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.
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).
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/
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