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!
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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.
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.
Sounds like a keeper! :)
She certainly is <3 celebrating 10 years this year
Good for you guys!
Thank you!
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.
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 :)
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.
Sometimes I wish I had a machine dedicated to nothing but reinstalling different distros. :)
It can get a bit disrupting to do it on your main rig too often.
Use a VM?
I know, I do that too but it’s just not quite the same for some reason.
VMs are great for that
gentoo!
i love the versatility it offers, but it’s very much so DIY. it has great documentation. anyone who considers themselves a “linux enthusiast” should try an install in a VM at some point or another, if nothing else it’s a great learning experience.
for gaming in particular: flatpak steam / lutris / bottles. it’s great because it’s completely distro agnostic. i can take the $USER/.var directory and put it on any distro with flatpak installed and it’ll just work.
I am starting to realize how handy flatpaks can be!
I’ve been distro hopping like a madman these last couple of days and it’s gotten so much easier to get going with my games now!
Debian
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.
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
I’m still happy WSL exists, it’s definitely better than nothing if you’re stuck in Windows land!
Yeah absolutely! I know I dissed it, but I was happy to have it when I was stuck on windows for work.
All of my workstations are now running Fedora Silverblue. Steam is installed via flatpak, and GPU is a Radeon 6800 XT. I also have a Steam Link for couch co-op. All is well on the gaming front!
Debian Sid and Arch have run equally well with this setup. Your choice of distro matters much less now compared to a few years ago, especially if you favour a flatpak workflow.
Edit: typos!
A very simple, almost stock setup of Arch + KDE.
X11 or Wayland? I find games like csgo stutter on Wayland.
Make sure you’re running the sdl environment variable that makes them native on Wayland, in my experience when that’s on it makes my games that are native significantly more performant.
I really should have known better than to expect a consensus in a topic like this 😁 Ask 10 linuxheads which disto is the best and you’ll get 12 different answers
Well that’s what’s fun though isn’t it? :D
I ended up installing Kubuntu 20.04 for now… I was going to install Pop but they require a 1GB EFI partition and I didn’t have the patience to move my Windows partition around to resize it so… Kubuntu it is.
Knowing myself I’ll probably distro hop in a few days again.
Trying out different distros are almost as much fun as actually using them (probably more fun at times!)
If I were doing it on some spare PC maybe I’d find it fun too but I rely too much on my main workstation to just constantly reinstall stuff on it, and dual booting looks like a risk/hassle too. I am prepared for the inevitable day I take the plunge into linux for good, hopefully the number of distros doesn’t triple by then ^^
Don’t worry!
They’ll quadruple…:)
It definitely feels like they have in the past decade. When I last used Linux everyone would just dump Ubuntu on you, give you a nice pat on the head and wish you good luck. PopOS got big at one point but I think there were some issues when LTT tried it that gave it a bad rep. I haven’t even heard of 90% of distros in this thread.
I think your next task is to start modding Skyrim so you can have the ultimate experience of spending more time setting something up only to spend a fraction of that time actually using it. XD
That or setting up a retro gaming sysgem… gathering and scraping roms, setting up a nice frontend with cover art and everything just to never touch it again when it’s done. :)
How dare you call me out like this.
Been there, done that eh? :D
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.
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.
So, there are a couple of things that have happened recently. I have an old laptop that I’ve messed around with different distros of Linux on. I installed Arch on it and am trying to do some different things. It’s not a good laptop, so the VM set up I’m really interested in won’t happen until I get a few more drives for my main PC and set up a dual boot abd some other things. I am really interested in this set up because it just sounds neat.
Are there some things I should try to do to help me get better at working with this OS? I’m currently seeking up a server with a reverse proxy using nginx and its… Going. The server works I think, but the proxy doesnt yet.
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.
Ok, I want your setup. Can I have it? Please? :)
Sounds pretty nice!
I can help you set yours up like mine if you want!
But you’d need to make sure you have two graphics cards. I have the 3080 disabled from Linux until a VM starts, so it won’t load the Linux desktop or anything. Even a CPU with integrated graphics works, but a physical GPU is obviously better.
I really like the Quadro series for this as its physically thinner, lower power, and has the performance around a 1060. They’re on ebay for like $60
I’m currently stuck with a laptop thats creeping towards potato status so it’s a bit hard to upgrade parts of it. :)
I’m happy just being able to run it almost to the ground as it is!
How’s your vm setup?
Depends on my needs, my desktop itself has a 8core @ 5GHz, around 50Gb ram, a Quadro and a 3080ti.
For gaming I’ll usually pass through 6cores, 30Gb ram and the 3080ti to a windows VM, leaving 2cores 20Gb and the Quadro for my linux host.
sometimes I’ll do more of a 50/50 split or if I’m just updating windows or downloading a game I’ll only pass 2 cores like 10Gb ram and no gpu.
But if you mean how did I do the initial setup, any arch based disro will be the easiest (but you can do it on others if youre more technically inclined) by following this guide:
Ive done this process on so many systems I can do it off a fresh install in probably 30 minutes now.
Once the Linux host is finished, I install windows in the VM, strip as much bloat from it as I can, install my universal programs(Firefox, 7zip, VPN stuff remote desktop stuff, GPU drivers, etc)
For gaming, the best programs I’ve found are Looking glass to pass the VM GPU’s video to a window on the client with no latency, and SCREAM audio for the same with sound.
Once that’s all set up and windows is fully updated, I make a backup of that VM, and basically never open the original again. If I need a new VM, just clone that setup and everything’s ready to go. I can rn clone the original setup, and use my private collection of interesting viruses on that windows VM without fear of it damaging anything.
Was running the same setup pretty much, I really miss it. Was running arch with an 8c/16t cpu, with 32GB ram, a 2070 Super (for passthrough), and a cheap GT710 (for i3wm on host). I’ve heard of Looking Glass and SCREAM but never tried it, instead I would switch inputs on my primary monitor and keep i3 on my secondary. Just used an Elgato Stream deck with Streamdeck_ui and would set attach and detach commands for peripherals, and others like power/pause.
Ended up helping someone troubleshoot their PC, which turned out to be a dead GPU, and I gave them the 710 as a better then nothing card. Was still able to play a lot of my games native or via proton on the 2070, but some new games had performance/compatibilty issues and I couldn’t use RTX. Ended up installing Windows over my Arch to play them, you know just till I could get a new host GPU.
Now I have a GPU for the host again, but I’m using Microsoft Storage Spaces for my RAID 10; and, being lazy as I am, I just keep putting off copying all of that to spare drives and rebuilding with mdadm. Plus the fear of losing terabytes of data during migration is intimidating.
Endeavour OS (PC and Laptop) and Steam OS. Very happy with both.
Mint Cinnamon. Things generally work put of the box. There’s the occasional weird config mess to get into but it’s Linux.
The standalone Nvidia driver install panel makes installing the right gpu drivers a breeze.
The only problem I ran into is that it won’t boot with my main monitor (1440p 165hz) plugged in. I have to use my secondary monitor (4k 60hz) to install the OS and Nvidia drivers first, then shutdown and plug in the main monitor and everything works on the next boot.
Yeah I use Cinnamon too. It’s fairly polished and can delve into Ubuntu or Debian when missing something you really want. I find the Nvidia drivers are easy to set up and maintain, and Steam works reasonably well (I have had a few quirks but nothing that I couldn’t resolve).
I use Arch with KDE. I don’t recommend Manjaro because it has historically had some serious problems, so for people who want Arch without as much hassle, I’m recommending EndeavourOS. It’s what Manjaro should be like.
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.
Are you me? Did you also use BlackArch for a while, and still use Rainmeter? :P
Ubuntu does make things easier.
I had everything set up the way I wanted it in Ubuntu the other day… but something still itched a bit so now I’m on Tumbleweed and feeling better. :D
Though Diablo 4 tends to crash after playing it for a while… not sure if I’d have the same issue in Ubuntu or not, might have to triple boot for a bit just to try it out. I really do want to stay here in chameleon land though so it would probably be better to just try to find the cause of the crashing.
I do think this is a pretty common thing among us linux geeks though, never really feeling content and just wanting to try everything. :)
Never did try BlackArch or Rainmeter though!
I’ve played around with plenty of distros though… Slackware, Redhat, Gentoo, Arch, *buntu, SuSE (before they split into openSUSE), openSUSE, Manjaro, Endeavour OS and probably a bunch more that I can’t even remember but those are probably the ones I’ve played around with the most.
