ForbiddenRoot

Installing arch is a pain

While Manjaro is perfectly fine, this is no longer true. With the archinstall script you can have even Arch up and running in minutes. It’s still not graphical or straightforward as a Manjaro installation, but it’s certainly not painful. EndeavourOS may be the closest to Arch with simple installation.

best hope for mainstream adoption

I feel for that the default Linux DE will need to have an UI closer to Windows, due to user familiarity with the traditional desktop metaphor. Maybe Cinnamon or even KDE are more suited in that respect. Neither need hours of configuring either. Personally, Cinnamon with Wayland support would be perfect for me (and I suspect a whole lot of Windows migrants as well).

Gnome is nice of course in it’s own minimalist way for many,but the workflow is very different from other OSes and I think many find it too minimalist requiring extensions to improve usability therefore. However, there isn’t a stable mechanism for extensions causing breakages between versions, which can be very irritating. I don’t know if that’s now changed now though, because I have been reading about a major change in the extension mechanism in Gnome 45.

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Yes, it’s called “Mail” and I guess it’s the successor to “Outlook Express” from the old days. I have never actually used it though, but it’s certainly there.

Onboard Intel/amd? “Discrete” Intel/amd/nvidia?

I have two laptops of this sort in use currently: One is a more recent AMD (5600H) + Nvidia (3080) and the other is an older Intel (some 10th-gen mobile) + Nvidia (2070). Both combinations work fine without any particular fiddling, apart from installing Nvidia proprietary drivers, on mostly any recent distro.

My use case is general desktop usage, Rust / C development, and occasional Steam-based gaming on these machines. Both laptops run pretty much the same as they did on Windows (GPU-wise). Fedora seems to work the best for me with everything setup nicely out of the box barring non-free stuff required from RPMFusion. On the Intel + Nvidia one, which is my distro-hopping laptop, I have used pretty much all distros without issue as well. Nix is however not included in the list of distros I have tried, but Arch is.

so what does Linux have that I need?

That should be the other way around, no? What do you need that Linux has (and Windows doesn’t). Otherwise it’s a case of “solution in search of a problem”. You presently do not seem to have a need as you have mentioned, so ideally you should leave it at that and continue using Windows.

What can motivate me to migrate?

While as I implied above only you can answer that authoritatively for yourself, a few examples of what other people seem to like about Linux might help perhaps -

• “Free as in beer”, so not having to spring for another license if you build another rig
• “Free as in Freedom”, which matters to many but not necessarily everyone
• Better environment for development
• Less susceptibility to malware (not necessarily because of inherent security, but also because Linux is not targeted as much)
• Heavily customizable, at the kernel, desktop environment, other software-level
• Choice of software update mechanisms as well frequency of updates depending on use-case
• Reviving of old computers where Windows would typically struggle to run
• Community participation, though this can be a hit or a miss depending on where you hang out and who you interact with

… and so on.

What is a good Linux to have for a desktop + steam?

There are many, but I generally recommend Linux Mint or Pop! OS for this use-case.

Am I missing something?

No. I think you are correct and mostly even wifi hardware works fine, at least compared to *BSDs. I use Linux across a wide-range of machines, both desktops and laptops, with mostly very recent components. The only other unsupported hardware I have personally come across is some gaming hardware (e.g. Thrustmaster racing wheels) and an add-on sound card (Soundblaster AE9). And of course, some things like DLSS3 with Nvidia do not work.

If the partitioning is fine (GPT with EFI System Partition), it should boot up even if you move the disk to a completely new machine. You will need to re-activate Windows though after booting.

You may have had the ESP on a different drive than the one you moved to the new machine, perhaps?

I am truly and deeply saddened to hear this. My condolences to his family.

vim or vim-enhanced is one of the first things I install on any distro that doesn’t have it included by default. I have been using it for decades and am so used to seeing Bram’s name come up on the screen whenever I start the editor. His work greatly enriched my programming experience over the years and I am sure for countless other people as well. I don’t know what to say except a heartfelt “Thank you, Bram”.

I’m no huge fan of Windows, but it sounds like you had (No offense) PEBKAC errors.

I think so too and no offense meant to OP as well.

I am an early adopter of all things tech and so I had a Gigabyte Xtreme X670E mobo on pretty much day 1 to go with a 7950X. Everything worked fine on both Windows 11 and Linux despite being a pimped-up mobo and brand new CPU. At this much later date, OP’s B650 mobo should be working without a hitch, especially with Windows (and almost certainly with Linux as well).

Maybe it’s problem is that it’s boring.

Personally, I consider that a feature. Most of my machines are on Debian Stable, though I do keep a distro-hopping laptop around which is on the newly released Mint at the moment. I just use Flatpaks for the odd application that I need the very latest version of (e.g., Yuzu emulator). I will give MX a try sometime, at least in a VM.

This is like a mythical distro for me. I hear about it here and there, usually in the context of it being on top of DistroWatch and why that does not mean anything, but never really known anyone who actually uses it or recommends it.

That doesn’t make it bad or even obscure of course, because even an outstanding distro like openSuse gets very less screen-time nowadays. But somehow this is one distro I have never installed or even had the urge to find out more about.

Someday I want to teach myself emacs so that I can get rid of rest of the operating system.

I’m gonna be that person…

Well, you are not alone. While I too would prefer not to use proprietary drivers, I have had no problems on any of my Nvidia machines as well. Ironically, despite the open source drivers, getting a 7900XTX card up and running was an issue for me for months till distros caught up (with newer kernels and mesa libs), while my 4090 installation was a breeze even on the day it was released.

A lot of problems people have with Nvidia GPUs seem to be installation related. I think that is because the installation tends to be distro-specific and people do not necessarily follow the correct procedure for their distro or try installing the drivers directly from the Nvidia site as they would on Windows. For example, Fedora requires you to add RPMFusion, Debian needs non-free to be added to sources, Linux Mint lets you install the proprietary drivers but only after the first boot, and so on. Pop OS! probably makes the process the easiest with their Nvidia-specific ISO.

when you start xfce, it start with tmux?

No. I use tmux only inside the distrobox / podman dev container (which is also Debian 12 Stable). I like a more conventional DE for non-dev related usage of the computer. If I wanted a totally tmux-like or terminal-based environment I would go with i3, but that is not something I prefer for my desktop usage for non-coding activities.

Rust and C development mainly with a bit of assembly language sometimes:

• Debian Stable with Xfce
• distrobox with podman for containers
• xfce4-terminal with tmux
• vim with plugins (coc.nvim, delimitMate, NERDTree etc)

I see. This is good to know, thanks. I am still getting used to openSUSE and quite liking it so far. Barring any drama that happens down the road, I think this is my Fedora-replacement now. I still prefer Debian Stable + Flatpak + Distrobox on most of my machines though.

And to update grub it seems the best command is “update-bootloader”

grub2-mkconfig seems to work fine as well. I just installed openSUSE Tumbleweed on a machine yesterday and used that to add some kernel arguments. I was not aware of update-bootloader at all.

Like what’s up with YaST?

Yeah, it’s like an all-in-one launchpad for managing the system. I haven’t used it much because I prefer using the terminal for most things, but it seems to work fine when I used it a bit (installing some repos and Nvidia drivers).

I installed SUSE after over 20 years and so far it’s been quite a good experience. Very similar to the Fedora experience I would say, in the sense that you need to jump through some hoops to get Nvidia / non-free codecs and then after that it’s smooth sailing. Let’s see how it holds up in the longer term for me.

So if I understand this correctly they will hard fork RHEL. So it won’t be a clone going forward in the way Alma / Rocky currently are. The advantage for RHEL users in moving to this fork are that they get an enterprise distro that’s well-supported by another large enterprise Linux company (SUSE) instead of RH. SUSE can probably offer them some cost advantages too to sweeten the deal. For SUSE, this is a great way to get people to move away from RH and use this or eventually one of their other distros.

Is that it? I am all for it and so should RH because this is what they wanted people to do instead of creating clones. I hope this works out for SUSE and they do even better in the future. I am going to be rooting for them.

In my region (India), for a while, there seemed to be plenty of laptops available with Linux installed as an option. Then again in the last few years that seems to have withered down to almost none, sometimes even if the same model is available with Linux in some other regions. I am not sure what changed. Perhaps some deal with Microsoft. The good part is that the fact that they do support Linux elsewhere on the same laptop configuration generally means its easy to get it up and running yourself even if it does not come pre-installed.

In any case, as an old-timer, it’s very impressive to me how much hardware Linux supports nowadays without any drama at all. Not to mention all the progress made in software especially in supporting Windows-only games, which is truly magical work by the Wine / Proton teams. As far as I am concerned the “Year of Linux Desktop” is here already since I can use it daily without missing absolutely anything at all from Windows.