Try running a stable distro without them

Arch mentioned btw

I see no “hostility” and “talking down” here. You shouldn’t be running GUI programs with sudo, and the fact that you’ve been using Linux for X amount of years doesn’t change that.

Unless you have very niche needs or choose to tinker, everything just works.

That’s something Windows used to do a lot, right? I remember the old HDDs were always noisiest under Windows

CLI:

• git
• zsh
• neovim
• lazygit
• my dotfiles (i have them on gh and then use a bare repo)
• a few extra utilities: htop, ripgrep, tree, exa
• yay (I use Arch btw)
• tools for whatever langs I’m using, usually rust or golang

GUI:

• Steam - games are on a separate disk that I add to /etc/fstab so I just need to add it to Steam and I’m good to go
• Lutris
• Sublime Text
• Spotify
• Discord
• Flameshot
• psensor

Oh boy. I definitely started with Ubuntu 17.04 in 2017 when I started uni, then soon downgraded to 16.04 because Unity was soooo much better than Gnome. But afterwards it’s a blur, I was distrohopping basically every few months, sometimes even more often. I used Antergos (RIP), Manjaro, all flavors of Ubuntu except Gnome, Mint, then I was into the whole minimalistic tiling wm suckless no-systemd rabbit hole with Void, I also did KDE Neon at some point, I definitely did pure Arch as well, and Artix too. Sometimes I even hopped at work when I had a bit more time. God I miss those days…

Right now I’ve settled on Mint for work and Endeavor for personal use and haven’t hopped for over a year which is as long as I’ve ever gone. I miss hopping but I’m so comfy right now. I’ve been thinking about finally giving Gentoo a go full time as I’ve been flirting with the idea forever. And there’s also Nix. And I’ve been meaning to try a system where I fully embrace flatpak (right now I never use it). I’d also like to try something like Qubes eventually. So yeah, plenty to see still after all these years.

Well, when you’re an experienced Linux user it’s kind of predictable what effect each answer will have on the outcome.

I love btw how Arch, a supposedly brittle and unstable distro, is one of the few that you can actually run for this long without ever reinstalling, on desktop at least. Not having to worry about LTS releases, end of life etc because you essentially always automatically have the latest version is so great.

I can recommend Mint, it’s fantasically easy and stable, but take a look at https://distrochooser.de

Gentoo because while it was fun to try I sure as hell won’t be waiting around for my stuff to compile.

cowsay

Assetto Corsa works? I haven’t managed to get it running at all yet (unlike ACC which works beautifully), did you do any tweak?

I got into it when I started university and we started using Linux for a few programming classes. My dad helped me set up a dual boot as he had been a Linux user for a decade at this point, and I had used it for some time as well but had to switch to Windows for MS Office bullshit for school and games.

At this point it was kind of cool to use a different OS but I honestly wasn’t much impressed, mainly because of the UI which I later learned was Gnome 3 - Ubuntu had just ditched Unity, but of course I didn’t know anything about this yet.

Then I took my first internship where the first thing we did was install Linux on our computers, and the installer they gave us was Ubuntu 16.04 with the Unity desktop - which I LOVED, holy shit it was amazing, so much better than Gnome 3, and miles better than Windows. The first weeks of the internship were basically purely education, among other things an in-depth intro to Linux, command-line tools and such, and I think this was key - not being alone in the process was very important, and I’m not sure if or when I would have made the full switch without this. I started distro hopping in my free time and loved every moment of it.

This was also coincidentally when gaming on Linux really started taking off with Proton etc, so after experimenting with it, I finally ditched Windows completely and made the full switch in I think 2019, about a decade after my first encounter with Linux, and 2 years after I started using it regularly.

I wouldn’t consider myself an evangelist by any means, I won’t bring the topic up unless asked, but I will recommend taking a look and experimenting in a VM to anyone with an ounce of technical know-how. Furthermore, I think every programmer should be using Linux (yes, literally) unless it’s impossible or too painful in their case - which I think is not many cases.

Okay, I ended up typing a novel but fuck it I’m leaving it here because I loved writing this way too much.

Yeah I’m always wary of what I install from the AUR, never more than 1 or 2 packages on any given system. But a surprising amount of stuff can be found even in the main arch repos, so the AUR is rarely necessary.

I still find it noticeable 🤷 I do have an nvme ssd, and while 50 eur is negligible to you or me, not everyone is so lucky, + there’s no reason to create e-waste when your older hardware is working fine.

I avoid it like the plague. It’s fat and slow, and the Arch repos + the AUR have just about everything anyway (I use Arch btw, in case you’re wondering). I’ll sooner build from source than touch anything flatpak.

Avoid Kaby Lake processors. I specifically have i7-7600u in my laptop and must use a kernel parameter otherwise it kernel panics freezes minutes after booting. Sometimes it still freezes when waking up from sleep or hibernate. Something to do with power management or such.

Because people will never agree on a single one, and it’s FOSS so nothing is forced. I for one am glad I don’t have to use apt because I prefer pacman, just as I am glad someone who doesn’t want to use an Arch-derivative has Debian and apt to fall back on.

You didn’t mention your hardware, but gaming in general benefits from a rolling distro for things like latest drivers, latest wine version etc. (Be aware though that if you have an Nvidia card you’ll have to run the proprietary driver, the open source one performs poorly.)

I understand being wary of Arch-derivatives, but it sounds like you’re the kind of user who would benefit from it and has plenty of experience with Linux, so I can sincerely recommend it. And since this is for a personal computer, nothing bad is really going to happen if it ends up not working out other than the mild annoyance of having to install something else.

But honestly, things don’t break all that often, at least for me. For reference, I’ve been using Endeavour with KDE for a year, and the only real problem I can remember off the top of my head is that Steam was broken for like a week when the new UI rolled out that was somehow incompatible with the current Nvidia driver, but this got fixed with the next update and there was a workaround to make it run with the old UI so it remained usable.

There’s also whatis for short summaries

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