this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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I did it. For a few years now I've wanted to make the jump but lazyness and a bit of worry that my main game wouldn't work very well kept me from it.

Then some effing windows update caused ridiculous stuttering on games (or maybe it was a auto-update of some other hidden thing, I couldn't figure it out) so I decided that if I needed a system wipe, might as well as try gaming on linux.

Honestly? Much easier than I expected. Install Steam, turn two options on and 90% of your library is ready to go. I had to tinker with getting freesync to work (ended up just switching to wayland, which just worked) but other than the plugins I use for my main game requiring a bit of more work, smooth as butter really.

So yeah, if you are a lazy gamer like I am, next time you do a system wipe or get a new computer, try installing linux first. Don't even bother Dual booting it, if you don't like it just reinstall (setup your usb drive with ventoy and the images you want to try out.)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I've gone through several installs (mint, neon, vanilla, tumbleweed, manjaro). The distro I've ended up sticking with has been EndeavourOS.

For three simple reasons:

  • when I want to install something, someone has usually already put in the work and made it easily available on the AUR
  • if something breaks, there is an easy way to recover as long as you set it up in advance (snapshots)
  • bleeding edge, you get updates quickly, latest KDE, latest kernel, latest everything

Basically, the low ease of use of arch is addressed by EndeavourOS, and its "instability" is addressed by timeshift. All you're left with is how easy it is to get your system to run whatever you might want it to run.

What I did is install EndeavourOS with btrfs, then first thing run sudo yay -S pamac to install a GUI for managing software discovery, installation and updates.

Next, timeshift, timeshift-systemd-timer and timeshift-autosnap. The systemd package enables timeshift to maintain scheduled snapshots, and the autosnap package automatically creates snapshots whenever you install or update something, so you can always go back to right before changing your system.

Run timeshift to set it up, and you're good to go.