I liked Manjaro, but when stuff broke it broke in weird fuckin’ ways. My last attempt with it ended when I tried to do some gamedev in Godot and Manjaro started registering my laptop’s mousepad input as a joystick 😭
I’d probably use arch if there was an easy general immutable/atomic version of it. I just don’t trust bleeding edge rolling enough to not have that kind of a safegaurd.
Grub has many features & addons that many others are still lacking though. But maybe we'll see some improvements in that area now as well. Still sucks for an end user.
It’s a pain. Stuff does break for no reason. I’m a slave to it’s enhanced hardware compatibility and higher success rate at running proton games that are borderline. You just can’t beat the wiki and the community support. It’s too good to not have. But you still run into issues it’s just that I’d be no better off on a different distro.
Hardware support for GPUs in based on compositor. X11 supports them better but Wayland is faster, both are available on most popular distros and swappable via a logout login.
Modern looks can be done with desktop environments like KDE and Gnome. Both are good, but KDE is more customisable.
If you don’t want to compile stuff yourself every now and then then choose Ubuntu or Fedora based distro.
Having the freedom to install anything you want is a fun requirement. If you mean literally anything then Vanilla OS might suit you since you can use all package managers but you get less modern features with it. This gives you 20 year old apps stuff that only works on some fringe dead on. If not that extreme then Ubuntu based is a bit better than Fedora based in those situations.
Ubuntu is nice and all but you’ll have to follow a guide to add flatpak support otherwise a very good distro.
So here’s a suggestion list from me:
KDE Neon (Ubuntu based on LTS versions)
Fedora (Gnome or KDE variants)
VanillaOS (if edge cases)
PopOS (New kid on the block. It’s just nice)
I recommend downloading whatever interests you and start them up in a VM.
I’ve been using arch exclusively for years now. Pacman and the wiki are just too good for me to go elsewhere. I’ve used Gnome and Kde both extensively and I just like Gnome more. Kde just has a lot of jank that doesn’t make it feel like a modern system imo. Gnome is a much smoother experience. Both work perfect for gaming though. Just started experimenting with hyprland this week and I’ve been loving it. It has some weird stuff with running games, but that just might be user error. I have friends who swear by mint too which I haven’t seen mentioned in this thread much.
You don’t need logs because in Windows 95 they made a tool that always 100% diagnoses and fixes the issue and it runs every time dispite never actually returning a fix or error code.But wait there’s more here’s a hex code to some memory allocation rather than creating a reference library in human so you can search forums where the only advice is reformat or don’t worry guys I fixed it.
But you are not allowed to look at the actual run time logs as we’re a polished environment.
bought my first Gateway PC when Windows 95 came out. Lockups every day drove me to Slackware install from a dozen floppy set I d/l’d. Mac OS 8.*/9 was no better. OS-10 brought apple back from the dead. wanted to buy stock, was/am poor
It could be mostly steamdeck users, but for me arch is the only distro that works well. You know what you install which makes troubleshooting easy, and it’s documented very well.
from the bits and pieces I’ve read on the official Discord (ugh), they’re using two anticheat solutions. EAC is whitelisted, but their own one doesn’t support Proton yet. they’re actually working on changing that, supposedly, but it’s not their priority at the moment.
I had a look on this and unfortunately, only comparable AMDs (RX 7600) exist in that size. I wish I could do an upgrade with my next card, but since I want to switch to a tiny “portable” PC case, I am limited to small GPUs. That’s why I’d like to try it first with the GPU I am currently runnning on (actually the only part I want to reuse from my current build, lol)
Yes. AMDs usually work out of the box in Linux and provide the full performance a card is capable of. Even though I run Linux, I haven’t gamed for a while now. This community might be able to present their personal experience with particular models.
I think part of this that I’m not seeing talked about, and perhaps confused for “more tech savvy users”, is just the user hostility of Windows.
9 times out of 10 when a Linux app or game crashes I get a verbose error and more often than not one that I can simply copy and paste.
9 times out of 10 when Windows, or much of windows software, crashes it gives some random number or code and in a window I can’t even copy and paste out of.
My skill level doesn’t change. Linux just isn’t user hostile in nature making it easy to search for fixes and report issues. Where as on windows I can’t summon the care or effort to manually transcribe the error so I can then do something with it.
If the interactive session is still up, just screenshot it and OCR the image. Takes a few seconds, but it’s still easy. Win+S, select the area, paste into OneNote, right-click copy text.
That’s surprising to me. I get the vast majority of bug reports from Windows users. But I use auto generated crash reports that the user clicks OK to send and it’s a music app, not a game, which might be different.
Yeah how I’m guessing their reports work is it’s like a forum or form you can fill out with the bug report. Not something that happens automatically like that.
I always always write strong feedback and extensive bug reporting for games. Doesn’t matter the platform. However, my daily is Linux and my daytime job is director for cloud eng and ops which is all linux distros. We write and manage massive nix fleets. Shit my career started writing and doing linux kernel work. It really made me appreciate good feedback and extensive reports on bugs.
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