Do not use RAID… anything for an OS that is not designed for it*. Especially not RAID 0 (which barely deserves to be called “RAID”) where you are mostly just increasing the odds of a failure taking out all of your data. A good rule of thumb is to have a smaller drive/partition for the OS and then put the vast majority of storage on a separate drive/partition. That way, if the OS fails it is a fast recovery with minimal data loss.
Things may have changed over the years (the last time I tried was four or five years ago?) but I strongly discourage from any form of dual booting. Windows has a tendency to find ways to completely destroy the bootloader with the most random of updates and then you are stuck having to fix grub and the like. I THINK you can get away with putting each on their own partition, but I am a big fan of one OS per drive and just mashing del as you boot up to pick which drive or doing shenanigans with telling the bios what to boot into on the next reboot while still in linux/windows.
(time to piss some folk off!) Honestly? If you are asking these questions, I suggest not going with Arch. It is a really good distro, but it expects a lot more knowledge of linux from users. People around here hate debian/ubuntu with a passion, but do keep an eye out for some more newbie friendly distros to get your feet wet and learn what YOU care about and want from your distro. Bare minimum, consider Manjaro since that tries to put a more user friendly layer over Arch (and kind of succeeds?)
*: And, somewhat controversially, I would argue that any OS that is actually designed around running across multiple drives (beyond “I guess that could work? Maybe?”) is probably not the best choice because… there is pretty much zero reason to ever do this. Storage should definitely be distributed (and redundant). OSes are disposable and any good OS has a way to rapidly recover in the event of a failure or a corruption.
I’m a software engineer, and I know my way around Bash have some familiarity with Linux- mostly Debian. My understanding of how very low leveled stuff happens on my computer is very incomplete though, hence why I ask for help.
If you recommend something that’s not Arch, I’m happy to try it, though.
Typing commands into a terminal and administrating a system are very different beasts. Arch gets a bit of a bad rep, but it very much still considers a desktop to be a “linux system” rather than “a computer”. Ubuntu and Mint tend to be pretty far on the other side of the spectrum as they do their best to make things seamless to the user and put the vast majority of (pertinent) config settings in GUIs and the like.
On its own? Looking up what to run and how to fix problems is not the end of the world. But a lot of the greybeards out there will insist on ONLY answering the specific question asked and nothing related. So you either need to end up cross referencing and researching twelve different aspects of an answer that MAYBE is correct, or you are bowing and asking for help so that said greybeard will paste the rest of the answer they held off on to feel good about themselves. ChatGPT goes a LONG way toward avoiding this, but you still have the “so… is this even correct?” problem that you only really learn from experience and “thinking like a linux distro”
I already suggested Manjaro if you really like Arch but want something more user oriented. But your best bet is to just go browse “linux getting started” on youtube and watch a few videos on the install and configuration process for various distros. You’ll obviously find people who insist you need to be doing manual systemd calls and doing sudo emacs for every config file in Ubuntu, but this should give you a good idea of what the “philosophy” of each distro is. Which then lets you figure out which one(s) you want to try.
Personally? All servers should be Debian or some form of RHEL. As a desktop, I used to use Mint but went back to Ubuntu a year or two back. I don’t want to be a sysadmin when all I want to do is play some games or watch some media and most of my work is on servers or involves manually building out dependencies anyway. But everyone is different and that is the beauty of linux. Hell, you can even be a complete psychopath and insist on using BSD instead (not sure how that works with Steam though).
And if you set up your partitions (or just drives) correctly, changing distros is a 20 minute process with zero data loss. I mean, I am increasingly looking at alternatives because the Ubuntu snap obsession is increasingly pissing me off. Not a huge deal, but also… changing distros is not a huge deal.
I got real hyped when the trailer came out, then I managed to mostly forget about it. Now I’m trying desperately to go back to the amnesia stage because I won’t have a chance to play until next week. But at least if the download servers get swamped early on, I won’t notice… 🤷
Amen. Folks seem to forgot the many other aspects that makes a game good in exchange of focusing on the least important aspect – how well s/he will play the game.
I doubt that will last long with the introduction of the game developer tool kit and the next macOS
Apple’s GPU cores suck. As much as you can genuinely praise their CPU work (which you can somewhat easily upscale with more cores and more cache), even the most high-end ARM Mac has a GPU that’s just an iPhone GPU with more cores but without any actual high-end features such as raytracing (more of the same limited cores can’t just magically become a raytracing engine). Even Steam Deck’s GPU is capable of raytracing because it’s not an upscaled phone GPU but a downscaled high-end GPU.
I get the open source support part of your comment, but you are taking out the fact Steam/Valve has done a lot …A LOT…to get games working on Steam. Additionally, for the first time every they have driving Linux marketshare higher than MacOS as a result. So, to dismiss them completely is wrong. They have done a lot for linux…and linux gaming.
I don’t think its as mutually exclusive as you make it sound. Personally, I think showing that there’s a bunch of Linux users interested in buying and running games in general is helping out the Linux gaming scene, regardless of whether its a native port or not. We need to shortcut the chicken-and-egg problem of not having enough marketshare and I think Proton and Steam Deck have been instrumental in doing that and getting developers to even be aware of Linux. It’s a slow and steady march onwards, but I firmly believe one day we’ll have enough marketshare to start demanding native ports from non-indie game devs.
You could go with System76, I think they have a high-end “graphics” laptop, which would be suitable for gaming. Open source company so you are guaranteed everything is compatible with Linux.
However, if money is an issue or you find something else you like, for example the Dell XPS laptops ( in the past have been very compatible with linux,) here is a tool to check the model and/or the parts (important) such as wifi, etc., to see if they are compatible for a lot of laptops.
I had the same problem on steam deck, I solved it by launching the game in desktop mode, force stop it on steam launcher after a few seconds, move back to game mode, change the layout from community to official layout and it work absolutely fine 👌
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