I’ve been using Ubuntu as my daily driver for a good few years now. Unfortunately I don’t like the direction they seem to be heading.
I’ve also just ordered a new computer, so it seems like the best time to change over. While I’m sure it will start a heated debate, what variant would people recommend?
I’m not after a bleeding edge, do it all yourself OS it will be my daily driver, so don’t want to have to get elbow deep in configs every 5 minutes. My default would be to go back to Debian. However, I know the steam deck is arch based. With steam developing proton so hard, is it worth the additional learning curve to change to arch, or something else?
Endevour os for me. No issues on kde nvidia and wayland, pretty straightforward installation. If I were you I’d do some distro hopping in the new PC. I’d try one of those ublue images, then nobara then endevour and see what you prefer.
Big second for EndeavourOS. I loved Linux mint early in my distro adventures, but I had issues, sometimes steam wouldn’t launch. Sometimes my secondary monitor would lag out every minute or so. So I tried nobara, which was okay, but never fell in love with it.
Enter EndeavourOS. In over six months I’ve had one instance of a broken package hampering my experience. I keep a backup of important files on an external drive, so I just nuked it and reinstalled. I also use BTRFS and timeshift-autosnap, so if a package does create issues, now I can just boot to an older snapshot from grub and wait to update that package until the issue has cleared up.
In the same vein of an “easier” Arch install, maybe also look @ CachyOS.
Gaming on Wayland with Nvidia is straight up not enjoyable for games running through XWayland due to this bug. This affects all games running with Proton/Wine, Steam, Discord, Firefox without MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 environment variable and many more
Personally I haven’t had that issue. I had lots of issues with latest 545 but downgraded to 535 and it’s all good so far.
It doesn’t happen on Systems using Prime Render offlading. Are you playing on a laptop?
Endeavor is fine. But when it came to performance I had a number of issues. By default it put my i7 into power save. One could use core control to put it back into on demand or something more reasonable after every boot. Or go in and change the configs manually which I did. But that’s still beyond people in general. Also for whatever reason if I had more than one app actively using the GPU. Say blender open using GPU, accelerated cycles etc. And another window open doing something with OpenGL and Vulcan. I would get the whole system hanging under x11. I’d have to drop to the terminal. And kill all of it off and restart it again. And not just isolated. It was heavily repeatable.
I ended up giving Garuda a try. CPU scheduler is much more same out of the box. Graphics card support under x11 and Wayland has been rock solid as well.
They’re both arch. And it is all personal anecdotes on isolated systems. So make of it what you will. I like both systems though and actually have computers running both
Yeah, I also gave garuda a try but it was too messy for my taste, like I had to spend time un-costumizing kde because I just wanted vanilla plasma.
Oh god yeah. I forgot about that. I applied all my normal look and mods within minutes of getting to the desktop the first time lol. After that it’s been great