This won’t be interesting for any longtime user but maybe it’ll give someone on the fence the courage to switch. This post includes every problem I ran into and how I solved it
I settled on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed but I downloaded a couple more distros and loaded them into a Ventoy USB stick.
Good thing I did because despite partitioning the drive itself, the opensuse installer kept saying it said was out of space and no fix I found worked. So I booted up TempleOS for advice and the good lord whispered through my speakers, “try the Fedora KDE iso…”
The Fedora live environment booted right away. And unlike OpenSUSE, it recognized my 32:9 resolution so it looked good, too. I clicked through the installer and it rebooted. I was up and running in about 5 minutes.
The “app store” had a Steam and Discord flatpak so I could brag about my superior OS to my friends immediately. Do not install Steam this way, though (see below) EDIT: This apparently wasn’t a mistake, see viktorz’s comment below
The biggest problem I faced was with my audio interface (Focusrite Scarlett 18i8) which was recognized but hardware muted. Had to install alsa-scarlett-gui to unmute them…this was admittedly a huge pain in the ass but it’s a niche problem and it was solved.
The best biggest problem was the video drivers. My resolution maxed out at 32:9 1080@119.97hz and the screen would not wake from sleep. I ran two commands to download and install the Nvidia drivers and it worked - 1440&240hz with HDR and it wakes properly
A minor problem I ran into was Steam not creating shortcuts for games. I learned that this was because the flatpak version is siloed. Installing it “normally” solved this problem. I had already downloaded some games but was able to move them from the original folder in /var to the new one in /home. EDIT: In the comments, viktorz said a symlink would have accomplished the same thing. See what he wrote for more info
Another minor “problem” (I was prepared to lose the functionality) was my crappy Corsair mouse/keyboard. I mainly wanted to disable the default RGB rainbow but was thrilled to find CKB-Next which allowed me to change the colors and map the extra keys on my keyboard.
Anyway, I don’t know why I wrote all this. I guess I was just surprised to find how easy it was and wanted to share. I’m sure I’ll run into some headaches once I try to actually use the computer for stuff but for now, I’m quite happy with the experience.
The biggest problem I faced was <today’s problem>. Had to <solution from the wiki>… this was admittedly a huge pain in the ass but it’s a niche problem and it was solved.
As a Linux user, this is basically your life now.
But you don’t have every advertising agency on the planet rifling through the contents of your computer… so there’s that.
The best biggest problem was the video drivers. My resolution maxed out at 32:9 1080@119.97hz and the screen would not wake from sleep. I ran two commands to download and install the Nvidia drivers and it worked - 1440&240hz with HDR and it wakes properly
You will run into some issues with HDR, it’s still pretty new in Plasma and Wine so some games will not recognize that you have HDR support (Path of Exile 2, for example). You can run the games in gamescope (The arch wiki has a good article bout it, btw), which will have a small bit of performance overhead but hasn’t failed me yet at enabling HDR in stubborn games. You also need Proton 10 or better.
Your best bet is to install protonup-qt and use it to download and install GE-Proton10-27. GloriousEggroll maintains a community build of Proton which includes more current versions of the software and some extra community tweaks. protonup-qt just gives you a GUI to install/update. It works with the flatpak version of steam as well.
Don’t be afraid to check other distros wikis. Often the solutions will work on your system or at least give you an idea of what to look for. The Arch and Gentoo wikis are excellent sources of information.
A minor problem I ran into was Steam not creating shortcuts for games. I learned that this was because the flatpak version is siloed. Installing it “normally” solved this problem. I had already downloaded some games but was able to move them from the original folder in /var to the new one in /home.
I just made a symlink from
~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/Desktop/inside~/.local/share/applications/. Name it what you want, I named mine “steam-games”. Then Desktop launchers will/should recognize all the installed games.Then there shouldn’t be an issue launching games directly, with Steam installed via Flatpak. I have been running Steam via Flatpak on two generations of PCs since 2020 and it’s been working great. ✌️
Aha, that works too! I’ll edit the post to suggest this to future readers
Every headache you run into will build a few more skills as you fix it, but if you are like me, you won’t run into many more than you already have. I dropped windows for good over a year ago and changed distorts a few times but never looked back.
Thanks for sharing your experience!
I second this. When I came to the world of Linux almost 20 years ago, it was different. Games were mostly non-existent, interfaces were mostly super ugly (but tolerable), and things did not work quite often. To solve these issues, I developed a pretty solid base of knowledge that helps me in my day to day work, and life too. I just understand things much better, I guess. All that thanks to Linux. These days Linux, I’d say it just works. I run Fedora at home, and apart from some inconveniences, it was rock solid and very easy. A cherry on top, our shared home computer is mostly HTPC serving media to the huge screen, running Kodi on top of Gnome. And it has no keyboard attached! Which is fine, Gnome is quite manageable with just a mouse. I bet it would manageable the other way around, with just a keyboard.
There’s a few things I expect to run into (I’m still beholden to a lot of windows software for now) but the most important stuff is behind me!
Oh, I just fixed my broken partition with a fresh install last night. Haven’t played with Linux in a while but I spent way too much time themeing.
If you or anyone else is in KDE Plasma, surprise your friends with something like Reactionary 98 or WhiteSur. It was enough to get someone to try Linux, lol. (I ultimately went with Sweet, though. Lol)
The partition thing was part of the installer. I used the suggested partitions and when that didn’t work, tried resizing the suggested partitions. When that didn’t work (can’t resize an efi partition apparently), I made the partitions myself and it was the same thing.
I was already a bit annoyed by the aspect ratio and needing to access a hidden menu to boot with an Nvidia card so I stopped trying after that.
I might install those just for fun but I’m pretty happy with the default plasma dark theme!
Breeze has a day/night cycle now too, haha. Sweet just caught my eye since it has custom icons for discord and steam that match the theme. Lol
And yeah, the experts on Lemmy can probably explain better but there’s issues with screens depending on what the distro uses to manage that stuff. I’ve had trouble before, but I had no trouble last night detecting my ultrawide, and they added HDR support since I last tinkered. I’m using CachyOS (which is arch based), so what they’re using might be different. They also seem very anti-flatpak, haha.
Welcome to the community! Grab something to eat while we show you around, it’s all free.
congrats!
👍
And I’d say that was an interesting read, as someone who’s long in the game, so I cannot install the thing for the first time again. I hope your post would inspire someone else to try waters too.
The thing that really blew me away wasn’t just the ease but the SPEED of it. Can’t believe I had a functional operating system in under 10 minutes. I swear it took an hour just to get to the desktop on my last Windows install.
The funny thing, installing Arch Linux to a relatively old computer, if you did the install pretty often, to the point of knowing what to do, the installation takes like a minute or two, completely depending on the internet speed.
Technically, other distros with modern SSDs and powerful processors, are in the same league. As there’s little difference in what they do upon installing. It’s really cool! I stopped bothering backing up some important system data beyond some configs and the list of installed apps, purely because reinstalling the whole thing is just non-issue, a couple of minutes.
Also, a year or two ago, I installed Windows XP (the one from 2001) on a relatively modern computer with an SSD. (The hardware was supported, as it wasn’t too modern.) I expected the whole thing to be like 5 minutes compared to an hour it was back then. Turned out, it took about an hour! Why? I couldn’t get it, Ubuntu or Fedora took like 5 mins for that very PC with an SSD.
For Corsair RGB, there’s also OpenLinkHub. Supports pretty much everything Corsair now.
Good to know! I will likely stick to this for now, my mouse is on its last legs and it’ll be the last trash Corsair peripheral I ever own. I’m getting a free Logitech MX Master 3s (confirmed Linux support) from work and plan to replace the keyboard and headset next year anyway.
