XFCE or KDE Plasma.
As I haven’t been using any of the store features in Steam prior to the June’s Steam Next Fest, I failed to notice any of the above, but now, I can’t deny that it’s been annoying. I really like my current configuration for everything I’m doing at my PCs: it’s great for my work, it’s even great for my gaming, it’s great for my leasure, and I don’t want to ditch it, because I have already tried many other tiling window managers, and i3-gaps is the one that stuck with me the most.
Now, I know there’s sway, which is supposed to be a drop-in alternative, i.e. I can use my i3 config with it no problem, but sway uses the Wayland compositor, so I can’t run it as easily: I’ll have to set up the SDDM display manager instead of the dead-simple lightdm in order to keep the convenient multi-user setup I have, and probably sacrifice some of the performance my GTX 1080 has been giving with the proprietary drivers (I know, disgusting, but it has worked the best for my hardware as compared to the nouveau, unfortunately). I guess it’s just time for me to tinker again.
You know… at least for me, I think I’m past the stage of being horrified over having to use proprietary drivers. I know it’s not as nice as a pure open source system, but still… it gets my system to run better, it’s free and it’s still Linux. So in my opinion it’s a good tradeoff still.
I do get why purists would hate it though and I wish you’d get the same performance with a completely free system.
As far as I know, it’s not entirely about some purism ideal they have in mind - the difference between the two nvidia camps on Linux is the functionality you gain with both drivers, and the proprietary driver is simply more restrictive, so, yeah, I agree that they have a point.
This is the reason I know very well that my next GPU is going to be an AMD one (given that their hardware has proper open source source by that time, that is). I bought by GPU back in 2017 or 2018, I think, a couple of years before using Linux and even considering it - had I known that today’s me was going to run LInux, I would’ve gone for an AMD GPU right away.
Even skipping the Nvidia driver debates, the AMD hardware has been a much more consistent and pleasant experience for me on Linux overall across several AMD-based laptops that I have installed Linux on. While I did manage to get things going on my desktop that has an Nvidia GPU, it definitely caused me more headache than I expected.
Good points all around. I suppose AMD would be a better choice when the time comes to upgrade. There’s no real down sides to them either compared to Nvidia except maybe not supporting the same ray traving tech?
I’m a bit out of the loop there though.
