manjaro is my backup os for my primary endeavourOS, and it has never failed me in the last 5 years. one time there was an issue with manjaro lagging behind aur which was solved a few days later and wasn't a big deal. the only reason is not my primary is bc I just like endeavourOS a tad more
I use ssd for everyday use, but sync my files to a larger internal hdd as a backup/archive. I even occasionally sync all that to an external drive just to be extra safe (Because it would be a disaster to lose all the random stupid bullshit I’ve accumulated over the years).
Regarding Manjaro, maybe try the Plasma version. I have several friends/relatives on it for the last few years and never have to fix problems for them. And these are not technical people.
I don’t know much about the console and such magic which probably makes me not exactly predestined for an Arch-based distro with the AUR where I feel like you can break more than in some more common ones like Mint. Despite that, I have been on Manjaro for years now, still learned only the very basics, but have not found a more stable distro that works so well out-of-the-box with some of the newer hardware I have (or had, it’s hardly new anymore). Also, I did in fact find the repos combined with careful use of the AUR to be satisfying.
I did distro-hop a lot especially in the beginning of my Linux adventure and was on Mint for a couple of years as well. And that’s what I generally recommend to the other non-tech-savvy folks around me as well: Just try a bunch of the top distros on Distrowatch for a couple of weeks. They all have their advantages and disadvantages but eventually you’ll figure out what it really is that you want from a distro and which ones work properly with your hardware – and you’ll learn about some fixes for common issues which helps the learning about Linux in general.
There are probably folks who know much more than me who can tell you if Manjaro is objectively better than its bad reputation but from my personal experience as a fellow Linux noob: I found it very stable, decently accessible and the KDE spin with its many themes absolutely beautiful.
tbh i never had any problems with it while toying around with it (i’m a debian stable type, anything else is a flirtation) and it works just fine for gamery and such but they have some significant flaws in their operation which makes them unfit for serious computer click clacking imo (im no software nerd or anything, just been using linux since forever). certificate expirations, financial goofery, there’s just better distros including rolling with straight arch.
As the other comment says, what you’re referring to is running a Windows VM (virtual machine) inside of your Linux machine. It’s a great asset for a lot of things, but gaming is not it’s strong point. A VM shares resources with it’s host machine, meaning it can only access so many of your CPU cores, utilize only so much of your RAM, and take advantage of CPU powered graphics – unless, as was pointed out in another comment, you happen to have a spare graphics card laying around. The set up for GPU passthrough is more trouble than it’s worth, IMO, especially for gaming. And you still have the other bottlenecks to contend with.
Gaming on Linux is best enjoyed by using a combination of Wine and Proton (Wine suped up for the express purpose of gaming by the fine folks behind Steam) paired with a launcher of some kind, usually Steam. For non-Steam games, Lutris is a fantastic second choice. These platforms make gaming on Linux easier than ever, and are actually the technologies powering the SteamDeck. If you decide to go this route and need any help setting up, please reach out! The community is here and (usually) quite helpful, lol.
If you decide to try the VM anyway, you should look into a software called VirtualBox. You will need to install a few packages to make your system a suitable host, and you’ll need the Windows installation ISO image to get it up and running. You can usually acquire it directly from Microsoft by running a search for “Windows XX ISO” where the XX is the version number you’re looking for. If you need help getting any of that together, I’d be glad to assist as well. ☺️
All this comes from years of running Linux and only Linux, on a PC I almost exclusively game on. I’ve had great success, especially with all the headway Valve has made into making the ecosystem viable and accessable.
However you decide to proceed, best of luck to you!
EDIT: As has been pointed out, if you want to virtualize a gaming setup, you should look into KVM, not VirtualBox! It sounds like it’s a much more performant option, I am just not very familiar with it myself.
Because it’s accessable, and is also the extent of my knowledge in running a VM. I won’t speak about KVM because I am not intimately familiar with KVM, nor will I ever be. I’m certain it’s a better solution than VirtualBox, just as running games in Linux with Wine/Proton is a better solution than setting up a VM to game in.
I’d be happy to hear about the details of why KVM is so superior, if you’d care to enlighten me! I’m always looking to learn new things.
The real question is why we’re down voting people who are adding to the discussion just because we disagree with them, instead of just having a conversation?
I’d be happy to hear about the details of why KVM is so superior
Essentially type 1 hypervisors, like KVM/Qemu, make direct use of the CPU’s virtualization technology (VT-d and VT-x) while type 2 hypervisors run all the calls through the kernel which is significantly slower. In a way type 2 hypervisors are closer to an emulator.
Thanks for the link! And for the info. I’ll give KVM an honest try, and maybe I’ll get motivated enough to spin up a VM for CaptureOne. A 1080 should be decent enough for light photo editing, and I was recently given one as-is. It may or may not work, neither I or the person who gave it to me had time to test it.
thank you for the lengthy reply! I think I’ll go with alternative options and not to virtualize windows, because I don’t have a separate GPU that I can pass in, nor a second monitor.
fwiw I remember reading around a year ago, a post by the KDE contributor Pointiest Stick that he actually thinks that Fedora has a better Plasma experience than Opensuse. I can’t find the post where he said that though so take it with a grain of salt. But as someone who does use Fedora with Plasma, it feels like it mostly works fine. The only big issue I can think of atm is that the Plasma Discover auto-updater just doesn’t work at all. It doesn’t auto update. That could just be an issue specific to me though.
Fedora seems to me a wonderful distribution and what I like the most is that it is like the “Vanilla” flavor of each DE and that it is really innovative. I’ve tried their Gnome and Plasma flavors and it’s been pretty good, except for a few things:
Inability to install Nvidia drivers: In the past, maybe a year or year and a half ago I tried Fedora but when I installed Nvidia drivers and rebooted the system I had the problem that I always had a black screen, I reinstalled several times and I exhausted myself Now that I think about it, it is very possible that this is a problem of some Wayland dependency in Plasma, because that has happened to me in other distros and I simply changed to X11 and installed said package, or I could do it from TTY, but I never thought about that .
I have nothing against snaps or flatpaks and it seems ridiculous to argue about that, everyone uses what works for them and likes it and in my case I use all the available package formats, but there are some Firefox extensions that I don’t they work because of the sandbox environment that flatpak provides, and some other programs that have a similar problem.
I guess all that will be fixed, one day I’ll give it a try again.
I’ve been using ext4/btrfs for a long time,but recently I decided to give xfs a try and it feels pretty solid all rounder fs.
I know it’s a very old and very well supported fs,developed by Silicon Graphics and has been getting constant improvements over time with various performance improvements andchecksuming. TBH,for my use casesanything would work but BTRFS snapshots were killing my storage and I got bored with the maintenance task.
Archwiki has amazing documentation for all FS,so might be worth a look.
Is there a reason for using Travis instead of GitHub’s built-in CI system?
With the GitHub CI system, you can specify your own container image which could have GNU Make 4.4 already pre-installed (you build it once and then re-use it).
RE Travis: I feel quite comfortable and happy w/ Travis already. Additionally, I want to keep my reliance on github minimal. The only reason I’m using it is that it is where things are searched for and found by fellow programmers :-)
RE Container: My home machine is running Tumbleweed which’s had Gnu Make 4.4 for a few months now already. I was trying to make the pipeline behave as closely as possible to the user’s machine who may not have that version installed. Otherwise as you and @sugar_in_your_tea mentioned, I could pack everything I’d need in a container.
You’d just use the container for testing other Make versions. If your users use Ubuntu, run your tests with an Ubuntu docker image. You can run several versions that way with minimal effort.
I don’t know much about Travis, but it’s pretty easy to set that up with Jenkins.
That’s pretty much what I ended up doing. Install Gnu Make 4.4 as part of the pipeline. I then added a check to warn the user if the Make version they use is not supported.
No, I’m saying you’d support older versions of make in your project and use docker images in your CIb pipeline to test each of those supported versions. If you’re not using any 4.4-specific features, 4.2 (20.04) and 4.3 (22.04) would probably work. So you’d have a docker container for every OS that you’re officially supporting (or at least every version of make that supported OSes use).
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