There’s not a “best” distro for gaming, it very much depends on what games you play.
If you want to play latest releases, a rolling release is most probably the best option for you, I hear openSUSE Tumbleweed is very good if you don’t like Arch.
If you want less “aggressive” updates but not exactly a stable, you can try Solus, it’s a sort of middle-ground between the 2.
If your games are not the latest ones, a Debian-based distro is a good option, rock-solid, updated enough and without any “extra fluff”.
I personally use Linux MX XFCE and I’m very happy about it.
With Mesa compatible GPUs it’s objectively better to get Mesa updates ASAP and not wait for 6 or so months. The constant feature and performance improvements are especially crucial for gaming.
Sadly Zypper isn’t really faster. From my experience, pacman is really the best package manager. But if you still want to try Opensuse. There’s also Leap. It’s a stable release distro, though it mostly uses LTS ⁄ stable software as it’s a clone of SUSE enterprise, while Fedora mostly gets cutting edge software when a new release hits.
I don’t think the drive is totally dead, it is somehow reactive to commands, but I would not trust to use it.
You should be able to pull of at least some of the data, but there is no guarantee.
I would copy all what I can and then try to run a low level format and mark the bad blocks, then run the S.M.A.R.T. test to see if something change, but I would do it just out of curiosity.
OP may want to look at Garuda’s gaming edition. It seems to have a lot of good gaming packages I usually end up installing myself and it’s based in Arch Linux
All you do is install your drivers if using Nvidia, then just install your games, whether native packages, flatpak, Steam, Lutris, or whatever.
I just run Debian 12 and everything through Lutris or native. Used to run Steam through Flatpak which also worked perfectly, but don’t play any games on Steam anymore.
It’s a signed archive of deployable files along with meta-data. Usually a cpio archive (which is similar to a tarball) with that extra signature wrapper and meta-data (which, itself, should be a list of files and checksums).
A proper package can validate a project’s installation, either from the local database or from remote resources, at any time, which gives positive assurance that what is installed is what should be installed.
As well, proper package info is exported by SNMP to be consolidated centrally and validate what is vs what should be installed at the group level.
TL;DR? Like a tarball with tracking info, signatures, checksums, and top-to-bottom validation. If it’s a good package, anyway.
But because like every layer is checksummed both in delivery AND when it’s installed, so you can easily validate a delivered file, and it’s all signed with signatures you can easily check, you can at least be assured that
what you installed is what that package delivered
which is what the authors wanted
and the package probably hasn’t been tampered with
even weeks after install
the chance of problems should be reduced.
Bonus1: with a proper repo config, you can check for updates so fast. It’s like the chocolatey windows repo but more formalized and usually vendor-maintained.
Bonus2: bad upgrade? Enterprise packages on Linux (long description; trust me) can be reverse-installed over what’s there so you can back-revise or downgrade with almost no pain. It’s a good oh-no fix. At every point you can still validate that what is there should be there, according to hard signatures at every stage.
Bonus3: grabbing os version 6.1 and upgrading to 6.5 OR just installing 6.5 fresh gives the same final content - files and services - when you’re done. (almost entirely) No cruft, since package installs (because of the locking below) just install over themselves in a way Linux people just accept and windows people may freak over.
Linux bonus: Linux locks file differently; again, long description, so trust me or look it up. You can upgrade many files and services without stopping them, and then bounce a service or a host, so your patch-and-bounce process is fast, it happens after the upgrades, and is like 2 min or with systemd 3min.
Ultimately
use packages for wayyyy easier, consistent, reliable, tested, quasi-roll-back-able updates that you can validate all the way down.
and still that SNMP connection to check content remotely. It’s so great.
Correct, the reason they are called packages, is that the package can contain other resources besides usable programs, like libraries used by other programs.
The most common use case for tmux is to put long running terminal apps in the background when working remotely, e.g.:
<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;"># start a new virtual terminal
</span><span style="color:#323232;">tmux
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"># do something in the terminal that will take a long while to complete
</span><span style="color:#323232;">sleep 1m
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"># put the virtual terminal into the background
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Ctrl-b d
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"># do other stuff
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"># reattach to the virtual terminal
</span><span style="color:#323232;">tmux a
</span>
This allows you to disconnect from the server, but keep the process running in the background. It can also do split screen with multiple terminals, provide a scroll back buffer (Ctrl-b PageUp) and other stuff. But using it for background processes is probably the most common one.
Apple products are too expensive (iphone is 8 months of minimum wage), universities are pushing Linux, some government facilities are using it(Turkey has its own distro for government see Pardus etc
I like rolling distros so Arch if you’re in the mood for some tinkering and really customizing your system the way your want it or openSUSE Tumbleweed if you’d rather have it up and running quicker with a premade polish.
I’d also suggest Arch assuming one has patience for some tinkering. Getting familiar with the Arch Wiki and the other resources that exist is quite useful even with other distros! Not to mention the better understanding of the system gained simply by following the installation guide.
Even if one doesn’t stick with the distro, the things learned setting it up will be useful down the line as well. The experience would also be very different from Debian based things, so it could be fun for a distro hop!
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