Migrated from Windows to Linux. Decided to share list of answers/statements I was looking for before did it (and could not find).

Oikio@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 366 points –

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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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.

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.

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.

Arch is several months ahead of other distros

Source for that? It's one of those weird, wild affirmations that go around regarding Arch. Ahead in terms of what? Integrating the most up-to-date kernel or something?

Is it because of the rolling release model? But it's not the only one to have rolling releases.

This comes from personal testing of games. There was a DX11 bug intel igpus where UE4 games crash instantly on boot. I was able to work around this by forcing dx12 in arch, but when I moved to fedora it wasn’t working, that was until about 2 months later after an update. Since I don’t know exactly how far behind fedora is in terms of graphics drivers I said it in ambiguous terms.

Yeah, I'm not sure supporting MS proprietary 3D rendering APIs is the goal of any Linux distro? It's like saying: look my distro is ahead because excel runs on it. I might be missing the point here. If you can have the same reasoning with Vulkan, that would make sense tho

Have you not heard of the Steam Deck and Proton? Running MS APIs through a compatibility layer is the main goal for Linux gaming for the past few years, as it allows legacy games that had no hope in getting a Linux native port (or a terrible Linux port) to run in Linux, through the Proton Compatibility layer.

The apps I was using were running with DXVK, but due to a bug with intel iGPU driver which affects both Windows and Linux users, it didn't work. A Intel Mesa update patched the bug, and my game worked better. When I moved back I was on an older driver and had to wait for it to be added in.

Aaaaaah it's gaming! Oh dear, I feel old. OK, so Arch gets the compiled drivers for gaming related HW before other distros? I guess, given the community of nerds (no offense), that would make sense. Thanks for clearing that up.

Still wouldn't be ahead of the compilable distros. I urge you to switch to LFS, the real beginners distros. ;)

I wouldn't worry too much about not knowing this. The steam deck is still relatively new and proton/dxvk is improving at such a blinding pace compared to the rest of Linux that my head is still spinning.

From my limited understanding, because of Arch's rolling releases and Valve basing the steam deck on Arch. DXVK the compatibility layer for DX games to vulkan is managed by the distro. How this works is magic is still magic to me. I also think graphic drivers gets pushed on arch early too, since it's a rolling release.

However I am in complete agreement, Arch isn't beginner friendly, I personally like Manjaro and find it friendlier, but that's like having a pet cat, and it's a Bob cat. Sure it's not a Lion, but it's not a Kitty.

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

Anecdotally, Mint broke file permissions and then the mounting points for my home server setup. And I find Cinnamon to be quite ugly imho.

I tried Fedora and Debian and much prefer those two vs Mint. Also, KDE is incredibly beautiful on the Steam Deck.

P.S. Fedora and Debian work with secure boot OOTB. Helpful for a laptop install. I know you can make it work with Arch and Mint as well, and there's issues+opinions with secure boot, but I just wanted something to work. I am not as adept with linux and the guides assumed a particular level of experience with it.

I installed Mint in my Windows user moms computer she loves it.(on windows it was unusably slow) It is a drop in replacement for beginners who want to use linux almost exactly the same way they have used windows. Fedora is good(and my fave) and not too unintuitive for beginners aswell but if someone wants to switch to linux but "keep using windows" Mint is the answer, not to mention all the extra software preinstalled to make stuff work out of the box.

You're doing god's work, well done

An the thing is, I don't use linux myself 😁. Lemme explain, I tried Nobara on my gaming desktop and loved it but was not geting the performance I was hoping for so I reinstalled the nvidia drivers. I fucked up and couldn't get to the graphical UI anymore. For some ungodly reason not even live USB without the simplified graphics mode I formatted my drive thru the simplified live usb mode to nsft and installed Windows on it. To this day Linux literally can't be installed on my Computer. Same bug. Plus Wayland isn't quiite ready for nvidia cards yet, meaning I will do Linux on my next PC that will also have an AMD GPU.

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).

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.

It's because it's bleeding edge, extremely well documented and extremely popular. Bleeding edge is exciting and you're gonna end up on the arch wiki anyway regardless of distro, so you may as well go to the source.

Do mind though it doesn't mean it's easy, like at all, and I fundamentally agree, there's a million better choices for first timers.

you're gonna end up on the arch wiki anyway regardless of distro, so you may as well go to the source.

Absolutely not. I've never used a distro that required me to check the forums or wiki of another distro.

it's bleeding edge

What now? I feel I have fallen asleep and just woke up at a marketing meeting at my job.

I've ended up on the arch wiki a few times on non-arch distros, it covers many generic Linux tools very well

Being on NIX I'm very jealous of the volumes of documentation for Arch. Found my way to the Arch wiki a few times.

not optimisable enough for very advanced users

In what way?

Compared to gentoo for instance, packages are not compiled depending on the HW they are installed on. So, not enough resource optimisation and customisation for some users

Of course, any distro is customisable if you spend the time to do it voluntarily, but by default it's not the way it works

I suppose, although you are getting very little performance improvements compiling from sources. Like very, very little. Considering that you will be waiting for emerge a lot, there's a good handful of folks that consider it a net positive.

Absolutely, it used to be important, now it's more of a hobby for me...

Yet, for some people who love to have everything under control, Arch is a step below the fully optimisable distros. That's why I think it's maybe not for the ultimate Linux extremists among us :) Although there is definitely some respect to give to people who completely mod Mint or Ubuntu, they're among the bravest

Have you tried Funtoo?

Not yet, thanks for bringing it!

I don't know enough about Gentoo to understand what it is saying but it sounds like it is totally the same but makes dealing with the compiler options a lot easier? Do you think it's a good first pick over Gentoo? For "advanced Linux" I mean not a first timer lol.

I find it a bit weird to try to make gentoo more 'user-friendly'. It kind of defeats the point... I have to try tho before being able to answer

I moved from Gentoo to Arch years ago and was unable to notice any performance difference. There may have been one, but it wasn't perceptible to me.

For very specific uses, it can be useful. Some scientific SW, niche applications, or if you have older HW. Most of the time, it's a flex now (I use gentoo BTW, what about that?)

If you absolutely need to compile everything for your system, you can do that with ABS

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.

Honestly, I'm still not sure I would recommend Arch to those people. I think most of those people would be better off on something like Gentoo or NixOS (depending on the class of weirdo we're talking about). Arch in my experience is just more painful than it needs to be. Like, honest to god, there is no reason the user should have to fiddle with the keyring when updating... Figure it out.

Sure. If you want to tinker and look under the hood, Arch is great. But if you just want stuff to work, there are better alternatives.

I've been living in Mint for a decade now, it's as close to "just works" as I've seen a desktop computer get.

Last used Linux over 10 years ago when I was in college for ITNA. It didn't work out for me and I drive trucks for a living now lol. Computers/gaming has always been my hobby though. Decided a few weeks ago to try out Linux again on a spare computer I have. Started with EndeavorOS and broke it somehow. Went to mint for like a week and couldn't get used to it for some reason and decided to try EndeavorOS again. Been using it for about a month now as my primary and only using the windows PC for gaming and it's been great. Does take some tinkering and googling to get it how it want it from a fresh install though which I've had to do a couple times now because of hardware failures lol

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.

It was annoying at first for me too but they tell you how to bypass it, so can't you just use the flag --break-system-packages and make it an alias for pip?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

I hope people will take my post with a grain of salt and do their own research anyway.

i love endevouros. great for beginners. simple transition from DEs, too, for noobs

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.

I'm curious what you mean by "no animations while playing games"?

I like Wayland and use it on my laptop. But I also have Nvidia on my PC and while it's janky at places, I don't get all the problems you describe (at least on i3 for me)

I use multiple monitors with different refresh rates and don't really have any major issue. It syncs with the highest one. I indeed don't use a compositor because it's distracting and also turn off all the composition pipe line stuff. The result of turning off the latter is less latency and a teeny tiny bit of tearing in the lower 3rd when scrolling web pages but that's it.

Games can run utilize gsync when in-game vsync is enabled so long as you disable the second monitor with xrandr.

I believe no animations while playing games would be like, no DE animations while playing games.

Hey, whatever works for you, works, it's just... is disabling your 2nd monitor with xrandr every time you wanna play a game really more convenient than using Wayland? That's a genuine question btw, I'd be surprised if KDE on Wayland is THAT bad, where disabling your 2nd monitor on X11 is preferable to using it

Of course whatever works for you works too, we found workarounds for what we need.

Yes it's more convenient because it's a keybinding away. Also, on Wayland I have to use kernel modeset and it is impossible to "overclock/undervoltage" the GPU to save energy. I also get more frames on X. It's not that KDE on Wayland is bad...it's exactly switching to X just to do that to play games is inconvenient.

I have Nvidia and 1 monitor, so did not run into mentioned issues. Wayland on KDE did not work well for me, also https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers have some blockers for me. Gnome on Wayland as far as I understood does not work with DRM, so no chance to run VR. Also though I used Gnome before it does not appeal to me today. Plasma on the other hand was exactly what I was looking for, plus it's actively maintained and updated. Looking forward to see Plasma 6.

When it comes to VR - I was very surprised, it was something I did not expect to work at all. My setup for reference: I have Nvidia proprietary drivers, SteamVR Beta and Valve Index. I had problems with sound (cracking, quality and etc), but using sof-firmware helped to choose proper output channel on Nvidia GPU via Pro profile and it just started working.

Gnome before it does not appeal to me today. Plasma on the other hand was exactly what I was looking for, plus it's actively maintained and updated.

Very confused by this statement, are you implying Gnome isn't actively maintained and updated or am I missing something?

No, I just said it's not appealing to me today as it did before, when I used it, years ago. I'm not implying anythings here, personal taste. I chose plasma.

Ok that was what I thought until I read the last part and got very confused lol

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 @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml @nooter692@lemmy.ml @MarcellusDrum@lemmy.ml ?

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.

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.

Thanks for the updates, there was a typo when it comes to Linux10 ^^, I'm quite good at making them

I can relate to that 😂😂

You made different choices than me. I run Debian and the Gnome desktop on my main machine. But Arch and KDE are awesome, too. It's more a matter of personal preferences and maybe less so what you're trying to do with it. I think the vast amount of possibilities and choices to make is a big hurdle for new users. I always tell people it doesn't really matter. Just pick something. The desktop environment you find attractive and a distribution with a nice and helpful community. Doesn't really matter what you end up with, there are many excellent ones.

True, I've chosen Arch only because I used it before and it left good impressions. Plus philosophy - "make of it whatever you want\need" appeals to me. As long as distro is supported well, it all comes to your needs and taste.

Good choice. Arch has a big community and there are lots of resources out there. If you can handle it, you're unlikely to get disappointed.

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

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)

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!

Try using virtual machines. You can do this entirely free. Install then take a snapshot. You can learn about the OS in a safety net. If you fuck up too badly, roll back to the snapshot and try again.

Thanks for the tip. I like to live hard and fast! But this really is an idea I hadn't considered and I use VMs at work all the time...with Windows.

There was a good suggestion about usimg VMs, but if you want the bare metal expwrience use something like OpenSUSE Leap, slowroll, or Tumbleweed. if you wreck your system trying sruff,you just reboot and choose an earlier snapshot.

Holy shit, I love you! That's what I was always wanting in any OS.

Honestly it is great, i have run the same install since 2017 without having to reinstall. the filesystem is btrfs, it is configured to take a pre and poat snapshot whenever you enter any of the Yast2 GUI GTK apps for system changes, or use zypper cli etc. You can add remove software or make manual changes and break your system. Reboot, go into advanced option scroll through the time stamped snapshots and select the one you want to boot with. it will be read only, but if it is back to the state you want, drop to command line and issue "sudo snapper rollback" that will set current readonly snapshot as your default writable boot snapshot. you can also manually generate a snapahot at any time using the yast fileaystems. They take up little space or time because it is only saving the delta differeneces.

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

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.

On Manjaro, compatibility issues with the AUR may occur, which happened a few times for me, while that won’t happen on Arch.

You can prevent that by using their unstable repositories which mirror the Arch repositories.

I ended up installing Arch on my 2011 Macbook Pro with archinstall and everything went surprisingly smooth. Only had a small hiccup with the wi-fi drivers, as is tradition. Loving it so far.

When you set it up - it just works. For me installation took 4-6 of hours (I had to read all the topics), until I had bare bones operating system with desktop env. Just follow wiki installation guide (precisely! I made couple of mistakes, because was not paying attention) and you will be fine.

Rare problems during update I had 10 years ago seems to be even rarer today, just check out feed https://archlinux.org/ before update, or after. You can always rollback any package with pacman using local cache. Lots of solutions are easy to find on the internet.

Haven't used it in a while, but in the time I used it I didn't have many issues maintaining it. General rule is to just check out the news before you update because they'll warn you if a package is likely to break stuff or requires manual intervention to update.

I remember installing a package that would prompt me for any packages I was about to update that had a new warning/news since the last update and would link me to it, but I haven't been able to remember what it was called, it was really helpful.

Edit: It was this (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/informant), though just reading the announcements before every update would be just as effective

Install Manjaro on VM, see how they did it. Then install Arch with the same packages. It is best if you have life example. That’s how I matched my 1st Arch.

These days there’s archinstall script on standard Arch install image. It supports LUKS 2 disc encryption and BTRFS root. If you save your configuration and load it, then retry attempts take no time. Saving configuration is best done to a separate USB stick.

As far as maintenance. It is near zero cost. Check website for warnings then

 pacman -Syu

While officially yay is not supported, it is a great tool to keep AUR packages up to date. These days it updates system prior to running AUR updates.

Manjaro breaks more often than Arch, but as a 1st time OS is great.

Beware that, on Arch, "once you've got it set up" can be a loaded statement. Once your OS is running and all your programs reinstalled, there will still be a dozen little configuration files somewhere that you don't know about and that will annoy you until you spend the time to problem solve. If you let those problems linger, it can lead to a "struggle never end[s]" situation. Part of the beauty of Manjaro is sensible defaults. But if you want to try out Arch, you should. It's not hard; it's just annoying for a while.

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.

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

I did, though I do not have a use case for that. It looks like a great solution if you have a scenario.

I love KDE Connect! And it's even available for Windows users. Great piece of software that can do so many things. I've used it on many occasions to quickly get a link or something like that from my PC, having the ability to share your clipboard is amazing.

It's also been my main "share the password manager file" application for the longest time before someone else on Lemmy recommended Syncthing. But KDE Connect is still fantastic!

I love the wii remote mouse thing in Connect, it's really nice when I want to interact with my computer, but am too lazy to get out of my bed to do so

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

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.

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.

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!

Any chance we can get Oculus Quest 2 to work on linux?

ALVR works great, assuming SteamVR in general works with your DE (no Gnome support atm but KDE works for sure).

I saw that people had success with ALVR. But I can't say anything from experience.

wine staging for yabridge btw, should mention that

I am using default wine package, which should be development.

This video was a game changer for me. Turned my vanilla Linux Mint into an audio production powerhouse with a single script. Bitwig, Reaper, Windows VSTs, low latency. Incedible!

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

This video

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

will check out

2 more...

Your suggestion for arch-based distros isn't the best. Tumbleweed is a more friendly alternative for those who want rolling.

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

Please stop recommending Arch...

What's so wrong with it?

Its unstable. I don't have any issues with you using it (it would be concerning if I did), there are better alternatives

We both agree that everyone should have its own distro, I'm on Pop_OS most of the time, but I used Manjaro for a while and I didn't notice many instabilities... but well I'm a very average user!

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

A simple install of Debian + GNOME install (with all the defaults, easier to install than Windows) will provide you with a useful store that can even load flatpaks... and there's nothing that easy an practical on the KDE land.

Almost everything works out of the box, by just installing corresponding package

^No extra package required

Wine is great!

No it isn't. It is a piece of shit that does a garbage of a job to get Windows application to "run". It doesn't run old/basic applications well nor does it run useful modern applications such as MS Office without constant glitches and hours of hacking around

TL:DR; the Linux experience might be great but it isn't for everyone and anyone. If you need to do your job and not constantly be dealing with small annoyances that will curb your productivity it isn't, most likely, for you.

I use Linux at work because Windows has too many "annoyances that will curb [my] productivity". I can understand that it is not for everybody though.

Yeah, sure. Thing is: it isn't for:

  • Regular folks that need MS Office cause it won't run it properly and if you've to collaborate with others Open/Libre/OnlyOffice won't cut it;
  • Regular folks that just installed a password manager (KeePassXC) and a browser (Firefox/Ungoogled) via flatpak only to find out that the KeePassXC app can't communicate with the browser extension because people are "beating around the bush" on GitHub instead of fixing the issue;
  • Regular folks who want a simple Virtual Machine and have to go thought cumbersome installation procedures like this one just to reach the end and have error messages saying virtualization isn't enable when, in fact, it is... or trying to use GNOME Boxes and have a sub-par virtualization experience;
  • Designers because Adobe apps won't run properly without having a dedicated GPU, passthrough and a some hacky way to get the image back into your main system that will cause noticeable delays;
  • Gamers because of the reasons above + as the OP said a 5-15% hit in performance;
  • People that run old software / games because not even those will run properly on Wine;
  • A lot of electrical engineers as typical toolsets ( Circuit Design Suite combines Multisim and Ultiboard), IDEs and whatnot are primarily designed for Windows. And again there are alternatives such as KiCad and EasyEDA for some jobs but they don't work great if you've to collaborate with others users of Multisim;
  • Labs that require data acquisition from specialized hardware because companies making that hardware won't make drivers and software for Linux;
  • Architects because AutoCAD isn't available (not even the limited web version works) and Libre/FreeCAD don't cut it if you've to collaborate with AutoCAD users;
  • Developers, because if you aren't a dip shit so up your ass that you only know how to use Docker and Github actions to deploy to some proprietary cloud solution you won't even be able to find a decently working FTP/SFTP/FTPS desktop client (similar WinSCP or Cyberduck). There a few, all worse than the other and they all fail even at basic stuff like dragging and dropping a file.

Linux desktop is great, I love it but I don't sugar coat it nor I'm delusional like most people I see here.

If you live in a bubble where you don't have to collaborate with anyone else and you can use native Linux apps things might work, you might have a decent workflow and get stuff done but once you've to collaborate with other who use Windows/Mac it's game over.

When you get/install Windows you pay a minimal license and get things working out of the box without further issues. Getting software to run is easy all vendors support whatever you're trying to do and you get very high productivity from day zero. There are annoyances from time to time, sure, but they're way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you've to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive desktop experience on Linux. And I'm even talking about all the situations where you've to collaborate with others and the "alternatives" aren't just up to it.

It all comes down to a question of how much time (days?) you want spend fixing shit in one platform that will be working out of the box in another one for a minimal fee. If you buy a Windows license and spend the time you would've spent dealing with Linux compatibility issues doing your actual job you'll, most likely, get a better ROI.

TL;DR regular folks who require apps designed for windows.

So... everyone that has to work with others and play some games? :D

You make some good points - I don't think anyone can reasonably argue linux is in a state where a 'regular' user will find it more productive than windows. But, statements like these make as many assumptions about an individual's use case and workflow as saying 'everyone should use linux because xyz':

If you live in a bubble where you don't have to collaborate with anyone else

There are annoyances from time to time, sure, but they're way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you've to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive desktop experience on Linux

If you buy a Windows license and spend the time you would've spent dealing with Linux compatibility issues doing your actual job you'll, most likely, get a better ROI.

Again, it's certainly not reasonable to say linux is universally (or even generally) better for productivity. But neither is it reasonable to say it always isn't. Operating systems are tools, which one to use depends entirely on the situation.

They hated him because he spoke the truth. I can't even get "simple" distros like mint or popos to run on my work laptop because the keyboard will just not work on boot 19 out of 20 times and no amount of googling or chatgpt was able to fix this. It just won't work.

On my gaming rig with an Nvidia card there were no fan controls and no VRR on wayland and x11 doesn't have proper multi monitor support. This sub is delusional, if they think that Linux is usable for the average Joe and I'm coming from an IT background and it's still too much of a hassle for me. I just want to get things done.

A Windows key is way cheaper from a time and effort standpoint isn't it? :D

Literally free for most people having a job or studying.

And there's also the fact that you can buy a second hand computer with a decent 8th gen CPU for around 200$ that includes a valid Windows license.