Alright guys, I’m going to do it. Today I’m ditching Windows and trying to run Linux exclusively as my daily driver.
Over the past few days I’ve been reading up a lot about different Linux distros and DEs with their unique quirks and update philosophy. But since I’m more drawn to some rather niche distros that might suit my needs, I still have some questions, because a lot of more in-depth information has been nuked in the reddit fallout.
Basically, I’m looking for the best out-of-the-box experience for my specific needs, because I don’t really have the time to customize my OS from the ground up and have little Linux experience outside of docker. I also don’t want to spend months distro hopping, because I need to get some productivity done.
So anyway, here’s what I need from the distro out of the box:
- Gaming:
- Bleeding-Edge Nvidia driver support
- VRR support for Multi-Monitor-Setups
- Programming:
- mostly web development, so no real needs other than an intuitive DE with a good workflow
- Media Server:
- I’m running Plex with Sonarr, Radar etc. with multiple streaming devices around the house and VPN remote access, since I’m doing this in docker anyway, this should hopefully not cause any problems no matter the distro
- Tinkering:
- while I want something that just works out of the box, I want freedom. My goal is to tailor the system to my needs and keep learning for months to come.
So, what it has come down to is that I’m currently looking at the following distros with their pros and cons, let me know if I go anything wrong here:
- Pop! OS:
- it’s pretty and feature-complete out of the box
- I actually like their spin on Gnome DE and its productivity features
- probably the closest I’ll get to “it just works” coming from windows
- it’s not bleeding edge, drivers might not be the newest and bugs might persist for long periods
- their own version of Gnome has no VRR support
- seems to be more of a locked-down environment and less “open” than other distros. Getting heavy Apple vibes
- Nobara:
- Everything I need for Gaming OOTB
- Dev seems to have an insanely good reputation
- It seems to be pretty open and basic, as it doesn’t brand itself and is basically just fedora with pre-installed packages so you can just get going
- VRR support for Gnome out of the box
- As far as gaming and Nvidia support goes, probably closest to Bleeding-Edge you can get without going Arch
- Fedora appears to be more limited for tinkering with a smaller selection of software and extensions
- I don’t really like the default customizations or lack thereof
- Garuda
- everything I need for Gaming OOTB
- even more gaming and file system optimisations than Nobara does offer
- most open environment of the three with endless amounts of customization
- useful features to roll back problematic updates
- does come off as “too playful” and bloated and thus untrustworthy, dunno how to explain. Seems more like a playground than a serious OS
- EndeavourOS:
- Basically lets be do whatever the fuck I want and doesn’t hold my hand while at least providing a basic UI
- Basically lets be do whatever the fuck I want and doesn’t hold my hand while at least providing a basic UI
So basically, I’m looking for a distro that just lets me game with all the features (especially VRR) and do my work straight away but is as open as possible to customize and learn about Linux environments. It’s going to be Arch (btw) isn’t it? 😬
If you have little Linux experience it makes no sense to use a niche distribution. You have a lot less people to ask for help, you will find less documentation and support and you will be frustrated really fast, because your niche distribution is doing something different than everyone else, which will break something and you cannot repair it. If you are a beginner go with one of the big ones.
I’d go for Pop if you’re new. It’s not perfect and System 76 are busy developing their window manager so the distro hasn’t seen any major changes since their tiling extension, but it’s fairly stable.
I recently had a guest and we wanted to play games. I pulled a 2018 laptop with an NVidia 2060, installed the latest Pop, Steam and we were playing less than an hour later. It works fine.
I use pop to develop in Rust and Kotlin/Android.
I’m not a fan of Gnome but the tiling in pop is good and that’s what I still use it.
You can always try more distros in a VM and see if/what you like from others.
Pop. It’s what I use on my daily driver Thinkpad with Nvidia built in GPU and it’s rock solid. I’m in infosec, run all my businesses, tinker, and game on that laptop, with two extra monitors attached, and it never complains or faulters.
If Nvidia stops being a requirement, I’d probably go pure Debian.
EDIT: I just saw that you are new to Linux. I’m that case, definitely Pop!_OS. Don’t get fancy. Just use the latest LTS (long term support) release. In this case 22.04.
I’d personally recommend Garuda, as that’s what I’ve mostly settled with. It’s everything I like about arch, but with lots of little changes and utilities that make it both easy to tweak and easy to just use. The built-in btrfs/snapper is particularly nice. I get the whole toy thing though, it doesn’t give off the most trustworthy vibes. But if you can look past that it’s a great distro. Take a look at the lite edition, it comes without theming and most of the bloat.
I can recommend Garuda KDE Lite. I had some problems with pacman keyring being outdated when installing and had to set it up but other than that it works great
When i was still really noob to onward i have jumped from ubuntu, pop os, fedora, linux mint, debian, manjaro, artix, slackware.
I go back between distros from time to time but for a noob and support with out the box experience.
Linux mint is the choice to go, out the box:
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removed ubuntu snaps(snaps seem way too bloated for me)
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nvidia drivers are easy to install via gui
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docs are simple and easy to follow, i had jumped up 2 versions in an old thinkpad w/ nvidia quite easily.
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it does have display refresh rate changes.
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since its based off ubuntu it does have support for games as well.
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really user friendly
Stuff most linux distros have
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tinkering out the box, only a select few remove that to have the distro set to read only for user or are heavily integrated to work a certain way where tinkering is a pain.
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programming-you can setup it however you like for programming, via ide or through text editor such as vim/neovim etc
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vpn remote access for media- its supported in most if not all distros as well.
One thing i want to know is what your computer specs are, since wether a stable distro such as mint or rollin release such as an arch based will depend on your hardware.
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I just use ubuntu lts with the grafics ppa. It just works and is very well supported by third party vendors. e.g. steam works very well, docker cuda etc is available via ppa.
You can still play around with everything even if some call it Linux for noobs. But I can play with it wonderfully and work (R/Python/cuda/cpp and data science/ml stuff) at the same time without something always breaking or changing. Also, you’re most likely to find help and tutorials for ubuntu.
Snaps are annoying but still largely optional. I just replaced Firefox with the deb version via the mozilla ppa. And if snaps are too annoying just use debian.
It is also very practical to know debian/ubuntu because they are the standard systems in companies.
Nobara’s probably the “it just works” one for gaming and you can code on pretty much anything
If you want to tinker NixOS is the one imo. Has one config file with fairly simple options like to ensure steam is enabled it’s
programs.steam.enable = true; programs.steam.openFirewall = true:# nixos-rebuild switchAnd it installs and configures everything for you
Also because every time you are rebuilding your system it saves every iteration so if you totally fuck up your system you can just boot an earlier build and away you go
For basic stuff is pretty easy, but once you try to go outside of what’s in option, you might find yourself in a deep rabbit hole. Definitely not a beginner distro.
I’ve yet to find anything particularly difficult to do, 99% of things have options/packages and you can still install stuff with snap/flatpak/appimage if not
I like and use NixOS, but if this is the first time OP is using Linux, I’d recommend sticking with something like Pop. When something goes wrong, there’s a pretty good chance that there will already be a SO post for Pop or Ubuntu on how to fix it.
True yeah, this is why I suggested nobara first
Heh welcome!
If I was to give anyone advice it’d be to set up a way to make really solid notes/documentation. Be it a text/markdown file or a google doc. Put down the commands you run, put down the steps and then a link to where you found it. As you muck around and so on you’re going to remember that you wanted to get xyz going and you struggled and you can then refer back to those notes.
That has been the single most valuable thing I’ve learnt from this whole Linux endeavour I’ve been on.
When I reinstall I just follow my notes to get all the devices and so on going. Definitely worth the trouble!
Good luck and tell us how you go!
If you’re arch-curious but want something more opinionated and out-of-the-box, you could have a look at manjaro. It gets much shit thrown its way because its both try-hard (being arch based) and simultaneously “just works”, but that’s mostly memes
Yeah. Lots of people give it shit, but it does really “just work”. I’m using endeavor right now and considering swapping back to Manjaro, mostly because I cannot for the life of me figure out why SMB won’t work. Manjaro is the only distro I’ve had it work properly with little to no effort.
