What would you reccomend/use for an alienware laptop m17r5 with amdcpu (idr) and gpu 6850mxt. Idc about adjusting the keyboard lights, I changed it once and never touched it again. I play games like cities skyline, noita, etc. and some vr stuff rarely like vtolvr and warthunder. I use blender and houdinifx.
I’ve seen PopOs reccomended for Blender users but I think thats because it comes with a lot of stuff you need for Nvidia, which isn’t relevant to me with an all amd setup.
Cachyos seems to be the move for best performance with rendering and simulating, was wondering about other options I have since I dont need to worry about nvidia drivers.
I dont like the idea of using ubuntu because of snap packages, but its not a big deal.
While I like tinkering, I do want it to be relatively stable, not suprising me with issues when I need it.
Currently Interested in: CachyOs Debian (leaning towards here if I go the stable route) EndeavorOs Mint (seems popular, is it just simplified?)
EDIT: Went with CachyOs for now, works well, only issue was auto install didn’t work and I needed to manually partition and set the flags for boot and the os drive, other than that it’s been very fast and intuitive using KDE plasma. Recently tried Hyprland with the JaKooLit config, since ML4W didn’t want to work and had bugs, , I like it more than I thought I would.
Might try EndeavorOS and Bazzite on another ssd, they also look interesting.
There’s an atomic Fedora spin made for gaming, Bazzite, and the experience has been to install, and just go. Everything works, everything is set up for gaming and performance monitoring, it’s actually baffling how good this is!
I realise I’ sounding like a shill, but genuinely it’s great and seems to be what you’re looking for. You can always just try it in a VM!
Bazzite seems superior for handhelds or just pure gaming setups, I game like 20% of the time maybe less these days
That only holds true if you choose to download the version with Steam Game Mode, which boots directly to Steam’s UI, this version is called bazzite-deck. If you go with the no game mode version, it boots like a normal PC: to the desktop.
The non-game mode version is a solid choice as a daily driver. I use Bazzite on my main PC, I work by day and do gaming at night. Bazzite excels at both.
Seems annoying for tinkering, but good as a daily driver with minimal issues, i’m going bazzite if I get any issues with cachyos, reccomending bluefin/aurora to family that want to switch depending on if they like plasma or gnome, I like universal blue and how those distros work, if Linux was the only OS on this computer id go bazzite, for now I still have windows as a backup, so i’m going cachyos. I haven’t opened the windows side in 2 days tho, so I might just fully make the switch.
If it’s worth anything I daily drive Bazzite but also only game around 20% of the time. It’s still a great daily driver, does all I need it to do. Let me know if I can answer any questions.
Prob gonna stick with cachy since im not having any issues, why do you like fedora/bazzite over arch/cachy? I cant really tell the difference
Not familiar with either arch or cachyOS, but I’m gonna go and guess that cachy isn’t immutable(?) At least to me it’s nice to know that neither myself or anyone else can break my system as all system files are read only. Additionally I quite like that I don’t have to think about configuring or updating anything - it’s all handled by the devs. That might not be for everyone but personally don’t want to tinker with my PC that much, I have a server for that 😅
Ah, I do use Mint on my dev laptop but Bazzite on my gaming PC, each has their own usage.
It’s really just Fedora with different defaults, pre-installed software (mostly for Steam, MangoHUD, etc.) and a welcome-screen that helps you set up different software.
It’s also immutable
It’s really just atomic Fedora […]*
That said, it isn’t fun for firmware development.
I have daily driven it for 6 months or so. Most things work great but more niche uses like embedded firmware development, digitally signing documents (impossible on bazzite as far as I have found) and anything that requires udev rules or interplay between software.
Otherwise it is great! Much better day to day than opensuse Kalpa.
Ill check it out, only time I heard it mentioned was someone saying cachyos is superior if you dont mind a bit of tinkering
Fedora. It just works. I use it for work and it doesn’t let me down. Semi annual upgrading it is easy and it seems to be moving slowly, because gnome/LibreOffice is, to flatpaks. It’s slow to change and stable because of it, they still include Grub when it became a relic since systemd included gummyboot (systemd-boot) many years ago.
Contrast that with ArchLinux which is ‘cleaner’ and a rolling distro which I prefer; Fedora isn’t. I use it for a Rescue USB. I used to use it for work but, and this is long ago, I managed to break it quite easily by ‘fixing it’ too much! ArchLinux doesn’t let me down but I don’t have a gui or Window manager on it, console only, and I know my way around Linux reasonably well.
Debian is still confused about systemd. Run a combination of testing and unstable branches on the desktop and you’ve got a great system but this is before the systemd days where they moved all the systemd defaults to the old/odd places that make no sense. As you say, snap appears to be another mad experiment by Ubuntu, like mir when everyone went to wayland.
If you’re going to use your PC for games, I think there may be better distros than these. I’m not a gamer so I can’t advise.
I’m not a huge fan of derivative distros, like Ubuntu (based on Debian decreasingly) or so on. I’m not one to mess about with screen savers etc and aesthetics though. To me derivatives add bloat and unexpected changes.
Source distros are a rabbit hole I’ve been down. They were fun but I couldn’t get myself to do any work when I had them.
I’ve never tried SUSE, it’s alternative rpm style distro which can be stable as a rolling.
Distrowatch.com is always worth a visit. Find a/several forum that is your intended use and find out which district they use there; if you have issues they’ll know how to fix it.
2nd Fedora. I used Mint, Pop!_OS, Open SUSE tumbleweed, Nobara, EndeavourOS, MX Linux, Manjaro (eww) and Fedora finally clicked as my primary distribution. It’s not without its occasional hiccups. A while back, waking my machine from suspend stopped working. It took a month but they fixed it with an update, I didn’t bother with any work arounds because I knew they would.
Gaming and multimedia experience has been great. Between the RPM Fusion repos, COPR, and flatboat, I can always find the software I need. It’s solid, fresher than anything Ubuntu based, and rarely has issues.
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Bazzite is terrific
A friend installed it and it’s been terrible doing tech support about it. All the obvious fixes don’t work because it’s immutable, all the obvious fixes like editing fstab don’t work, you need to use their hip programs and special commands to install things. The arch wiki that usually helps any distro doesn’t work and you need to almost exclusively use their own docs. Terrible experience.
He has somehow managed to break the glorious immutable distro twice in two weeks while I’m happy with life in EOS for a year since the full swap.
Oh, and bazzite doesn’t support NTFS drives. They say it’s because the NTFS conversion layer has issues but I’ve been living with the games ssd drive being a NTFS drive because I need space to swap it to brtfs and it works FINE. Games run at the same speed, the drove doesn’t lock, there’s no weird write issues or anything. Bazzite devs are cowards that don’t allow NTFS drives for dual booters either.
Doing tech support for it for a month now, I’ve come to hate all the stupid limitations for the so called glorious immutable distro.
Bazzite does support NTFS. I use Bazzite on one of my devices with ntfs partitions and I haven’t had any problems so far. Unless you mean installing Bazzite on the ntfs partition which yeah I guess it doesn’t but Im not sure if any other disro has support for it.
But fair enough, immutable distros have a read-only system so making certain changes might be difficult and the usual commands might not apply. They are not impossible though, just require different commands since you have to layer those changes on top of the system. I have been able to make pretty much any changes to my Bazzite system that I would do on an ordinary distro.
Bazzite also has a really nice community that will help you with any issues and you can also ask for help in Fedora Silverblue/Kionite communities since Bazzite is just an image of Fedora (Kionite).
Bazzite does support NTFS
That’s great news then, I found this on their official documentation concerning external partitions so I assumed that it was updated:
https://docs.bazzite.gg/Advanced/GNOME_Disks_Auto-Mount_Guide/
https://docs.bazzite.gg/Advanced/KDE_Partition_Manager_Auto_Mount_Guide/Bazzite does not support NTFS
I’ll tell my friend so they can stop swapping back to windows to watch stuff.
Yeah the docs are a bit misleading but they are mostly for complete linux newbies. Its basically saying that to scare away any newbies from relying on ntfs because ntfs on linux has quite a few issues (in general, not exclusive to Bazzite) and might break unexpectedly since it is reverse-engineered so it is not perfect.
that sounds terrible
yes bazzite does have a specific command to install stuff (like all other distros)
yes bazzite is atomic so the os changes are managed differently, the standard linux hacks in Arch wiki won’t work but might help you debug the problem
if you really need to use NTFS or Bazzite doesn’t work with your hardware then go for something else. i’m a big ZFS fan but Bazzite don’t work with that so i have other ways of using my ZFS drives.
those stupid limitations have given me a very stable and fast experience with my AMD/Nvidia laptop, but that’s just my individual story
That is muy point, a lot of people that swap from windows probably have several drives for the HDD or just extensions, being able to access that stuff is key for a smooth transition.
Also, im going to ignore you calling basic Linux commands to enable services, swap DEs, install and uninstall stuff, add drives by wirtting them in fstab as it has been done since the dawn of time… hacks, but as a side note, if the OS limiting you from fucking up your system is what gave you a stable experience… Maybe don’t fuck it up? BRTFS has snapshots, you can configure the system to snapshot every time you install stuff… Idk.
I didn’t know about bazzite not supporting ntfs. I do agree with you that it’s silly that they don’t allow you to use it, but from my own experience i will say that they are probably right about ntfs having issues in linux. I was using an external drive formatted to ntfs to move stuff between windows and linux, and at one point the entire partition just broke when it was connected to linux. It didn’t seem to be a faulty drive cause after a reformat it worked just fine, but i try to avoid ntfs as much as possible now.
Bazzite does support ntfs. I have ntfs partitions on my system and they work perfectly fine in Bazzite.
Then it’s your anecdotal experience vs mine, I’ve been using a better main drove connected to two NTFS drives, one for torrents and videos and downloads and another for games. 2 years almost like this and all games run perfectly fine. Souls games, path of exile (quite read heavy), league, hots, last epoch monstwe hunter… You name it, it has worked perfectly fine for over a year.
Maybe it has improved since that happened to you idk, and I agree that threshold not allow NTFS for the main drive of, but for external ones it’s just silly.
Nobara looks interesting for fedora, do you have experience with it? Or anyone else seeing this comment. Nvm its developed by one dude
Not just any dude. That’s Glorious Eggroll! As in GE from GE-Proton.
Debian laptop user here, left Windows on my gaming desktop for a decent while. Now that I’m more accustomed to Linux DE’s I installed Nobara on it about a month ago. Zero issues with the NVIDIA variant on my 3080 so far
I use Nobara on my desktop and Fedora on my laptop, they both work fine, although I’ve had a few audio issues on Nobara, but it could be the different hardware. I don’t play emulators, but every game I’ve tried on Nobara worked with no fiddling, just recently: Cyberpunk 2077, Subnautica, Horizon Forbidden West, X4…
I’ve been using Fedora for I don’t know how long, over a decade I’d say, and it’s hard to overstate it’s stability, it just works, and has great repos. My main annoyance is the frequent major version updates, it’s a quick process anyway, and I never had problems.
I think I heard fedora will never be supported by a ps3 emulator because of some core issues and that turned me away initially, some youtuber was swapping away from it, though now im not sure and it may have been some other distro, cant find info online
Honestly you should be getting similar performance and package quality on all modern up to date distros. Pick whatever looks good to you.
PopOS is in a rough state. The stable ISO is using absurdly an absurdly outdated desktop, and the beta using COSMIC desktop. I personally love COSMIC, but it is far from stable, so I would not recommend it to most users.
CachyOS is a great distro. The performance gains from its changes won’t be huge, but the people acting like its nonexistent are silly. They also make many upcoming performance improving features like NTSYNC available early in their default kernel.
I definitely wouldn’t go Debian or Mint for gaming personally. I don’t like stable distros with such slow release schedules for gaming, mainly because of stuff like the prior mentioned NTSYNC. You don’t get those new features for a long time.
I saw people recommending Bazzite, which is a distros I highly recommend. The only issue I have with Bazzite is that installing kernel modules they don’t ship is pretty much unsupported and requires a lot of jumping through hoops. Most people won’t need this, but it matters from some use cases like if you need steering wheel drivers.
Have you tried EndeavorOS, any thoughts?
Yep, that was actually my second distros when I switched to Linux a few years ago (right after PopOS). Its a good distro, essentially Arch with a better out of the box setup. If were to go with an arch based distro today, I’d probably choose CachyOS for the package and kernel optimizations, but both are good.
Arch-based distros are definitely CLI centric, but if you don’t mind that then its great! Just keep in mind it is a rolling distro, breakages aren’t super common, but they can occur. A backup using Timeshift is probably a good idea. Also, I wouldn’t rely too heavily on the AUR, remember they are unofficial packages and are more prone to breakage. Id prefer flatpak for GUI apps at least.
You can install them, just not by default and not reccomended*
I think flatpaks aren’t supported by cachy because they inherently have some performance issues?
they work, they just don’t have the same optimizations as the packages in their repo. that’s also true for AUR packages.
I tried cosmic and wasn’t a fan, felt too much like windows, really like kde plasma, like it more than windows, surprisingly like hyprland too, didn’t think I would. Helped that the config I used had a tips/shortcut menu that was obvious to find.
I’m surprised to hear that, I don’t think cosmics default configuration has much in common with windows. It uses a MacOS style dock and and status bar by default. The workflow is also very customizable. I personally use it with just a status bar and always have tiling on, similarly to how one would use Hyprland or another tiling wm, since that’s what I used before cosmic. I love plasma too, but the fact that you can’t have separate workspaces per monitor unfortunately makes it unusable for my workflow.
Gnome 42.9 feels attacked.
It should lol. I’m not the biggest fan of Gnome but the newer versions have made so many improvements, I don’t think I could stand using 42.9.
is it really gnome 43+ that’s better or that it has better wayland support?
Wayland on Gnome 42 worked well enough for me, I definitely think the newer versions have made good improvements to Gnome itself, it just feels way more polished. The last 5 Gnome releases have so many improvements and are just way more polished. Some I can think of are the files refresh, quick settings redesign, new activities indicator (which would be especially useful with PopOS’s tiling plugin) and that’s just what I can think of between 42 and 45, when I stopped using it, I’m sure 46 and 47 have more. 48 will also soon be releasing with triple buffering support, which I love on laptops.
You want stable and no snaps.
Debian
I keep seeing people recommending Debian. Its a great OS, especially for server stuff (which I use in multiple VMs in my home lab), but I wouldn’t recommend it on a computer you’re actively using. They take so long to update packages you’re always multiple versions behind. This really makes it difficult to get bug fixes and patches for software that you’re using on a daily basis. The hardware support is never as good as other options.
but I wouldn’t recommend it on a computer you’re actively using
Debian is my daily driver on all my computers. Servers, desktop, laptop. Its called the universal operating system for a reason
Packages are regularly updated with bug fixes for security issues. Do you absolutely need the latest features for every software? Debian is fine unless theres some killer new feature you absolutely need.
Hardware support is mostly fine unless you have the absolute latest hardware (which OP doesnt). And backport kernels should take care of newer hardware
Debian 12.9 was released a few months ago based on kernel 6.1 LTS, the latest kernel is 6.13, with 6.12 being the new LTS.
Debian packages are updated for bug fixes and security updates, but they generally don’t update to new versions.
If you’re running KDE Debian, your version is plasma 5.27, meanwhile 6.3 was just released.
There are a massive amount of quality of life improvements that debain 12 stable will never get. Sure you can backport some, but then it’s not really debain stable is it?
Meanwhile there are plenty of other distros that are almost just as stable, but have newer versions of everything. Not to mention the stability improvements of the newer software (one example is plasma 6.3 is a massive improvement over 5.27)
Like I said, I love Debian, but if you’re doing daily driving of the computer, I think there are better alternatives
There are millions of people out there who do 99% of their stuff in browser, and never need the newest shiniest features for graphics, or gaming or whatever. Plasma 5.27 works great for years. People only get fomo if they follow this stuff constantly. And most people dont. Lemmy/linux is a very niche gathering of nerds
To say that debian is not a good daily driver for most people, i still disagree for the above reasons
I’m not a professional or anything, but i get my basic photo and video editing just fine on debian.
For example, i used to chase all the latest and greatest digikam versions because “ooooh! New features!!”… In hindsight, there was nothing really that groundbreaking each update, and i just go back to using the core features that have been stable for years.
But we know based on OPs usage requirements, he’s not one of those people doing everything in the browser.
Updates are important regardless of fomo. They’re not only for adding new features, they’re for fixing bugs and improving stability and these changes rarely get backported unless their critical.
The core Debian might be stable, but, for example, plasma 6.3 is much more stable than 5.27
Debian is stable and will work, but there are other options that are basically as stable and have much newer packages - improving desktop stability and user experience
I really do want to know what the Debian enjoyer is actually missing out on…
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Have you checked out OpenSUSE Tumbleweed? Very stable rolling release. I’ve been using it for a couple years without issues.
I see people saying CachyOS is finicky, but I’ve had almost no issues in two years of extensive use.
And anything that pops up gets fixed extremely quickly.
What’s better, everything you need for gaming is in the repos by default and pre-tweaked, no need to fuss with it like other distros. This is my nitpick with Fedora or Arch AUR: once you go outside the curated, officially supported packages, you are asking for trouble.
The only issue I’ve had is that the system will completly freeze up, although it only happens every once in a great while. I never had it happen on any other Arch based distro.
Actually I had this one!
Something about their swap config makes it very fragile unless you use RAM swap as enabled by default, and I kept having this when I disabled it for reasons. It was much better once I re enabled it, though occasionally I still have severe issues going way, way, over my RAM pool.
I don’t mention that much because swapping to like 64GB on a 32GB system seems like an uncommon use case.
I haven’t touched anything related to swap or memory managment. They said they don’t ship with a swap partition or file. I figured the devs must know best.
Yeah, it uses only ram swap by default. If you aren’t going over a ton, it shouldn’t matter.
I just have weird workloads that spike memory usage a ton for short times, so I have to go out to my nvme.
I have 64 GB of RAM so I have never gone over. Except once when I had a memory leak lol.
~~Have you tried nobara? Seems to be another good one for gaming that is fedora based ~~ nvm its one dude developing it who changes what he supports on a whim
I skipped nobara for that very reason.
And I was more familiar with Arch anyway.
I skipped Nobara cause there is only KDE And Gnome and it’s based on a Fedora base.
Yeah, thats why picking a gaming focused one seems like a good idea, theres a community thatll fix stuff before I need to think of it
Exactly, and you can get mesa git and some other “fix” packages natively with community integration if you find you need them, without veering off track all by yourself.
Have you looked at tumbleweed? Its a rolling release so its always up to date but opensuse’s testing is fantastic. It’s very stable and on the off chance there’s a regression that impacts usability, it has built in version snapshots. It takes literally 45 seconds to roll back to a previous working version.
I had been rocking CachyOS for a year or so but the recent Nvidia drivers or something caused me a shit load on instability so I’m back on windows for now. Got tired of tinkering. 😅
If you want CachyOS I highly recommend you to have atleast Haswell or Alteast Ryzen If you use AMD due to their Compiled packages and stuff.
Endeavor os If you don’t have atleast haswell/Ryzen.
Stock Arch If your fine building it.
Debian I wouldn’t recommend to use for a pc you use often.
Popos I never used it before but it seems like a “stable gaming” Distro.
Mint is also a great option I use it on pcs I sometimes use and it’s also easy to use.
I have ryzen
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I’m quite happy with CachyOS but use whatever makes you happy. Just pick something with a desktop envionment you like (KDE, Cinnamon, MATE, GNOME)
Try NixOS. The killer feature is mixing old and new packages because deps are not globally installed
I use cachyos for gaming and work. It’s amazing. Stable, fast, drivers all work with no extra setup. Just select Ext4 during installation if you want the fastest hard drive performance.
While I like tinkering, I do want it to be relatively stable, not suprising me with issues when I need it.
I would suggest avoidig pure rolling distros then. Also bear in mind that usually the performance difference between distros is not really big enough to make a difference for most things.
I would consider something like Mint. But what I did on my new laptop was that I installed PopOS 24.04 Alpha and used gnome-session (“sudo apt install gnome-session”) on it, though I’ve switched over to COSMIC now as I’m writing apps for it and it works for my games. It’ll get regular kernel+mesa updates but the base os will remain “LTS stable”.
You could also go the Fedora (KDE or GNOME spins) route, it has a regular update schedule, this might be a great option for you.
I was more worried about compatibility and dependencies i might need and not know about, cachy seems to grab a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t think to grab, not sure, installed cachyos and tired to open a steam windows game from my d drive noita and it worked/played fine using wine instantly. Not sure if the others would work as well as that. I think bazzite is based off fedora and also does what cachy does. I’m liking kde plasma, Im also liking a presetup version of hyprland (the 2nd most popular one, hard to remember name)
Cachy - you might have some extra hoops to jump through. The performance difference is negligible for just desktop usage.
PopOS - no real benefit unless you’re running Nvidia, and then it’s only for the moderately useful graphics switching stuff.
You sound like you want Fedora for simplicity’s sake, honestly. There’s really no other major performance differences between desktop distros. Any tunings that one has you can just apply to another if you know their benefits.
Don’t necesssrily care about simplicity because I do plan to tinker a lot, I just dont want too frequent updates that arent thoughly tested, I like the 6months to yearly more than the frequent rolling updates, I do plan on messing with the theming a lot since I do that on windows with rainmeter (something would always break with windows updates for anything else)
Get Arch if you really want to tinker and learn about linux.
Well I also want it to work, cachyos is archbased
I’ve been daily driving arch since 2021, it just works. In my experience, mother distros like arch tend to work better than downstream distros like manjaro or endeavouros. I haven’t had any expreience with CachyOS yet though.
