What would you reccomend/use for an alienware laptop m17r5 with amdcpu (idr) and gpu 6850mxt. Idc about adjusting the keyboard lights, I changed it once and never touched it again. I play games like cities skyline, noita, etc. and some vr stuff rarely like vtolvr and warthunder. I use blender and houdinifx.
I’ve seen PopOs reccomended for Blender users but I think thats because it comes with a lot of stuff you need for Nvidia, which isn’t relevant to me with an all amd setup.
Cachyos seems to be the move for best performance with rendering and simulating, was wondering about other options I have since I dont need to worry about nvidia drivers.
I dont like the idea of using ubuntu because of snap packages, but its not a big deal.
While I like tinkering, I do want it to be relatively stable, not suprising me with issues when I need it.
Currently Interested in: CachyOs Debian (leaning towards here if I go the stable route) EndeavorOs Mint (seems popular, is it just simplified?)
EDIT: Went with CachyOs for now, works well, only issue was auto install didn’t work and I needed to manually partition and set the flags for boot and the os drive, other than that it’s been very fast and intuitive using KDE plasma. Recently tried Hyprland with the JaKooLit config, since ML4W didn’t want to work and had bugs, , I like it more than I thought I would.
Might try EndeavorOS and Bazzite on another ssd, they also look interesting.
I see people saying CachyOS is finicky, but I’ve had almost no issues in two years of extensive use.
And anything that pops up gets fixed extremely quickly.
What’s better, everything you need for gaming is in the repos by default and pre-tweaked, no need to fuss with it like other distros. This is my nitpick with Fedora or Arch AUR: once you go outside the curated, officially supported packages, you are asking for trouble.
The only issue I’ve had is that the system will completly freeze up, although it only happens every once in a great while. I never had it happen on any other Arch based distro.
Actually I had this one!
Something about their swap config makes it very fragile unless you use RAM swap as enabled by default, and I kept having this when I disabled it for reasons. It was much better once I re enabled it, though occasionally I still have severe issues going way, way, over my RAM pool.
I don’t mention that much because swapping to like 64GB on a 32GB system seems like an uncommon use case.
I haven’t touched anything related to swap or memory managment. They said they don’t ship with a swap partition or file. I figured the devs must know best.
Yeah, it uses only ram swap by default. If you aren’t going over a ton, it shouldn’t matter.
I just have weird workloads that spike memory usage a ton for short times, so I have to go out to my nvme.
I have 64 GB of RAM so I have never gone over. Except once when I had a memory leak lol.
~~Have you tried nobara? Seems to be another good one for gaming that is fedora based ~~ nvm its one dude developing it who changes what he supports at a whim
I skipped nobara for that very reason.
And I was more familiar with Arch anyway.
I skipped Nobara cause there is only KDE And Gnome and it’s based on a Fedora base.
Yeah, thats why picking a gaming focused one seems like a good idea, theres a community thatll fix stuff before I need to think of it
Exactly, and you can get mesa git and some other “fix” packages natively with community integration if you find you need them, without veering off track all by yourself.