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  • My gaming PC is on Win 11 because it's recent and I'm lazy and it's convenient. My laptop runs Win 10 so it'll be Linux I guess. Not really looking forward to finding a distro and reinstalling and whatnot but what can you do. It's been a good few years since I last had a Linux box so I'm pretty rusty and not up to date on the recent best distros.

    • For gaming, people often recommend Pop!_OS, Bazzite, or Zorin, but you can use whatever you want if you are a tinkerer. I use Debian and have a great time gaming.

      Outside of gaming and if Windows software compatibility isn't really something you're worried about, you can use any distro you want.

      You can try some of them out using a web browser with DistroSea if you feel like it, though they don't have every distro because that would be nuts.

    • What distro did you use before?

      • I used to use UbuntuStudio back when I was playing around with music recording and production ages ago because it ran the real-time kernel which was important for JACK I think. Last time though was just Mint.

        • Well, Mint is still one of the top recommendations for new users. It gets support for the newest hardware at a bit of a delay, so if you wanted to follow suit with your new gaming PC, it might not be as great of a choice for that for now, but for your laptop, that's what I'd recommend, if you're not looking to experiment.

          • I'm probably not going to be doing much gaming on my laptop, if any. I could be persuaded to experiment if you have any other suggestions.

            • Well, that was kind of a general statement. Mint is boring. That's what it's good at. That's why it's loved and why it's recommended for new users. Specifically, it's similar to Windows in many ways. It's somewhat more customizable, but that's about it.

              With you having used Linux twice before, you could consider something less Windows-like, less boring. I'll be talking about the desktop environment (DE) rather than distro, because it has much more influence on this. You can use these DEs on various distros.

              • My personal favorite DE is KDE Plasma. The default-layout is also Windows-like, but it's got all of the bells and whistles and options you could imagine. It's kind of power-user heaven and almost like a toolbox to build whatever workflow you want.
              • The other big, popular DE is GNOME. It's more macOS- and Android-like and focuses on a specific workflow. People who can get used to that workflow, then often really like it. The workflow itself is sometimes frustratingly uncustomizable, but it's also fairly customizable when it comes to the details, typically by virtue of also having lots of features, which can then be customized.
              • Well, and I guess, I'll throw in Xfce, too, since that's likely what you used, back when you used Ubuntu Studio. (Ubuntu Studio uses KDE since the October 2020 release, but used Xfce before then.)
                Xfce isn't necessarily what modern beauty standards would get flustered by, but many folks like it for its simplicity and because it is perhaps even more boring than Mint (without being Windows-like). There's a good chance that it still works a lot like back when you used it.

              Perhaps also worth mentioning that Mint's DE is called "Cinnamon", although it's developed by the Mint devs, so if you like that a lot, it's typically worth sticking to Mint.

              • Wow, thank you for the extensive reply! I did used to use xfce back in the day, yes. Never had a problem with it, but those were maybe simpler times. Might look into KDE this time, why not.

                I was really thinking less of the DE and more along the lines of if you had any recommendations that weren't Ubuntu- or Debian-based, as that's pretty much all I've used I think. But maybe that's too much experimenting...

                • Yeah, I always hesitate to recommend distros. 😅
                  There's tons out there and they all exist, because some smart person decided to put in lots of work, as the existing ones didn't match what they wanted.

                  If we exclude Ubuntu/Debian-based, that narrows it down somewhat. The other major distros are:

                  • Fedora: Rather much tied to the corporate side (Red Hat / IBM), tends to be rather up-to-date. Kind of has a focus on GNOME, but other "Spins" are available.
                  • Arch: Community-driven, pretty much a DIY distro, so the initial setup is somewhat challenging. It's really up-to-date, so much that it's referred to as "bleeding edge" (rather than cutting edge), meaning you might get faulty updates from time to time. It's also often loved by minimalists, because they can decide for each component, if they want to install it.
                  • Well, and perhaps the most niche of these – which is what I'm on – openSUSE: Has the best integration of KDE (not by a huge margin, but still). I like it in particular, because of its snapshotting system. It automatically starts snapshotting your OS (not the user files) once per hour or whenever you make changes to the installed packages. If something breaks, you can boot into a previous snapshot from the bootloader and roll things back.
                    It's the most "maximalist" mainstream distro, in that it preinstalls relatively much software. Personally, I think the other distros are a bit silly with their minimalist tendencies, but yeah, I'm biased. And well, downsides of openSUSE are that it is somewhat niche. You'll find a helpful, tight-knit community, but it's less likely that guides mention how to do things on openSUSE. Similarly, you're less likely to find pre-packaged software for openSUSE. May have to compile from source more often, although SoS has a good amount of software, too.

                  As for whether a different distro is too much experimenting, if you do jump into it, you'll understand why I talked about the desktop environment instead. 🙃
                  The DE makes a much bigger difference. Some people conflate distro and DE, because certain distros will have certain default DEs.
                  But if you used the same DE on two distros, honestly the main difference you'd notice is a different package manager. Where Ubuntu Studio and Mint use apt, openSUSE uses zypper, Fedora uses dnf and Arch uses pacman. They handle somewhat differently, but largely do the same things (i.e. install/update/remove packages).
                  Obviously, there are more differences to the distros, like how quickly they update and some of the default configuration, like the snapshotting I raved about, but ultimately it's still a Linux system with much of the same software running on both...

                  • Thanks again for the rundown! Snapshotting like that is definitely cool, I can see why you enjoy it. I'm no stranger to having to nuke the system partition and reinstalling because I broke something so snapshots definitely sound like a convenient tool. Though I might be older and lazier now and less prone to do a bunch of weird things.

                    I know the memes of "Arch, btw" and have always been scared of it tbh. Maybe it isn't so bad though? I've also heard people praise Bazzite, but I might lot end up doing much gaming on my laptop as I said.

                    Is the whole thing about real-time or low-latency kernel still a thing, or is that old news? Just in case I wanted to play around with JACK again.

                    • Yeah, I don't have first-hand experience with Arch for that reason either. Well, and also because I do want a distro to set things up for me. You could set up the snapshotting (with BTRFS and Snapper) on theoretically any distro, but not having to figure out how and what settings are good, that's why I go with openSUSE.
                      I might look into NixOS at some point. It obsoletes the need for OS snapshots, because the entire OS configuration is made in configuration files. But from what I hear, it helps to be a programmer (which I am) to really appreciate NixOS.

                      And yeah, don't know much about Bazzite either, but from what I've heard, it really has some design decisions that make it feel more like a games console. The atomic/transactional updates, for example. As I understand, updates and such are applied to a copy of your OS, which gets swapped in when you do the next reboot. This helps keep the system stable after applying updates, but implies that you can't really just poke around manually in your root partition.
                      It can be helpful for users not looking to experiment, but yeah, can be a pain, if you do want to.

                      As for a real-time kernel, the JACK FAQ says you don't need it, but the distro might limit real-time scheduling anyways: https://jackaudio.org/faq/linux_rt_config.html
                      I've had JACK running on my system about a year ago, although I didn't really have a need for low latency, so I can't say, if it actually worked correctly.
                      Perhaps also worth pointing out that "Pipewire" is becoming a thing, which tries to make interfacing with JACK and PulseAudio much easier. I believe, I also used Pipewire back then. But yeah, folks who've dealt with JACK a lot more than I have, seem to be really excited about it, so it's presumably doing a great job.

                      • You are just a font of information, thank you so much! I'm starting to feel like I have a handle on the landscape. NixOS sounds like a cool idea, though I am not a programmer so maybe it's not for me at this current time.

                        I probably know what to start looking at now when the time comes to make the change, this has been a great help. Pipewire sounds great and I'll definitely look into that, I do remember tearing my hair a bit occasionally dealing with PulseAudio back in the day 😅

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