I’m currently on Win11 but I’m getting that familiar Linux itch and want to dual boot a while again. I tend to gravitate towards Ubuntu simply because it’s so big and well supported by most things.

I’ve run Arch in the past but I’ve gotten too old and lazy for that if I’d be completely honest. I have played with manjaro and endeavour though… and opensuse tumbleweed, rolling is kind of nice.

Not sure what I’d try out first this time so I figured I’d get some inspiration from you guys!

I’ve been on Manjaro for 3 years, honestly love it, it’s treated me great for gaming and given me so little to have to fix that my wife has also been running it for 2 years.

@nlm@beehaw.org
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02Y

Got to love the wife rating :D

But yeah, I had manjaro on an old chromebook at University, it was pretty nice!

It’s funny, she’s become more of a Linux evangelist than me, she really went all in.

@nlm@beehaw.org
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02Y

Sounds like a keeper! :)

She certainly is <3 celebrating 10 years this year

I would take a look at pop_os. It’s Ubuntu, but without Snap and a closer to mainline kernel version. They have a lot of great usability tweaks too.

I run Arch BTW. I just like to make things difficult :)

@nlm@beehaw.org
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02Y

I installed Kubuntu… I couldn’t be assed to resize my efi partition to a gig and disrupt windows… Done that in the past with varying results. Wish they didn’t require it to be that big tbh.

I do miss Arch… wouldn’t surprise me if I’ll install it again soon.

Kubuntu works. But where’s the fun in that? :)

It’s like… I installed it, messed with lutris a bit (needed a newer version) and installed Diablo 4, everything works… and now I feel like I’m missing out somehow. :)

You’re missing out on chasing the dragon for the latest and greatest. :)

Arch is fine once you get it setup, but I feel like the nerd in us can never just leave it be. I’ll probably go back to pop_os next major release they have.

A very simple, almost stock setup of Arch + KDE.

A little background for context. I’m gamer and professional software developer. I’ve been dual booting windows 11 and pop os for awhile. Windows for games and pop os for everything else… Over the weekend I switched to NixOS. This came with a learning curve which I spent a day or so learning. I’ve been getting the hang of it now and I love it so much. I definitely recommend it. I managed to get steam working without much fiddling and my emulators. It’s been great! The benefits for programming are obvious. Allowing me to basically stop using docker dev containers.

I completely removed windows from my computer and I’m very happy.

@nlm@beehaw.org
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02Y

We used to run Ubuntu at my last job, it was so nice! I’m back in Windows land now though…

Yeah my job recently started letting developers choose between windows and Mac now which is a step in the right direction… their excuse is that all their security software doesn’t run in Linux… Ill accept using a Mac over WSL though, that was a huge pain

@nlm@beehaw.org
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12Y

I’m still happy WSL exists, it’s definitely better than nothing if you’re stuck in Windows land!

I’ve been running Linux Mint for a few years now and it’s been really good for me. Runs games through Steam and Lutris about as good as I’ve had it.

I’ve also run other distros like Pop! and Fedora here and there but they seem to give me more issues.

Snart
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02Y

Fedora but I’m about to move to NixOS Unstable or VanillaOS if it gets better NVIDIA integration.

I am on Vanilla OS with a NVIDIA gpu and its running pretty well.

Snart
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12Y

Awesome. I’ve heard there are some problems with hardware acceleration.

I use Arch, but I have two graphics cards in my system and I run a stripped windows VM for any game that I want ray tracing or 4k in.

My arch setup has an older Nvidia Quadro card and can run everything on like medium settings, but my virtual machines have a 3080ti. I didn’t want the wear and tear on my 3080ti just to watch YouTube or play indie games that don’t need the horsepower, but I still want to try stuff like portalRTX or stable diffusion and the like that needs an enthusiast graphics card.

This to me is the best of both worlds. I can run the VM in the background so I can use my desktop(connected to the TV) as a media center and have cyberpunk playing totally hidden and streaming to my steam deck for ray tracing maxxed settings.

Hell I even play Half life:Alex VR in a virtual machine and stream it over wifi to my Oculus quest.

With some of the news going around about the new windows versions and what-not, this sounds really interesting. I have a couple questions if you could answer them, that would be awesome!

How does a new release of Windows affect the compatibility of this set up? I know programs with for a while on older releases, but after a time, that version will be phased out. That might be more about the VM than your setup, but I don’t have a lot of experience with those either lol.

Does this introduce some system lag for input in any way? If I ever do get the confidence to abandon my system to go to Linux, it would suck if this really cool sounding method added response time to inputs.

So the only problem is you’d have to update every VM over time to get security patches, this is mainly a problem if you’re on limited internet(like me). Im capped at 100gb a month and my download speed is almost always less than 1mb/sec.

Windows has a feature that if one system on your network is updated, other systems on the network can download locally from that one and save your data, which is wonderful. But you still need to update Nvidia drivers for each VM, and update games, etc. You can connect a hard drive(virtual or physical) to multiple VMs, but only run VMs with a common hard drive one at a time.

And mind you this isn’t to save compatibly, for me once it works it works. I just like to keep security patches updated because I download a lot of sketchy programs lol.

Latency is non-existent. I use a program called lookingglass, which allocates like 32mb of GPU memory to be dedicated to passing frames between the VM and the host. Or non-existent for my level of perception. If you’re Spidey senses tingle more easily you can pass through a secondary keyboard and mouse and just literally have two screens two keyboards two mice one box. It would have the same latency as bare metal. And even have two people play multiplayer games together off of one box if you have the horsepower.

aetris
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02Y

Don’t see it mentioned here - Nobara. Fedora tweaked by Glorious Eggroll to be as compatible as possible with games ootb. Worth looking at.
I used to use Arch but Nobara works too well for me to go back.
A big thing for me too is the custom version of OBS that the welcome GUI installs is excellent and allows for application specific/exclusionary audio sinks so I can screen record games without having audio from discord/music.

CorInABox
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12Y

Seconded for Nobara, gaming is a smooth experience with it

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