Sounds about like I would expect. I do feel like a lot of the “Core” distros are similar though, although not to the same degree. You get more “out of the box” from something like Mint or PopOS than you do straight Debian, for example.

The derivative distros i’ve tried come with a lot of help getting things setup just how you want/need, a lot of it GUI based which is nice for new converts.

This might not help, but I’d seriously recommend reconsidering Arch derivatives.

I’ve been 100% Linux for almost 2 years now, with Garuda Linux on my primary desktop and Fedora on my laptop. I’ve had zero major issues with Garuda (and very few minor ones, to the point I can’t think of any specific problems in the moment), gaming performance has been fantastic, and the availability of software in the AUR is nothing short of amazing.

In my experience, keeping up with updates is not at all an impediment to use, and I’ve yet to have stability issues of any kind. I’ve been seriously considering replacing Fedora with Garuda on my laptop, the experience has been so smooth.

Just stay away from Manjaro. I feel like Arch fan-boys being dicks and people recommending Manjaro to new Linux converts are the only two problems with Arch (or at least its derivite distros, I haven’t raw dogged vanilla Arch before).

I had used gimp for years until my latest install of Linux had Krita already there so I gave it a shot. Holy hell do I love using Krita now.

Nonshade to gimp, I still like gimp, but I love Krita.

Garuda Linux hands down. Arch at its core but has just enough hand-holding for me to be comfortable and able to do most things via a GUI out-of-the-box.

I might not have made the switch when I did if I hadn’t found this distro.

Bazzite for an honorable mention, running it on my laptop and recently had some update troubles as it hadn’t been booted up in a while and ended up rebasing to the newest image (and discovered there was a specific image for Asus laptops with nvidia GPUs). The rebasing process really WOW’ed me…

Exactly. The average Joe sees he can’t just download hacks and suddenly be good, assumes the anti-cheat works, and then when they still get owned complains about something else instead of cheaters and is happily giving shady game publishers the highest level access to their computer like its nothing.

Anti-cheat doesn’t actually need to eliminate cheating, it just needs to make the masses think it works by slightly raising the bar for entry into cheating. Cheating is still rampant, players just feel better about it and complain about smurfs more because they dont think its possible to get around kernal level anti-cheats.

Honestly I’d be much happier if the industry moved away form terrible anti-cheat software in general.

My install does not seem to do this. I removed the windows drive when installing Linux on a new drive. Put both drives in and select which one to boot in the bios. Its been that way for about a year and, so far, grub updates have never noticed the windows install nor added to grub.

That’s with bazzite, can’t speak for any other distro as that is the only dual-boot machine I own. Bazzite does mention they do not recommend traditional dual boot with the boot loader and recommend the bios method so maybe they have something changed to avoid that?

I cannot for the life of me get bazzite to use the Nvidia gpu in my laptop for shit. Like proper 3d games refuse to launch and simpler 2d games run but at like 4fps. The icon in the system tray for gpu selection/info won’t let me select dgpu, only integrated and hybrid. Gpu basically never gets touched. I’m sure it’s less of a bazzite issue and more of an Nvidia drivers on Linux issue, but can’t really test full functionality of bazzite like this.

And that’s with the Asus laptop Nvidia gpu specific image of bazzite. Very disappointed because I otherwise love bazzite. I have been keeping the windows drive in the laptop specifically for gaming until I can figure out how to fix this. I wish there were more laptop options with amd dGPUs… Looked at microcenter today and there was only one option. :(

There are almost always ways to verify the correct owner for something like this… None of which it sounds like Microsoft was willing to do, as they only seemed to care about what the current password is.

You are making an assumption that the person can’t provide any way to identify himself as the owner. The story as written states they didn’t care about anything other than the current password.

I worked with a guy that would tell people that coax needed to be “released to ground” occasionally, by unhooking the cable and putting your thumb over the end. That’s how he made sure people were disconnecting and reconnecting the cable from the back of the box. He also told someone that “data might be trapped in the Ethernet cord” and advised they unplug it from both ends and swing it around their head in a circle to “loosen the stuck bits and clear the line”…

Linux fanboys have ruined it’s image. Most of them take pride in doing simple things in an over complicated manner and wonder why people won’t switch. Even basic tasks like loading kernels or installing something is told in such a gatekeeping manner that scares new users into adapting it.

I think this hit close to home. As a community, we really need to strive to be better here. I typically don’t post much in any Linux forums. I feel like I am still too new to offer “the correct answer”, and keep quiet and leave it to the “experts”; like it isn’t my place to try to help. I guess I need to get over that and do my part from now on.

My install does use btrfs (but unfortunately since I reused the other drives they are still ntfs formatted) and it does regular snapshots, but to the same drive. It isn’t completely borked yet so I’m hopeful I can “clone” to a new drive and rma the bad one (10 months old so should still have mfr warranty). I’ve used clonezilla in the past but had read it doesn’t support btrfs, maybe that info is outdated? I did see some promising tools for doing basically the same job through btrfs though. I planned to work on salvaging what I can tonight. Worst case scenario, all my personal files are synced to a cloud storage service so I’d just be out installed programs and configs if I have to reinstall from fresh.

I’ve been 100% on Linux since July of last year. I thought I was currently having my first major Linux fucked up situation that I just could not figure out this weekend.

It has been very depressing, after trying to convince friends and family to give Linux a chance and keep an open mind for months, I was beginning to feel like a fraud and a liar.

But, after hours of software troubleshooting turning up nothing I’ve discovered I’m in the early stages of a dying ssd… My first major problem, and it’s hardware related. It sucks but it is also a relief in a weird way.

And I’m finding out about it way earlier than I likely would have in windows thanks to btrfs. But it’s also funny because if I had been having similar issues in windows I probably would have ran hardware diag much sooner, but because I’m still a bit of a Linux newbie I assumed I broke my OS and wasted hours troubleshooting software.

Ah damn. Didn’t proof-read myself. It’s a fun typo though, maybe Linux is related to Jebediah?

Linux is the kerbal, the company would be GNU.

/s

I just broke 1000 hours on baldurs gate 3.

Minecraft also great, thankfully it does not tell me how many hours I’ve spent mining and crafting…

I’ve been using it daily for about a year on my primary desktop gaming pc without any issues. I love it.

As for performance, I vaguely remember phoronix doing a benchmark comparison of a few distros and in some tests it was marginally better (cannot find it now though…). For the most part though I’d say it’s not as much about potential performance gains as it is ease of use for gaming. So many useful tweaks and useful programs “out-of-the-box”.

I’d suggest that Linux tends to attract a higher percentage of people that want to tinker with their OS, and tinkering with your OS can lead to some unexpected outcomes, or outright break things that someone would have to turn to the community for help.

It depends a lot on what you want to do with it though too. Browsing the web, checking email, spreadsheets / word processing, etc? You could likely install literally any Linux os and be fine, and definitely be fine with the mainstream core distros.

If you’re gaming, I’d recommend a distro aimed at gaming. PopOS, nobara, bazzite, or Garuda all come to mind, depending on your preferred flavor.

But, as much as it pains me to say it, if you need to run, for example, Adobe or Autodesk products (or something similarly specialized and proprietary) you’ll probably have a better time doing it in windows. There are alternative options that will work in Linux fine, but if it’s for work or some other situation that requires you to use those specific proprietary products, you might be stuck.

He’s just flat out wrong about gaming. I haven’t had to put in any special “commands” (unless he means the tick box in steam settings to allow compatibility on all games, which I checked once and didn’t have to futz with anymore…) and I haven’t run into a game I wanted to play and couldn’t. I’ve heard that games that rely on aggressive root-kit anti-cheat don’t work, but I’ve avoided those titles on principle for a decade at least. But if those are titles you want to play, then yes, you’ll need windows - no amount of tweaks or commands will make them work in Linux because of the game developer’s choices.

That said, it really makes me wonder if gaming on Debian derivatives is worse? I can only speak to what I’ve used which is fedora based and arch based. And no I don’t constantly run into issues with either. I’ve spent less time “fixing” stuff since I switched to Linux, not more. Ymmv.

If you are interested in something arch-based but like having guis for stuff, I highly recommend Garuda Linux. I’ve been using it for about a year on my everyday desktop for gaming and it’s been great. I also have really liked fedora bazzite on my laptop for almost the same time period.

I’d stay away from manjaro, I wouldn’t touch it again with a 10 foot pole. Every time I’ve tried to use it, it just breaks itself every 3-6 months. I know some people swear by it, but I just have to assume they either have extreme tier knowledge to prevent trouble before it starts, are so used to fixing problems they are blind to their time spent doing it, or they are just incredibly lucky.