I'm going to give it a shot I think, will make backups of everything including Windows and I'm not going to try and force myself into Linux. However I will set myself some goals. I really like the look of Nobara because it was developed by Glorious Egg Roll and seems to be developed purpose built for gaming rather than some neckbeards slapping together various bits and claiming it's supported as is often the case unfortunately when it comes to open source then bitching at people who have the audacity to use it for gaming as advertised.
What sold me completely on Nobara was how easy the driver setup process was because that's something that completely drove me mad. Inevitably if you're just a simple end user very easy to cock up and you won't know if it's been done correctly or not. You've installed the wrong version of Nvidia driver desktop such and such 0.0551.4123.1313 now go back again. Yes I'm exaggerating but that's still very much what it's like sometimes.
Don't get any of that with Nobara, it detects your hardware plonks you into the update and lets you download what you need which is an absolute joy. Got my USB sticks now will be giving it a shot and if there are any special steps I have to do it I'll post them. The joke is my work related stuff should work fine out of the box but we'll see what happens.
Checklist tasks when installation done
. Remove password protection ( Never liked that feature, not relevant for me )
. Get brave running with previous bookmarks and passwords
. Install DeadBeef
. Install Nvidia drivers
. Play one very common mainstream game
. Render a backed up scene in Blender cycles
. Run Godot By The Gods project and playtest
. Record by the gods gameplay in OBS
. Sail the high seas and run a game
. See if Morrowind/New Vegas will run?
From my experience, I never trust when a distro says it's "focused on easy driver setup". It was already the point of Ubuntu way back in the years, or Pop!, Zorin, etc. Not to say it's a lie, but it's never as straightforward as they claim, because there are just way too many different specs possible.
The best thing you can do for Linux, is not use Nvidia. Just don't. The drivers are just bad, and no distro can ever fix that. If someone wants to give Linux a fair chance, I'd say invest in a decent but not expensive AMD GPU first. You'll save yourself headaches, and it will still run about 90% of indie games easily. It is possible to use Nvidia on Linux, but it's very likely it won't give you a good impression on Linux at all.
I've tried a few distro, the only one so far that really worked for me is Mint. Almost everything works, and I haven't done a lot of setup. Even softwares like FL Studio (Audio workstation) with complex audio system works almost perfectly through Wine (which really impressed me). I also use Godot with C# on it and it works just fine as well.
I have had issues with nvidia, but I have had one of the worst most infuriating bug with AMD that to this day still isn't fixed and causes issues for people at random(fill gpu crashes). I liked my old Vega card, I even switched it out for TWO different modern ones with similar errors. Put in my old GTX and it ran without issues. I would not discourage people from using nvidia, it just isn't as smooth sailing with it sadly.
I'd argue Linux is never a smooth sailing, which is its main problem since forever and what is stopping it from rising. If you have an opportunity to reduce the risk, especially if you're not a tech-nerd and new to Linux, I'd really try to focus on that.
I'm going to possibly grab another SSD and dual boot this summer and see where I can go with it. Will be a little shocked if I can move all my games, but I'm closer than I think to pushing 75% to Linux. What I don't like is Steam only supports Ubuntu by default. I did boot Xubuntu last week off a USB and got Half Life playing in probably 20 mins though.
Already use Linux 100% at my desk, so that helps.
Xubuntu is just a what is commonly referred to as a spin, its still Ubuntu under the hood. And official support is not really that important, if you mean something like deb packages. Due to the Deck having arch under the hood I'd expect them to also "support" that.
My personal game collection is 90-95% working on Linux without issues. The games that do have issues got less and less with time.
Yeah, I’d really prefer not use Debian-based at all. I only tried Xubuntu because of that. I started with Manjaro first. I’ll probably just run with Xubuntu at this stage at least until I get used to the in-and-outs of gaming on Linux.
I’m curious, how much of your personal game collection natively supports Linux, versus support via Wine, etc.?
with dualboot: if a game doesnt run, move it from the windowspartition to a linux one.
skyrim for example doesnt even start from ntfs. also steamtinkerlaunch can run modorganizer2 perfectly.
I did not like Debian-based also. I don't know what it is but I've seen it on 3 machines with packages breaking and not being able to fix it. I've had package issues on arch before....and those I could fix myself easily.
I probably am going to have to consider some sort of Linux OS in the future, after complaining about how invasive into your activity so many popular things are, yet here I am still using Windows.
LOL yes I wish, I wish Linux was everything people said it was, but it really does seem like with Linux there's a massive hardware lottery. It either works brilliantly for some people or shit for others. If it worked properly I would have switched over in a heartbeat but even though I was doing a bog standard installation I ran into errors and freezing issues for no apparent reason. I'm not going to bullshit people so I'm just giving out an honest report of what happened.
The area I have open sourced like crazy is with everything else, there's fantastic support out there for third party software now that isn't reliant on Microsoft. It doesn't seem yet for certain users you can completely rid yourself of Windows and dual booting is a bit cancerous in my view.
A great example of the hardware lottery is Signal, brilliant idea, open source truly encrypted messager software for your phone. However it seems there's a specific bug with either certain version of android or perhaps hardware itself and the devs simply won't acknowledge it which leads to a lot of frustration especially if someone's earnest about their privacy and learning this stuff.
Some open source communities seem to have a really nasty habit of blaming the end user when it's clear the compatibility issues are there and the software isn't ready yet for mass adoption.
SIGH
'common interrupt no irq handler for vector'
Linux mint it is because I know that worked for me last time and quite comfortably for the desktop environment at least. Guess I'm fucking with the nvidia drivers manually and running through tutorials. I may scout around for other gaming distros though before I resort to that.
I used two different USB flash whatever software by the way, I did the recommended BalenaEtcher and then I tried Rufus out of curiosity.
If it's not actually causing any issues, you can probably just ignore that one. It's a reasonably common error message with a dozen different causes, but rarely an issue in itself. I swear half the point of Linux is to expose issues that every OS has, just to give hyper autists something to spend their time on.
Nobara broke completely I managed to get Kubuntu up and running but it was corrupted somehow so I think this is to do with how I've set up my USB. Running theory is it is write protected and not using the correct format or something as a result because it couldn't be changed by the flash software or it couldn't simply write certain files.
Edit: Nope, looks like the corruption is happening somewhere else potentially, will experiment.
Edit 2: Also worth noting on Kubuntu I had an installation error that definitely broke things.
Sorry to hear it caused issues for you. You can btw validate any ISO you download and you probably should. Etcher will not help you on that, it just writes it on the USB. Also be sure to not use an old USB, I learned this the hard way myself before.
Thanks, at least I know it's not just me that runs into issues with Linux every time I seem to have the most ridiculous luck while everyone else does fine. I just spent the better part of a few hours trying to rid myself of the damned grub boot manager that comes with Linux.
That thing is so fucking bizarre it almost acted like it was rootkit and just wouldn't fuck off until I started rage deleting all the volumes on my SSD properly. I think it's gone now but holy fuck that was annoying. I did not appreciate how much it borked Windows and interfered with the boot process because of course Windows itself didn't appreciate grub's existence either.
Yea, I have a friend like that. He honestly should not touch PCs, he's had tons and tons of issues for whatever reason. After helping him at 4am and not being able to fix it he went back to windows(and even there it's weird but at least I'm not the dedicated ask why it doesn't work person for windows).
Sucks it didn't work out. Reading up on Nobara it looks like it pulls a bait-and-switch between the install media and what it installs. Namely, the install environment is xorg but it installs Wayland, which is nuts to me not only because Wayland isn't really ready yet but because what's the point of having an live boot image if it's not going to simulate what the real environment is going to be??
Okay, well I can honestly say I tried, which is a pain in the arse because I really liked the look of Nobara. Despite weirdness I did get it installed fine, I liked the setup process a lot, these desktop environments are getting so much better however I couldn't even get to doing anything it it because I was experiencing freezing.
Will potentially research a bit to see if I can spot any immediate fixes to this freezing problem but I would not be shocked if it was simply hardware compatibility. 2024 is very much the era of digital cancer and you simply have to pick which one you find most bearable.
I was completely unprepared for the level of cancer Windows 11 now has but at least my brave backups and everything else are working perfectly so well done me for that. Corrupted linux install also somehow managed to corrupt my SSD so I couldn't wipe it properly, luckily Windows 11 would install fine on the secondary hard drive, never encountered that before.
Some notes about Windows 11 cancer
. It seems to really get whiny about left over OS' on other boot drives even when it's supposedly properly formatted, I've never had issues with that before
. TPM checks are pure cancer, I had to go into regedit to bypass everything
. Online checks are cancer, Windows bitches at you to stay connected, thankfully it seems once you get to the pestering login screen you can still just disconnect the internet and bypass that
. Hideous amounts of spyware crap to click through.
It's not hyperbole, the DRM and spyware on Windows 11 really has become completely awful.
I take it you're dual booting? Though I'm by no means an expert, I would recommend testing out Linux installs on a spare laptop if you can. Dual boot can bring some of its own issues that you wouldn't encounter otherwise, particularly with boot loaders, file system types and permissions.
If you haven't already, I would recommend having a full image backup for Windows before attempting any new installs. On my laptop I used macrium reflect to backup Windows, then installed Linux Mint, and then used Clonezilla to backup the Linux install, and then I tested out restoring copies of each OS on there. Then, once I felt pretty confident with that, I backed up my desktop and set up dual boot on there, but I believe I did have to fiddle with a few settings while doing that.
I haven't tried out Windows 11 yet. Are they making people upgrade? I haven't gotten any prompt for it on my machine yet.
Most of this list is things where you just have to type one line and your computer does what you want it to do, it's not remotely as arcane as you've been led to believe.
I was curious and was going to give it a try then i saw its based on Fedora and noped the fuck out.
Red Hat can go suck a big back of dicks.
Oh boy. The linux fanboys will be along shortly to sperg out now that you fired off that signal flare.
Can't make anyone happy can I? lol
Nah, I've been using Linux since '98 when I tried out Mandrake. (Which became Mandriva, which is now Mageia...) Drivers suck on Linux, they have always sucked on Linux, and it's the big thing that is keeping the OS from becoming more mainstream.
It's a tough one, because if they work, they work great. When they don't....boy you are in for a hell of a ride if you want to just try to fix them.
I owned a VooDoo 5 video card back in the day. I went 5 years without a working KDE driver for Mandriva for that card.
When you say drivers just outright say it: graphics drivers. Used to be worse with WiFi cards, printers etc but the only one that is a sore thumb sticking out is nvidia still. I even have game controllers that just work by plugging them in. Driver support outside of nvidia is great in my book unless it's some specialised hardware, even my drawing tablet works great.
I haven't encountered an nvidia driver issue that didn't immediately fail and cause problems. If it affects your configuration, that sucks a ton, but on the upside it failed right away. All in all a much better problem than flakey WiFi drivers randomly dropping connections or your USB 3 ports being useless even for USB 2 or earlier.
The majority of stuff today either works or doesn't and that's really ideal, especially with that live image from which you install the OS. Can just do a pre-flight check with your preferred gear and make sure dmesg is clean before you commit.
I have honestly had less issues with my nvidia card, I mentioned it before but there was some AMD related issues, dunno if it was based on the motherboard but I recently checked the posts about the bug report again: people still have issues. It was a mess with stuff randomly crashing the driver and not being able to recover. I fixed it by going nvidia weirdly enough.
And yeah, that's imho the best positive you can just use a live-disk and test from there, have done that a lot before myself.
Printers for networks or MFPs on networks are still a bit wonky.
TBF: those are also pretty wonky on Windows, I hate printers in general.
How is the Linux community nowadays? Last i check a couple years, DEI faggotry was already seeping in and taking a foothold, with Linus Torvald (sp?) been a super turbo fag himself.
Absolutely infested with troons and pajeets desperate to put something on their resume.
I don't really keep much of an eye on the Linux community beyond seeing if anything works yet. It does look like depending on the project though it is getting taken over by retards.