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. ^^
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
I’m coming from Ableton Live, which I’ve used for a very long time and got used to, Bitwig turned out to be similar (I think I’ve seen that company was created with people from Ableton), so it works for me. But it’s better to try everything first of course.
I’ve used FL studio via wine on several machines and it always ran better than any windows machine.
With the major wine 8 overhaul it’s even better.
No problem with vsts.
There are several distros specific for AV needs with Jack etc already set up.
https://www.slant.co/topics/11893/~linux-distribution-for-music-production
Dual booting is simple on Linux.
(Make yourself a dedicated /home partition to save yourself time when distro hopping)
Yeah I never could figure out Ableton either lol
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.
Same, I have surface as jellyfin/torrent server. Want to migrate it to Arch next
Glad to hear. Few remarks that I hope will help. I’ll start with Wine to clarify it’s a clutch. Sure it’s a useful one but IMHO the beauty of Linux is that you are in control, you have more agency. Wine per se is great because it gives you more options. Unfortunately most of the time Wine is used to run what is not available in Linux and that is usually not open source. Consequently you bring with you little black boxes, spaces where you lose again control. The deeper problem IMHO is that you assume there are no alternatives. In truth in most cases there are numerous alternatives, they just aren’t clones because having more freedom to explore means they can be genuinely new solutions with interfaces that are thus unfamiliar. So… yes enjoy Wine but I’d suggest to take just a bit of time to search and try open source alternatives. This lead me to an example. I work in VR so when you mentioned desktop view I thought it was interesting. Yes you don’t have whatever M$ is proposing (honestly used it years ago with WMR but can’t even recall it) but you have “simple” things like ALVR (I even use SteamVR on Steam Deck) and IMHO deeper explorations like XRdesktop https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xrdesktop/xrdesktop that allow you to manipulate actual windows in space, not “just” on a 2D plane. Anyway enjoy the discovery it’s a worthwhile adventure. I work and play, VR or not, on Linux for years now, it’s literally liberating!
don’t recommend manjaro. instead - vanilla arch or endeavour os
i love endevouros. great for beginners. simple transition from DEs, too, for noobs
I hope people will take my post with a grain of salt and do their own research anyway.
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.
I also would like to know.
See my other reply - delays for testing lead to versioning problems with the aur.
I used manjaro for a while, and it just worked out of the box. The problem is with the AUR. Manjaro is always a little bit behind the aur, and this leads to breakages because a package needs a dependency version that isn’t available. It’s like doing partial upgrades which arch is clear about: don’t do it. The other thing is that this delay is for testing, but there’s been questions raised if manjaro really does the testing justice.
If you stay away from the aur and use flatpaks, manjaro won’t have issues generally speaking. But now there’s an alternative in endeavor-it’s got a nice installer and dumps you into an arch+ environment. Me personally I didn’t find arch difficult to install, so I just went that route.
The biggest reason is instability - packages in its main repo are held back two weeks, while the same isn’t true of anything from the AUR, meaning potential dependency version mismatch. It’s kinda rare for this to be an issue, but it happens enough to make it a subpar choice for long-term usage. More info here
Do they literally just delay everything by a week or make weekly “releases”? Both don’t make anything more stable. I’m confused what their goal is. The weekly “releases” would at least seem like a good idea but you’re just as well risking being stuck with a bug for a week.
I think everything’s delayed, rather than weekly releases, but I’m not 100% sure. Either way, in theory this gives them more time to catch any major bugs and hold those packages, though in practice I don’t believe that happens much at all considering how short the delay is.
Yeah, I’d imagine that Arch devs are quicker to fix things because they’d affect everyone than Manjaro devs would be to notice and stop something. I imagine there are more Arch devs. I don’t know though.
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
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://m.piped.video/watch?v=5KNK3e9ScPo&pp=ygURbWFuamFybyBsaW51eCBiYWQ%3D
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
https://manjarno.pages.dev/ (kinda ironic that the original manjarno site is dead)
Also https://dont-ship.it/ for Linux mobile where Manjaro shipped broken WIP pull requests
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.
wine staging for yabridge btw, should mention that
deleted by creator
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
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
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.
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.
I ran Debian Sid on my primary computer for a few years, and it broke hard several times, requiring things like booting into recovery and package dependency untangling to fix. It was years ago, so they might have better safeguards against that now, but there’s no way I’d recommend that to a new Linux Desktop user.
That’s because you shouldn’t recommend rolling releases at all to new users. I just put it there for completion sake
Yeah, something arch based is a really weird recommendation for beginners…
Don’t forget Tumbleweed KDE!
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.
NixOS is great and you’d probably see benefits from using it even if your usage is fairly simple to be honest (and potentially some challenges as well, haha). If nothing else easy rollbacks are a win on the rare occasion when a system update borks something. That said, there is a learning curve, and if what you currently have is working for you and you don’t want to switch… Then you don’t have to switch :).
Arch for an average user?
Do you mean for the average nerd? Arch is def not for an average internet or computer user.
Stop using x11. X11 is legacy.
Youc’ve got nvidia? Get a better system and don’t complain that wayland dorsn’t work. You’ve got the wrong thing. It’s your fault, not waylands.
Wayland doesn’t work with the hardware of a major vendor. That’s totally Wayland’s fault.
Afaik it’s nvidia’s fault.
Xorg works with Nvidia so Nvidia is proven to work.
imagine if nvidia started launching new graphic cards but they only developed drivers for Windows XP. No support for 7, 10 or 11.
So, the graphic cards work yeah. On a legacy system.
Waking and sleeping does not work properly with my RX6600+wayland either (MX Linux). So I think you are (besides being rude) also partially incorrect. I get Arch family is not for regular people, but otherwise I kind of think you need to rethink your comment.
You’re right. I’m sorry for being rude. Recommending x11 over wayland isn’t the right thing to do which is why I was too hasty.
It’s your fault, not waylands
Pretty sure it’s Nvidia’s fault for being so stingy with their driver code.
“Have a different computer” is such a terrible take
I do use vanilla arch but i never suggest anyone to use it because the amount of full system update necessary to prevent it from breaking, i always run sudo pacman -Syu after login and if a user don’t have broadband connection then i don’t think arch and gentoo linux are for them.
For gaming, I would add Heroic Games Launcher for Epic Games ang GoG titles. Otherwise a great summary. Welcome back to Linux! I made the switch a couple of years ago and have not had Windows installed on any of my computers since.
Gaming outside steam is fine too. Use Wine, Lutris, Proton
And Heroic Games Launcher.
And Bottles
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] ?
Dang! DistroChooser is neat. I hadn’t heard of it before and it recommended Arch for me, which I’m already using (btw)
I don’t like the questionnaire nor its recommendations when I think about it in the pov of someone who hasn’t used Linux ever.
Have you tried ardour btw?
I did, it looks nice, it’s just that Bitwig feels more at home for me.
There are quite some comments and to clarify all misunderstanding regarding Arch vs something else or any other debates in this thread, I would like to add this comment.
I do not recommend Arch based distro over Debian based or anything else. Topic is about using Linux at its current state, I assume that most of distros will be more or less similar when it comes to statements of the post. In my case it was Archlinux distro, because I had prior experience and it’s philosophy is appealing to me. Like rolling release, configure yourself, install only necessary for you things and etc.
I do not recommend to use Arch itself for a new user. I hope from the post it was clear, that new user should not care much about mentioned topics, like Pipewire vs Pulseaudio or Wayland VS X. One can use more high order distros or even different base, like Linux Mint. Which I also used long time ago and was quite happy about.
I do not say that KDE is better or worse than Gnome or whatever. For me it’s just a preference, like possibility to have more control over UI and looks and to avoid some blockers, like DRM on Wayland. You can have them all on your machine, beauty of Linux.
And please do your own research on the topic and do take everything with grain of salt. There are a lots of great distros, desktop environments and other things. And there are tons of good and bad advices, navigating through which sometimes is not so easy.
And I would like to underline that there are not so many up to date objectivly better things when it comes to software, pick what you need and like.
I too recently made the switch from Windows to Linux. I wonder what people mean by a “new user”? My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20, followed by a C64 and later an Amiga 500. The OS on the Amiga was somewhat like Linux (at least from memory). I tried Linux a few times in the past 30 years or so. Once because I was curious I ordered a CD (do not remember which distro that was), then 20 years ago because of work (I think that was Ubuntu) and a few years ago (maybe 4-5) because I had an old laptop that couldn’t run Windows any more. Since it was just an old laptop I only used to watch movies/series on, I distro-hopped a bit on it. Of all the ones I tried, Manjaro was the fastest and the one that gave me no problems with hardware working out-of-the-box. Mind you, none of these experiences with Linux were very intensive. And while I am a programmer and I learned at school how computers work (this was in the 80s), I consider myself a noob when it comes to Linux. Does that make me a “new user”?
Recently I was planning on building a new PC and contemplated going from Windows 10 to 11, but the whole software market has been irking me for a while now. Everything (not just software and OS mind you) seems to be switching more and more to a subscription model, which just feels wrong to me. Not to mention the ever-increasing breach of privacy by the big companies. As such, before building my new computer, I tried a few distros on my old PC. First I tried all the flavours of Ubuntu and decided fairly quickly that KDE is my desktop environment. Gnome is just too restrictive for my taste and the others feel too much like Windows (just a personal opinion, obviously). In terms of actual distro, I noticed all the Ubuntu flavours gave me problems after using them a few days, so that one was crossed off the list. While doing my “research” I quickly came to the conclusion I prefer a rolling release over a regular release cycle. Partly because some of my (new) hardware is/was not part of the kernel yet, but also because I do not want to do a major update every (x) year. But rolling does come with a higher chance of breaking things. This is why I went with Manjaro. The 2 weeks (or so) of holding back updates -which others seem to see as a problem- I see as an advantage.
I have only been using it for a month now, so far so good. Still learning and getting lost a lot in how it all works. So far I am happy with my choice, we will see how I feel in a year ;) I already made some silly mistakes, like I wanted my /home directory on a separate drive and stupidly thought I needed a 1TB drive for Root as well… lol. Now got this big empty space on one of my drives not sure what to use for. The choice between X11 and Wayland is a touch one, but I stay with X for now. I do have one question though: What is pipewire and should I switch to that?
Nice write up. Hope we both will be fine with our installations =)
Regarding “new user” - that’s true, e.g. average person has much steeper learning curve than software dev, DIY enthusiast playing with Arduino or gamer who has his own server for favorite game in the cloud and etc. They might be all “new” to Linux as desktop OS, but not on the same start line.
Though looking at EndeavourOS and recalling my experience with Mint and Ubuntu, it might be possible to have windows like (when it comes to easy to use) installation\configuration and experience out of the box.
deleted by creator
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.
Mmh. If you like Machine Learning / AI / Stable Diffusion you’re kinda screwed. Hope AMD ups their game regarding this.
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.
Yeah. Lots of frameworks are optimized for CUDA (Nvidia). ROCm (AMD) and Intel’s efforts are a niche. Hence often cumbersome to set up and get all the performance out of it. Nvidia invests orders of magnitude more into AI. I believe they consider this to be the more profitable market in the future.
I see this sentiment often but like, tuxedo, system76, kubuntu focus, are all selling laptops with Nvidia gpus, what’s the deal? What’s your take on that
Pretty much the reason I’m not interested in buying their stuff.
I get it as workstation option for very specific purposes - but for 5 years or so you’re just better off with an AMD card.
Before that things sucked a bit if you needed 3d performance - I just stopped gaming after I moved off my last voodoo card as I don’t support companies with that kind of behaviour.
System76 also sell full-AMD builds. Friend of mine got the Pangolin which has an AMD CPU with integrated graphics. No it’s not gonna thrash through everything but it works for him.
I’m aware of that - but I think when you’re marketing as Linux / open source friendly you shouldn’t be selling those systems.
I might get interested if they ever have a modern AMD system with proper coreboot support - but until then they don’t do anything special.
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.
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.
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.
