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.
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.