this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Finally migrated from Windows to Linux. For anyone wondering, what is the state of Linux as your primary OS for home PC\laptop in 2023.

I've finalised my Archlinux installation yesterday, I dropped of Linux more than 10 years ago and experience in 2023 in comparison is awesome and beyond even wildest dreams back then:

  • For average user looking for more out of the box experience I would suggest something Arch based (people in comments suggest EndeavourOS, please do your research). Archlinux installation took me quite some time
  • Almost everything works out of the box, by just installing corresponding package
  • KDE Plasma environment is fast and beautiful
  • Pipewire audio server (Jack\Pulseaudio replacement) works great
  • Wayland window server is not there yet, especially if you have Nvidia with proprietary drivers and want to use VR. Waking up, session restoration and other scenarios have issues. Use X11.
  • Wine is great!
  • Music making - Bitwig Studio DAW has linux native version, yabridge allow you to use windows VSTs, which are easily installed via wine
  • Gaming works out of the box with Steam for majority of titles, some games have native linux version. Performance is great. In worst case windows game might loose 5-15% in performance. Was not case for my titles
  • Gaming outside steam is fine too. Use Wine, Lutris, Proton
  • VR is a mixed bag. Not everything is there (Desktop view, sound control and mirroring, camera, motions smooth, lighthouses do not wake up os go to sleep. I use my phone to turn them on/off). But if its not the problem for you, quite some titles work. Tried: native HF Alyx, Lab, windows: Beat Saber and Boneworks. For me it's a surprise, I did not count on it. Performance is great.

So overall my experience is great. Eventually I'm going to get rid of WIndows on other computers and laptops at howe. I can finally wave goodbye to Windows, with lots of ads and bloatware. Alway glad to help with answers regarding installation while my memory and history logs are fresh. ^^

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[–] [email protected] 144 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I wouldn't recommend Arch to Linux beginners, though. It'll take quite a bit of tinkering to get to work and you have to develop a pretty detailed understanding of the whole thing. Which is absolutely fine, of course, if this is what you want to do. But if you just want something that works with minimal hassle, try Mint.

[–] [email protected] 77 points 1 year ago (19 children)

Yes, I find this obsession with Arch on Lemmy very weird. It's certainly not a distro for beginners. Ubuntu (let the hate flow), Mint, Fedora, and many others would be better choices.

If it is what you like, fair enough but I feel that it is encouraged around here as a default for both beginners and advanced users, which is bizarre. It's too complex for beginners and not optimisable enough for very advanced users. I don't hate it but I hate to see it become the standard.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (6 children)

From my personal experience Arch is several months ahead of other distros and depending on the package and sometimes has everything you need already included for gaming.

I believe this is due to the Steam Deck.

However for ease of use, I agree there are other better distros. Fedora is only 2ish months behind arch in terms of graphics drivers and Ubuntu… has the latest proton from steam and lutris since proton isn’t installed from the local app stores.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I find Mint to be the most obvious choice for beginners who don’t use Lemmy.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I used to use Arch Linux. It's really good, honestly, especially if you want to know how the OS components work from inside or make something custom. For anything else, I would recommend Debian and its non-snap-based derivatives (Linux Mint Debian Edition or Tuxedo OS, or KDE Neon).

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I had to help a friend install the VMware kernel modules, since VMware is weird and VirtualBox sucks for virtualising Windows. I had to guide him through it step by step, making sure his commands were exact.

He's only started using the terminal properly. Hell no, I'm not going to recommend Arch to him.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (4 children)

There is a certain kind of beginner I would recommend Arch to, those rare folks who really do learn best from the bottom up. Candidates must also see "computers" as a hobby, and have separate hardware from their daily driver they're installing/learning Linux on.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Mint all the way

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Endeavor OS solves most of those problems. Out of box experience is fantastic, and the installer is the best I've ever used.

That being said, I still wouldn't recommend it due to the Arch package maintainers willingness to break userspace.

You will do a system update and it will break something. Most recent for me was Python packages. I updated my system and suddenly pip stopped working because they decided to follow PEP-668 and force the user to install packages using pacman.

The rationale given was allowing the user to install packages outside of the distro's control can potentially break system tools like Fedora's DNF, which is python based.

Now, I've done this on Fedora, it's not fun. But you know what else? FEDORA DOESN'T EVEN ENABLE THIS FEATURE YOU FUCKING IMBECILES.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I think it depends on what the said beginner is after. If they just want something that works then sure archlinux isn't the best option, but if they want learn more about linux then there's nothing wrong with installing arch. When I was new to linux, I found the beginners install guide on the archwiki to be very helpful and learnt a fair bit about how things work. I think you then have a good overview of how your system works and therefore have a better idea of what needs fixing when things break.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (6 children)

especially if you have Nvidia

This is something that needs to be highlighted over and over again: Don't buy nvidia if there's ever a chance of running anything but Windows.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mmh. If you like Machine Learning / AI / Stable Diffusion you're kinda screwed. Hope AMD ups their game regarding this.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

IDK, I used to have a dedicated software for playing with CUDA. Most of the image-specific AI stuff from the internet require 8 GB of VRAM or more, though.

Nowadays, I don't feel the need for GPU-accelerated computing, though. If I needed, I would write Vulkan compute shaders for that thing.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not really though, more like if you need open source drivers. Nvidia cards with the proprietary driver work great on OSes like Illumos (solaris) or FreeBSD, Linux on X11 where no other card works properly.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

I’m not sure I would say that Nvidia works “great”. I’ve had numerous issues over the years trying to get my laptop with an Nvidia card set up and working just right. I’d say it’s more like Nvidia “can” work in Linux.

I just bought a new laptop with AMD graphics, and so far the difference is night and day. It just works.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I would agree with this, I use Nvidia cards for professional work on Linux and I've never had a problem. Yeah there's some upfront work configuring the drivers, but I've never had it take more than an hour to setup.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Arch is the one of the last things I'd recommend for an out of the box experience.

I'd recommend Fedora with Gnome if people are coming from iOS and KDE if people come from Windows.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

It's also one of the last things I'd recommend to someone migrating from Windows to Linux lol it has a fairly high learning curve

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Anecdotal, but I jumped straight into EndeavorOS from Windows 10 with very little knowledge about Linux before hand and it's been a very "it just works" out of the box experience for me.

Granted I just use my PC mainly for gaming, but outside of a few issues that were my own fault for not reading/doing any research before wiping my Windows install, its been an incredibly smooth experience.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

While I agree that overall it can be a smooth experience I'd say for the majority of people who are just coming to Linux I woukd rather recommend Linux Mint. Especially when someone doesn't know what they're doing at all yet.

Arch and its derivatives are cool dor tinkerers but realistically speaking if you're looking for stuff that works out of the box without hassle it's much much better to stick to distros like Linux Mint, Fedora, Pop_OS!, and similiar. Need the latest stuff? Flatpack or Fedora should be good, or Debian sid if you want a rolling release (tho realistically you won't really need a rolling release over semi-rolling if you're still a noob). Sure the AUR is cool but it's a bit overrated in the sense that unless you're actively looking for stuff on it 99% of the time you're using it because something isn't in the official repos and that's not good, while distros like Linux Mint have large repos with pretty much everything you need already without a real need for the AUR.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (3 children)

don't recommend manjaro. instead - vanilla arch or endeavour os

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

Noob question here. Why so many ppl is against Manjaro? As someone who just tried many distros , Manjaro was the one that just worked for me without errors, untill I was bored to try something else.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

I think it's mostly do with the carelessness of the devs. They've let their certificates expire multiple times (and suggested their users put their clocks back as a workaround) and DDOSed the AUR a couple of times by accident. To be fair, I haven't heard of any foul ups in a long time so maybe they're being more careful now.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://manjarno.pages.dev/ (kinda ironic that the original manjarno site is dead)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Also https://dont-ship.it/ for Linux mobile where Manjaro shipped broken WIP pull requests

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

TLDR: poor project management & bad security and stability even though it specifically promotes itself as stable. Here's a video I think explains it pretty well https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5KNK3e9ScPo&pp=ygURbWFuamFybyBsaW51eCBiYWQ%3D

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Gaming outside steam is fine too. Use Wine, Lutris, Proton

And Heroic Games Launcher.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

And Bottles

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For picking a distro, I'd rather recommend https://distrochooser.de instead of just saying "Arch or derivative". IMO it should be in the sidebar. Opinions @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] ?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Dang! DistroChooser is neat. I hadn’t heard of it before and it recommended Arch for me, which I’m already using (btw)

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I agree with most of your statements, though not with all of them.

I'd say use X11, only if you're on nvidia and you've got 1 monitor or monitors with the same resolution and refresh rates and are ok with having to disable the X11 compositor and having no animations while playing games... You also have to be ok with tearing while gaming too... It's a lot, and the next version of plasma, plasma 6 is supposed to fix all the jankiness with kde on wayland, as afaik GNOME on wayland is stable on nvidia, I'm on AMD so I can't confirm though...

EndeavorOS is great, though I'd also suggest trying out nobara (or fedora if you're not gaming... or recording).

I'm really surprised that you managed to get VR working at all, didn't know that worked at all on linux.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

That sounds fantastic. Long term Linux user here. I hope you like the world of Linux and Free Software.

~~migrated [...] to Linux 10~~

~~I don't think there is a Linux 10. Arch has installer version numbers like 2023.09.01 After that~~ it's a 'rolling release' that means there are no version numbers, it changes continuously and is constantly updated.

Archlinux installation took me quite some time

That is correct. Arch Linux isn't recommended as a beginners distro. YMMV. If you managed to do it: Nice. You shouldn't have. But you're probably fine, now that it works and you've probably learned more in the process than lots of other people have in the first few weeks.

Music making

Make sure to also check out the free software for music making. "LMMS", "Ardour" and similar.

Gaming works out of the box with Steam

That's also my observation. Steam works fine. And Proton is awesome. Also, check out a few of the free games from your package repository. I like "0 A.D.", "Supertuxkart", "Super Tux Party", "Supertux", "Slingshot", "Mindustry", "Minetest", "Performous", "Sauerbraten", "Hedgewars", "X-Moto" Just to name a few. There are hundreds more.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Archinstall is included on the Arch installation ISO. Which makes it a bit easier to get into Arch Linux.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Arch, KDE, Wayland, pipewire... Not the most easy for a first jump but lot of goods choices 👍

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Personally, Ardour > Bitwig. Couldn't ever figure out how to do anything in Bitwig. Very complicated an unintuitive.

Ardour is also unintuitive but 1) I did eventually figure it out and 2) it's at least free

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I recently found an Android app on F-Droid called "Linux Command Library" and for the first time I'm not as intimidated to try Linux for my main driver/gaming rig. Previously, I had always fucked my installs up by facing an issue I wanted to fix, and using any info online to do so, even if I had no idea what the command was actually doing. Almost always I end up fucking everything up and needing to reinstall.

I've been saving posts and comments regarding Linux info for the last month on Lemmy and cannot wait to take the plunge and finally rid myself of Microsoft!

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I recommend ZorinOS for new-new people.

I settled on EndeavourOS.

NixOS is tempting me, but ultimately I don't believe it would be an improvement for me rn. All I do is yay from time to time to update my system. It just works.

Honorary mentions to Fedora and OpenSUSE, which I used, but they demanded more input from me. On EndeavourOS everything just works, so I enjoy it the most.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Does Archlinux take some time to set up but then is as easy to maintain as Manjaro or does the struggle never end?

Always wanted to try out Arch but feel intimidated by all the people telling me not to :P

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

In my experience, once you've got Arch set up, it less work to maintain than Manjaro. On Arch, you have noticeably more frequent, but smaller, package updates. On Manjaro, compatibility issues with the AUR may occur, which happened a few times for me, while that won't happen on Arch.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Wait until you find out that your BIOS and Firmware are also proprietary! Gotta get rid of those, but Coreboot/Heads is a real rabbithole and needs lots of work to be usable.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I see you're using KDE (I love it too), have you had a look at KDE Connect? It's an app to connect your phone seamlessly with KDE, and it's one of the things Linux does way better than Windows

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I switched because w10 got too heavy for my old shitty laptop. Now I got new shitty laptop with w11 and will soon it will be cured by Linux.

My old laptop will retire as server.

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