#Km91#Live Dangerously
username_1I use Debian testing for… 20 years? I have serious problems with it. Twice. Nothing unrepairable, but still I needed another machine with internet to fix the problem. I suppose that is ok stability-wise for 20 years.
cygnusI use Arch BTW full-time for work and personal for about 3 years now and haven’t had any issues at all.
I worked with someone who uses arch on his work laptop
One day it just died and he had to spend a day or two setting it all up again
I mean, its not common, but it happens
Yeah, I ran arch through college, it broke 3 times over 4 years, basically each time because Nvidia updated. Now that I don’t have the time to fuss with spending a couple of hours chrooting in and fixing Nvidia stuff, I just swapped to endeavorOS sway community edition (and made sure none of my PCs have Nvidia anything in them) and haven’t had an issue yet.
Yep, the only time things have broken in Arch for me has been with Nvidia driver updates.
Yep. Funnily enough, never really had any issues with the drivers on a desktop, only on mobile, mostly switching between integrated and discrete. But after messing with them on my laptop for a few years, you better bet my laptop was only running Intel integrated and my desktop runs on amd.
antsuI’d guess that keeping configs in Ansible would reduce that setup time to an hour or two.
flying_sheepThat doesn’t happen. When it breaks, it’s always recoverable, and it very very very rarely breaks (>10 years Arch user here, never lost sleep about it)
I’ve been dailying the exact same arch installation since 2014 without reinstalling it a single time.
Now to be fair I did have it non-bootable at several points. Worst of which was a PAM update which broke it completely because the new config was in a .pacnew file and the old one was not compatible anymore. But since it was a edge-case there was no forum post about it. Still recovered it just fine after an hour or so of troubleshooting.
It’s all open-source and usually decently documented. The only reason anyone should have to reinstall a Linux desktop is lack of experience, but I would always advise to persevere because troubleshooting my system is how I gained much of my expertise. If that’s not what you want, stick to Debian.
The only issue I ever had was Arch ARM changing the naming convention for network devices and making me have to plug the first Raspberry Pi that I upgraded into a monitor to debug what was going on.
This was annoying for sure, but less annoying than using a 6 year old Python version like the Red Hat Enterprise Linux at work…
StarDreamerI see your 6 year old python version and raise you RHEL5 running python 2.5 in 2022.
That thing didn’t even have a base Exception class.
paequ2Yeah, people like to think that bleeding edge means “untested”. As if your OS was directly receiving the dev’s
git push…
swab148I wonder if there’s a package manager that does just that, I want the real bleeding edge!
IllecorsAround 10 years here. Some issues, but much less time wasted in total than if I had done “dist-upgrade”s the whole time.
festntIt’s what Debian and similar distributions use to switch from one stable release to the next. This happens every half year for Ubuntu and every blue moon for Debian, which makes it a significantly more error-prone process than updating Arch every week in my experience.
The LTS released every other year) is supported 5 years.
Oof, that’s probably almost a full reinstall when you upgrade, depending on how stable your stack is. A lot of services will will have breaking config changes in that time frame.
One huge advantage of a rolling distro is that generally only one thing can break at a time :)
I have this, but in Windows 11. I’m stuck.
Same here. I want to ditch Windows 11 so badly, but I tried Linux Mint and I lost half my frame rate in games. I guess if you use a Nvidia GPU on Linux then you’re shit outta luck sadly, as I heard the reason is poor driver support. If I did something wrong I’ll gladly try Linux again but I don’t have high hopes it will work now :(
I’m just waiting for win 11 to fail catastrophically in me. That will definitely give me the time to install Linux… checks notes… Debian?
Yep that’s my plan, whenever my Win11 install becomes broken, I’ll make the switch, laggy games be damned! Maybe we can install Arch so we can fit in with the Linux crowd and finally say “I use Arch btw”
You need to change to a newer kernel when you use Mint for gaming. It has a GUI for it.
But personally, I’d just install Bazzite instead, it has all gaming- related optimizations built in from the start.
But personally, I’d just install Bazzite instead, it has all gaming- related optimizations built in from the start.
Thank you so much!
What games specifically? Some distros require a bit more driver installation, so maybe that was part of it (was running an rtx 2070 super on linux until a few months ago on linux, didn’t have any issues with frame rates). The poor driver support is mostly on laptops, as they sometimes have issues switching between integrated and discrete graphics.
Opensuse Tumbleweed is my way to go and I am pretty happy.
Also do have an NVIDIA Card…
nvidia drivers are good performance-wise, you should have installed the proprietary ones because mint comes with nouveau, which does not perform well at all. if you did that, let’s talk about L3 cache. ironically gaming on low end hardware is worse on linux because apparently proton needs quite a bit of that cache. my previous cpu (9600kf) had 9 MB and it was hopeless, current one has almost 100 and performance is not an issue anymore.
btw pop os comes with proprietary nvidia drivers so you don’t need to think about it all, but because they ship it with their half-done cosmic de, can’t recommend it to newcomers anymore…
Übercomplicated100%, biggest performance upgrade I ever experienced for Linux gaming was upgrading to a X3D CPU.
My CPU (Ryzen 9 3900XT) is a 12 core CPU paired with an RTX 5080. My CPU sucks, so you might be onto something here…
your cpu is good, seems like you were on the right tracks originally. people have been complaining about 5080 performance with dx12 games on linux. it may take them a while to get the drivers right, but i did recently see some news (techlinked probably) about nvidia adding resources to optimizing their linux drivers
On my system I am using kde x11 instead of wayland for the same reason. Last time I tried wayland I was getting half of the framerate compared to x11.
At some point I want to switch to a gaming-oriented distros and see if it’s magically better there.
Best feeling ever.
Ooh fun! I didn’t get that one!
RustyNovaWhat’s the best one, apart from Mint?
SkullgridThe typical advice is:
- Mint
- ElementryOS
- Fedora
- Pop!
- Ubuntu (unpopular with Extremely Online people, but is pretty good at the Just Works for normies)
Fedora
really? I haven’t touched regular fedora, how is the “vanilla” version different to derivities and other “vanilla” distros like debian or arch?
Yeah, vanilla Fedora comes in both KDE and Gnome flavors, with good hardware support and a large community. For noobies, a good, familiarish desktop environment and comprehensive hardware support are really the most important things for them not to immediately bounce off.
Yeah, vanilla Fedora comes in both KDE and Gnome flavors, with good hardware support and a large community.
I have never installed Arch, but I guess it doesn’t; but debian does come with various DEs , including KDE and Gnome.
Arch can be great and you can install whatever desktop environment you like, but there are just too many concepts for the average new user. Making a USB install stick is “difficult” enough to make a lot of people give up.
Debian is great, and my personal preference but it tends to be a bit behind on the latest hardware support, particularly for laptops. It’s easy enough to install whatever drivers you need, but again that can be just one thing too many for a new user.
Debian is great, and my personal preference but it tends to be a bit behind on the latest hardware support, particularly for laptops.
ah ok, so fedora is generic and more up to date for new hardware, but debian lacks … cutting edge support, otherwise, it’s just as good for newbies.
And arch is still wiki based to install, even if you use archinstall.
That’s pretty much it. The most obvious difference between Debian and Fedora is that Debian uses apt with deb files for package management, while Fedora uses dnf and rpm files.
LimeranceFor Arch, I’d go with something like EndeavorOS. The installation is easy for someone who knows what a file system or software repository is and I absolutely loved that you can install a bare bones system: just the desktop and almost no apps and you can go from there and install what you like (I wish fedora offered this).
I ended up not using Arch/Endeavor because of rolling releases and I found the AUR dangerous. I mean, its not dangerous, but anyone can put anything on there and its your job (and the communities) to make sure its good. I think a “build all the software yourself” is a great philosophy, but it only fits computer geeks (and I mean this in a good way). We cant all be Richard Stallman.
I ended up not using Arch/Endeavor because of rolling releases and I found the AUR dangerous. I mean, its not dangerous, but anyone can put anything on there and its your job (and the communities) to make sure its good. I think a “build all the software yourself” is a great philosophy, but it only fits computer geeks (and I mean this in a good way). We cant all be Richard Stallman.
Fedora’s philosophy is free software only. So vanilla Fedora ships with FOSS only. Imo, they’re really good at this, but I personally couldn’t live with that. The community maintained fusion repository is essential because of Nvidia drivers and full ffmpeg. Steam is in a separate non-free repo as well.
Other than than tidbit, Fedora is easy to install, well maintained, has a large community and wide third party support (as in software devs often build “native fedora” binaries available on their repo).
I prefer it to any other Fedora based distro, but for the reason above, it may not be best suited for the average lemming.
Other than than tidbit, Fedora is easy to install, well maintained, has a large community and wide third party support (as in software devs often build “native fedora” binaries available on their repo).
I prefer it to any other Fedora based distro, but for the reason above, it may not be best suited for the average lemming.
As usual OpenSuSE gets totally forgotten. Tumbleweed is 5the most stable rolling release I’ve ever seen.
Oh yeah! I’ve always heard good things about OpenSuSE, just never tried it. Maybe I’ll give it a whirl on my other old laptop.
Min- oh.
I don’t really know a bunch of distros, but I helped convert some normies so here’s a list of pain points I rather not have as a first experience
- No rolling distro. While some people may never see an issue in their life, some may see it right away. Bad first impression (Someone insisted on starting on fedora, then noticed the hard way that the current Nvidia drivers were incompatible with the shipped kernel)
- easy Nvidia driver install (only for gamers on Nvidia)
- Has a gui app store
- has a common package manager that is often shown in tutorials (like apt. You always see exemple apt commands)
- sudo is configured (Sorry Debian)
- doesn’t have a DE that tries to revolutionize UX
New users are dumb, so it needs to be easy for them
Sudo is configured in the Debian installer, if you click the “root not allowed to log in” checkbox. So it literally checks all your boxes.