Resize Rebar was something that was previously switched off I discovered. Turning this on via the Asus EZ Tuner made a great difference. Found im still on a Mesa 22.x driver for some reason, despite running latest driver update, and my kernal is showing 5.15.x, despite having all OS updates installed… will need to investigate, perhaps a Mint issue. Thanks!
5.15.X is the previous LTS kernel. Probably the default when you installed it. I don’t use Mint but you should be able to use 6.1.X at the least (the current LTS kernel).
The Linux version of the game has barely been tested. The frame times are all over the place. Give it a few weeks and the performance should increase through updates, the issue isn’t on your end
We are in a weird state it seems where some stuff requires amdvlk and some stuff requires that amdvlk not be installed… Like the latest gamescope doesn’t work for me when it’s installed unless you explicitly set the AMD_VULKAN_ICD=RADV env var but raytracinginvulkan requires the amdvlk package since it’s not as mature of a project and makes too many assumptions.
In the last few months I switched from years of arch to opensuse to bazzite. I got sick of updating everything all the time. Bazzite (also kinoite, ublue, silver blue, etc.) does everything with just a brief notification and is active next boot. Primary app install via flatpak, appimage, also fedora repos and rpm packages via rpm-ostree. And nix which I haven’t delved into yet.
The only things I’m not sure about are the driver’s for my brother laser printer, and undervolting requires turning off secureboot or a patch which may be too involved for me with this distro.
I have a Brother printer + scanner too (MFC-L2750DW). Many Brother printers (and a lot of non-Brother printers too) are supported by default in Fedora using a “driverless” method. It’s part of “IPP Everywhere” (www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html), AirPrint (Apple), and Direct Print (Microsoft), and most printers support it these days, and Fedora supports all of these. (Other distros likely do too.)
At least in GNOME (on Silverblue here), if it doesn’t already show up and work, you can click on “Add Printer…” and it should find and add it. KDE and other desktops will likely be different — although hopefully not much different.
Scanning with “Document Scanner”, aka: “Simple-Scan”, detects my networked Brother printer for scanning without having to do anything too. flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.SimpleScan
I hope this helps!
undervolting requires turning off secureboot or a patch
I haven’t looked into undervolting much. I know some people have mentioned CoreCtrl; I haven’t managed to figure it out yet.
If it requires turning off secureboot or a patch, that’s a bummer and might be why I couldn’t find the settings in CoreCtrl. I haven’t seen this when looking it up a while back, however (but the Internet is big). CoreCtrl setup docs @ gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl/-/wikis/Setup don’t mention either.
I do see that it requires setting a kernel flag, which on ostree-based distributions is:
I didn’t know about driverless printing. If it works out I’ll switch my parents over too since the lower maintenance updating is great and printer is the only thing they need that I wasn’t sure about.
The undervolting thing is on an old Intel, I think haswell. A lenovo t440p with the standard fare mod pack. I forgot what it was called but there was some procedure involving mok installation and signing the module that allows voltage control, and/or patch to bypass some aspect of it. I was only reading up on it before I switched distros to bazzite after liking it on steam deck and now it looks like I might have to make a custom ublue image to achieve this if I understand correctly. I’ll probably just switch to seabios and do away with the uefi entirely though as tianocore doesn’t have a bios settings menu but one can be added as a payload when using seabios.
Here are some tips from somebody who made the switch about a year ago. My advice is to take it slow.
I first tried Linux on an old laptop that nobody was using anymore. I messed around with it, did a coding project, tried to see what it was like to get this and that running. It’s good that you tried Linux with a home server first. That means you’re already decently comfortable with it.
I recommend starting with a dual boot setup. Some time later I got a new PC, and I was planning to run Linux on it. It came with Windows 11. I wasn’t comfortable with going full Linux, so I split the 512GB SSD down the middle and gave most of the 2TB hard drive to Linux. This has served me very well. It gave me peace of mind to know that if there was something I really needed that I couldn’t get working on Linux, I could boot into Windows.
After a bit, I defected back to Windows. It ended up being somewhat bad timing. I wanted to play Sonic Frontiers, but it barely worked on Linux. At the time I was also using the game engine Unity, which was what my game design courses were teaching me, and I couldn’t get it working properly on Linux for the life of me. I kept my Linux partition in case I ever wanted to use it for something or even switch back. This is partially why I recommend a dual boot setup. You might be dissatisfied with Linux the first time you try it, and if you end up really wanting to go back to Windows, you’ll be glad that you left yourself an easy way back.
Well, I’m glad I left my Linux partition on there, because I eventually came back and stayed here. I was over Frontiers, and I finally managed to get Unity working, so there I stayed. As I spend more time with Linux, I get more and more comfortable with it. I only ever boot into Windows to play multiplayer games with my friend since I don’t want to waste time troubleshooting a game for an hour during a call if something doesn’t work. Though I suspect that most of what we play would work fine on Linux! I’m starting to feel like I’m getting comfortable enough with Linux that if I wanted to get rid of my dual boot, I could. It helps that Unity destroyed itself so I don’t want to use it anymore anyway. Moral of the story: Don’t feel like you have to fully commit to Linux at first. You can make the transition slowly and do what makes you comfortable, and you’ll get there eventually.
I know this comment is very long, but I want a paragraph to recommend distros. I highly recommend something Debian based for a new user. It’s relatively easy to learn compared to other kinds of distros and more stable. I recommend either Linux Mint or Pop!_OS, both of which are excellent for beginners. They’re both based on Ubuntu, which itself is based on Debian. They’re pretty similar under the hood, so it mostly comes down to which UI you prefer. I believe that Pop!_OS is a little more up-to-date with some packages, but not everyone likes its UI, and its app store is somewhat miserable. I use Pop and I adore it, but it’s not everybody’s cup of tea. If you want to try a few distros before you commit, I recommend trying them on some old device you don’t use anymore, or a virtual machine.
I’ve heard people say that the linux/proton performance of CS2 is shockingly bad but I haven’t really investigated yet. BG3 is more shocking but that is also a CRPG which is a genre known for engine jank.
Aside from what others have mentioned: Getting more data on what is falling over helps a lot. Watch your favorite computer/tech youtuber and look at the kind of info they have in their benchmarks (frame time, etc). Personally? I am too lazy to look at systematic ways to collect this on linux but I do like to use mangohud. Set it up to show me some useful metrics and toggle it on for games that are performing unsatisfactorily. Generally lets me narrow down if it is CPU, Memory, or GPU limited and even what might be misbehaving.
First? If you linux “correctly”, distro hopping is almost a non issue. The key is that you want as little as possible installed on your OS drive/partition. Because you have a package manager with any distro (that you should consider for a desktop) so installing software is really easy.
Aside from that: There are a lot of youtubes out there that mostly boil down to evaluating popular distros. But… the reality is that mostly you are looking at desktop environments with those. Sure you sometimes have different ideologies in what can be in a package manager (such as closed source nvidia drivers), but there are almost always workarounds for any consumer oriented desktop distro. I recommend just watching one and then realizing that KDE Plasma is the best desktop (or you can choose to be wrong) and then picking a distro from there.
Personally? I mostly like (K)Ubuntu for my desktop. Most of the servers I work on for my day job are either rhel or debian so apt install is built into my brain at this point. And while I don’t like the ever increasing focus on snaps and flatpaks, I know enough to work around them when I need to and adding a new ppa is pretty trivial. And I have absolutely zero qualms about using the functional nvidia drivers so having that trivially built in is nice.
Although, funny enough: I am currently looking at other distros to maybe switch away from ubuntu. Mostly because I need to better understand exactly what the esm-apps are because right now it feels like Canonical is actively holding back package updates because they want people to pay for Pro and… fuck that noise.
Which, getting back to making distro hopping easy: My documents are already backed up to my NAS. Steam wise, I just need to copy the install library in my /data/nvme00 directory to a different drive (or redownload/reinstall). And then everything else on my OS drive is trivially replaceable and I just need to write a usb stick. … Or I use this as an excuse to buy an even bigger nvme drive and then use a usb adapter to transfer shit.
What I will say is this: if someone is STRONGLY pushing a specific distro/package manager/whatever? Ignore them. We all get VERY tribal and one of my best friends only slightly ironically encourages people to use gentoo. I am pretty sure even gentoo’s maintainers discourage people from using gentoo :)
Okay so I’m slightly confused and I haven’t experimented with that on my server because it’s only one single drive. If I have several drives and partition one for the distro, the other drives as storage partitions. Are the data storage drives compatible between distro?
Would that mean that I could go pick a new distro, nuke the “distro drive”, but leave the others disk intact and just log in the new distro with my drives as they were?
As long as you aren’t encrypting those drives it mostly “just works” with maybe the occasional chown/chgrp. With the more “eclectic” distros you might run into a mess with unsupported filesystem formats but generally with any “friendly” distro you support the same general range of filesystems and don’t have to care.
I wouldn’t assume you can recover life critical data but all of that should be backed up with something other than “it is in a folder on an ssd” anyway. But for steam games and TotallyNotPorn.mkv? Zero issues.
But yeah. Distro partition(s) or distro drive gets nuked. Rest stays the same.
Yeah I’m not worried about encryption, it’s more about convenience to not start from scratch every time, but whatever is critical is duplicated in several places and wouldn’t be lost if I were to lose the entire machine. It’s more me being lazy and wiling to avoid transferring games and music again if possible.
Basically yes. You also don’t need more than one disk, you can just partition a single one.
One common way to do this is to have a separate partition for /home, so anything there will survive nuking your root partition. You can also do /var; not something I’ve done but that’s where system-wide data is kept. And finally you can use something like etckeeper to manage your system-wide config alongside whatever your distros are doing.
Cool! And how do you proceed to switch distro then? Let’s say I have done as described above and separated the distro in its own partition. I plug a new USB distro, go through the setup and at the partitioner screen, I reassociate the new distro to where the old one was, and /home to where /home was, etc? And it just picks up that there are files there?
Yep. Most installers will let you specify mount points for partitions, and it will have an option for if you want to format the partition (obviously don’t select this for /home!). So you’d have one partition for the root, and one partition for home. You’d set the mount point of the root partition to /, tell it to format that, and set the mount point of the home partition to /home, and tell it to not format that, and it’ll work as you described.
See also the other reply to my earlier comment; this is just one way, and maybe not the best way, to handle this.
Personally? Unless I am going from one version of a distro to another (and even then), I have always found enough gotchas and issues with preserving /home and /var that it just never seemed worth the hassle. Much prefer to take the approach that any documents and media are backed up to a NAS (or even just google/apple/whatever drive), config files are part of a private git repo, and any development I am doing is regularly pushed anyway.
Can see the benefits for managing a lot of users (and I do get stuck doing that in my day job) but… you aren’t distro hopping under those circumstances.
KDE Plasma is the best desktop (or you can choose to be wrong)
and then...
if someone is STRONGLY pushing a specific distro/package manager/whatever? Ignore them.
lol. I love it. :P
To OP though, if you really don't want to "distro-hop", you definitely should test drive several. Look into Ventoy, it basically makes a bootable flash drive that has a separate folder/partition you can just drop bootable .iso files into, and then on boot Ventoy shows you basically a boot menu that lets you pick any one of the images to boot. If you get a nice and big usb flash drive, you can get basically ALL of the distros you want to try on one bootable usb stick so test driving them requires a lot less time and effort. You won't get a good idea of performance typically from a live environment, but you get a very good idea for the "look and feel" which will likely help you narrow it down a lot.
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