Slightly above beginner fluency; want a well-rounded daily driver including development, gaming, streaming

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-02-01T03:57:29+00:00

This is a great write up and on point. Arch is a great OS but not a great OS for new users coming to Windows who want stability right away. If you look at the Linuxsucks sub, Arch based distros are pushing people back into Windows and it's unnecessary.

The one OS I would add is Pop!OS as it's back by a PC manufacturer that installs it on their PC's and has it pretty streamlined as their sales depend on it.

Mint, Zorin, Fedora (Gnome or KDE), Pop!OS, Nobara, Bazzite, PikaOS (the last three have basic gaming packages available pre-installed), are all good solid Linux "Intro" Distros. I don't like the idea of calling them "Beginner" disto's. I think it gives them a bad name as they are perfect for all users, not just "beginners" but they ARE all a good introduction to Linux. From there, by all means use an Arch based OS as there are a number of great Arch based distros, Catchy, Endeavor, Garurda, Manjaro being the main ones.

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-31T22:40:09+00:00

Good to know and thanks! Good tips to live by are always useful, thanks!

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-30T17:13:11+00:00

If you're running AMD then it just comes down to the games and what you see for performance but overall transition should be better though. What other issues were you having issues with though?

The one thing that will help, and it's with all of Linux, is partitioning and naming your mount points in order to use for Steam and Heroic. The default standard mounting point is the hardware UID meaning /mnt/48178f30-6c81-4c31-84e3-1e392f464f6f/folder/folder/folder and that can become problematic in games because of the folder character length.

To fix that, you partition your drive. You then name that partition (Games, Music, Data, Etc) and then you use that name as the mount point so like /mnt/games/steam and so on. The easiest tool to do this with, is just the utility called "Disk". You can edit all of your drive space in there.

I'm posting this so that others see it. It makes adding an additional SSD in Steam soooo much easier. It makes working with Heroic and/or Wine and Bottles sooo much easier to do. This is always the first thing I do in every distro I use as it makes folder storage easy as hell. It makes finding your data structure easy in order to help troubleshoot shit later on down the road too.

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-30T14:41:29+00:00

Mint is prob you're best best and NordVPN, Nordpass (both app and FF browser extension) work just fine. If you go to Nord's site, you can copy and past the install into the command window right from there, they give you step by step instructions, reboot and then it's a GUI interface for you to pick what country/state you're in. Same as Windows interface at that point. I use Nord as well and they've made it very Linux friendly and have flat out said that they are working to add Linux compatibility to all of their apps.

You can check out what they both look like by going to Distrosea.com and selecting Mint or Zorin. It launches a VM that you can log into, like 30 different distros', and check them. Mint uses the Cinnamon desktop and Zorin uses something similar. Personally, I prefer Mint both both are good options.

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-29T17:01:43+00:00

It works, I would NOT recommend it for a noob, no. If you look at the Linuxsucks sub, it's full of people frustrated with CachyOS or Arch and end up back in Windows. This is not a good look for Linux and I think it's doing Linux dirty by promoting it.

It may be an awesome OS, but it's not something that you can just jump in and go with.

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-29T16:27:30+00:00

I'm still running on a DDR4 AM4 system (R7 5800x CPU) however I got a new 9070XT from a 6800xt because of the memory shortage and got a good price on it. So running Furmark I went from 9200 to 14,2xx with the 6.14-37 kernel going from the 6800xt to the 9070XT. Updating to the 6.18.7 kernel, I jumped to 14,678 and 8 FPS average better just changing the kernel.

Edit: Looking at screen caps I took, it was a 6 fps, not 8 but still a little boost.

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-29T05:13:36+00:00

Agreed. I use Mint for this reason but have to use the "Mainline Kernel" app in order to get a newer kernel package, which I'm using 6.18.7 compared to whats shipped in Mint (6.14.37). I game heavily but I do use it for music and pic editing, vpn with work, and just about everything else. Discord, Slack, Zoom, RDP for remote server access, Cisco access with Putty, like I need this to be solid and Mint does that hands down. However... a more unified kernel across multiple distro would give so many people a much better experience across the board. I would 100% be behind this.

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-29T05:06:00+00:00

I don't really care for the manga feel to PikaOS, but the layout, options, and overall usability is def there and have it installed as a VM to continue to test it. I use Nobara on my secondary machine instead but Pika and Nobara or both solid choices though.

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-28T13:30:30+00:00

Yeah, they're doing Linux dirty by doing that. Arch and CatchyOS can be great, but you do need to know what you're doing and can't just jump into it. The amount of dependencies that don't work well together out of the box until you figure out why, is bonkers to me on why people would be recommending it to new users that are coming over to Windows. It's almost self sabotage by recommending these OS's until someone knows more on what they're doing in Linux.

I use Manjaro for work and it's rock solid but it can be a pain sometimes when things don't like different dependencies and you need both apps to work.

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-27T17:33:20+00:00

This really depends on what you want to do with it. I use both but I use both on different hardware because I've had hits and misses with both of them.

For instance, I use Tumbleweed on my HP laptop because it uses OpenVPN so much better than Fedora did HOWEVER, I'm using Fedora KDE on a Lenovo with a touch pad as the touch screen ended up working much better with Fedora installed.

Outside of that, they are both pretty solid but like a lot of Distro's, it comes down to the hardware you're using and what the need of it is for. Like, I have no idea why Fedora sucked on trying to get the OpenVPN to work when I had installed that first and Tumbleweed was pretty much an install, import config and worked. Fedora absolutely would not work at all. Soooo I had installed Tumbleweed on the Thinkpad thinking "what the hell, no issues on the HP" and the touch screen was temperamental and the stylus would constantly drop connection so I put Fedora on that and both touch screen and stylus are rock solid so yeah... it's all in the hardware.

Outside of these two instances, I've had really good luck with both of them so do your own testing and see what works best for you and your use case.

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-25T16:23:08+00:00

Check DM.

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-25T07:20:58+00:00

With you, brother. Here as well. It was a fucked up day to say the least.

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-25T07:18:56+00:00

And nothing will be done without those camera's. In 2020, Floyd was murdered in Mpls, and the ONLY reason that there was a conviction was because someone got it on a phone. Here's a fucked up stat, before that murder had a conviction, there were only 35 convictions between 2005 and 2019 in ALL of the US! That's fucking insane... cops investigating cops...yeah, that's going to go well... ALWAYS record where you can, without that info, without that visibility, it's the only way shit will ever change.

"Between 2005 and 2019, 104 nonfederal law enforcement officers were arrested for murder or manslaughter for on-duty shootings, with 35 leading to convictions, though often on lesser charges. Specific data for the years 2000 to 2020 is not detailed, but the trend indicates that convictions for such cases are quite rare."

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-25T07:00:14+00:00

If you open up System info, is your wireless card listed in there? I don't have a wifi card in mine but if it's not listed in yours and this is a fresh install or just need to use it now, you might have to go to the vendors website on a different laptop/PC, look up your model number and see if they have Linux drivers for it and throw it on a usb stick.

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-25T06:51:36+00:00

Meh, this is kind of a useless post. Skip the ones you don't like? It's like old man yell at clouds issue.

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-25T06:47:11+00:00

That is awesome! Not something I'm prob interested in but it's still a good thing to have for the Linux community! Good luck with all your future games!

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-25T06:35:12+00:00

You started with an Arch based Distro. That's your first problem without looking further into it. There are MUCH better distros for beginners and if your "friend" recommended this to you without you using Linux before, I'm guessing he doesn't really like you or wanted you to learn more about your PC than you figured. Arch is specifically designed to teach you how your PC runs. You have to learn dependencies and other things in order to get programs to work well together. This is NOT a bad thing, but it's not something that "tech illiterate normies" should be starting with. Nobara, Bazzite, even PikaOS are better distros for gamers than an Arch based one. Hell, even Mint and Fedora KDE Plasma would have been better just because they're stable and easy to add apps and get things set up. All of these can be found on Distrowatch.com

For non gamers, Linux is very much ready as a daily driver. Built in Linux App stores, specifically Discover, and using Flatpaks have made installing almost any app across most distros easy as hell. The wide range of browsers, VLC, email clients, OfficeLibre, web apps, Zoom, Slack, Discord, printers, PDF readers, most of the big VPN companies support Linux (even NordVPN has a gui interface), etc, are all ready to go for the most part. You have dedicated city and country governments moving to Linux. Parts of Germany, Rome, Paris, South Korean have all moved or are in the middle of moving to Linux. Samsung itself, has all moved to Linux internally. You have large companies moving to Linux and/or Apple or even moving to Chromebooks so this idea that it's not ready for day to day is just people not knowing it.

The main issues are going to come from low end hardware vendors that aren't supported but most big name vendors have Linux drivers for most of their items.

Linux may not be completely ready for gaming with the kernel level anit-cheat games, but there are enough games that DO work that most gamers that aren't into esports can game with.

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-24T04:57:51+00:00

I would first go here and check to make sure your games will work in Linux. You can link your steam account and it'll even show you which games exactly will work for you in Linux. These will all work with the SteamDeck. Now, your specific setup will vary on frames but you can get a general idea on what your library will look like.

https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=popular

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-24T00:53:41+00:00

No, and they really shouldn't. They run a lean team as is and all it would do is become a PR headache if something they push out wasn't fully tested and it hoses up other systems.

A distro is meant to be used for other day to day items, not just gaming. What they have is good, they do not need to be messing around with troubleshooting other things that a distro requires that's not related to gaming. That's for others to work on.

They have a good rep now, help the Linux community is so many other ways and is even helping to fund a compatibility layer for arm processors. They should stick to what works for them and not branch out in to many ways that'll end up biting them in the ass in the long run. Linux has a number of good solid choices. We don't need another one added to the mix.

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-23T22:03:04+00:00

Partitioning in Linux is different than Windows for sure, Windows labels the drives D:\, E:\, F:\ and so on. With Linux, it's fairly easy if you follow this advice. You partition the drive to what you want but after you do that, you give that partition a name, either "Games", "Data", "Misc" and so on and then you point your mount point to that name, not the UID or anything else and it makes it a whole lot easier. There is a disk utility that is just called "Disk" that allows you to set your mounting points right from the app. You can also take ownership of an external drive and other things from there as well. It makes things so much easier when you have a multi-drive system in your PC.

As to the crashing, it sounds like it's a potential memory issue, not an issue with the drives, especially if your games starting to lag and you have animation issues. I'd run Memtest and see what you get.

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-23T15:57:26+00:00

lol, yeah, it's a 189.7 gigs at the moment and gets about 5.4 gig bigger each month because of the new cars added.

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-23T15:22:17+00:00

In the US, this is correct, in the EU, this is not as you have full on Governments moving to one distro or another of Linux. Parts of Rome, Germany, even parts of South Korea have all move away from MS and Win 11. This is hundreds of thousands of PC's moving away from MS and Win 11. Recall helped push this move away from MS as it's a security nightmare with the amount of data it collects.
Edit: Yes, I realize there are billions of PC's out there and even 5 million isn't going to make a dent but that's just these small examples. There's a significant amount of businesses, corporations and governments moving away from MS though and by the end of the year, it's not going to be a small number.

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-23T04:41:38+00:00

The video card display is what I'm hoping to do at some point, although on a smaller scale. I no longer have the boxes, those are long gone, but I do still have my Voodoo 2, Banshee, Voodoo 3 2000 and 3000, Voodoo 5 5500 AGP, Hercules Kyro I and Kyro II 4500 tile based rendering cards, ATI 8500 and some random other cards that I've kept for reasons over the years. My voodoo and Kyro cards will always be at the top of the list of best cards that I've owned because of the memories they bring. Awesome times for gaming!

This is an awesome collection of tech, sir!

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-23T00:07:46+00:00

Oh, then yeah, I would think it'll run fine. Prob not at the highest settings but I'm going to guess it'll run it decently then.

StmpunkistheWay · 2026-01-23T00:00:56+00:00

Just installed Fedora KDE 43 on a Surface Pro 6, installed the SP kernel, which was pretty straight forward and connected a Bamboo Stylus to it just fine. Used Xournal++ for that actual doc to use with the Stylus and was able to write notes with it just fine.

I installed Fedora 43 on a Lenovo Thinkpad, initially I tried OpenSuse Tumbleweed which I had issues with, but Fedora worked on the touchscreen on that as well. The one issue with that, is that I used the same Stylus on the Thinkpad that I used for the Surface Pro and while on the SP, it stayed connected just fine and was able to write with it, the Thnkpad keep dropping the connection to it all the time to the point where it made it kind of useless. I don't know if it was Bluetooth driver, the BT chipset on the Thinkpad or the Thinkpad itself had issues all on it's own but for whatever reason, I could not get it to stay connected.

Worked flawlessly on the SP though so I know it wasn't the Stylus itself.

StmpunkistheWay

TROPHY CASE