Very good review actually,was looking for something like that souole of hours ago and couldn't find.
Oikio
joined 1 year ago
Nice write up. Hope we both will be fine with our installations =)
Regarding "new user" - that's true, e.g. average person has much steeper learning curve than software dev, DIY enthusiast playing with Arduino or gamer who has his own server for favorite game in the cloud and etc. They might be all "new" to Linux as desktop OS, but not on the same start line.
Though looking at EndeavourOS and recalling my experience with Mint and Ubuntu, it might be possible to have windows like (when it comes to easy to use) installation\configuration and experience out of the box.
There are quite some comments and to clarify all misunderstanding regarding Arch vs something else or any other debates in this thread, I would like to add this comment.
I do not recommend Arch based distro over Debian based or anything else. Topic is about using Linux at its current state, I assume that most of distros will be more or less similar when it comes to statements of the post. In my case it was Archlinux distro, because I had prior experience and it's philosophy is appealing to me. Like rolling release, configure yourself, install only necessary for you things and etc.
I do not recommend to use Arch itself for a new user. I hope from the post it was clear, that new user should not care much about mentioned topics, like Pipewire vs Pulseaudio or Wayland VS X. One can use more high order distros or even different base, like Linux Mint. Which I also used long time ago and was quite happy about.
I do not say that KDE is better or worse than Gnome or whatever. For me it's just a preference, like possibility to have more control over UI and looks and to avoid some blockers, like DRM on Wayland. You can have them all on your machine, beauty of Linux.
And please do your own research on the topic and do take everything with grain of salt. There are a lots of great distros, desktop environments and other things. And there are tons of good and bad advices, navigating through which sometimes is not so easy.
And I would like to underline that there are not so many up to date objectivly better things when it comes to software, pick what you need and like.
No, I just said it's not appealing to me today as it did before, when I used it, years ago. I'm not implying anythings here, personal taste. I chose plasma.
I have Nvidia and 1 monitor, so did not run into mentioned issues. Wayland on KDE did not work well for me, also https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers have some blockers for me. Gnome on Wayland as far as I understood does not work with DRM, so no chance to run VR. Also though I used Gnome before it does not appeal to me today. Plasma on the other hand was exactly what I was looking for, plus it's actively maintained and updated. Looking forward to see Plasma 6.
When it comes to VR - I was very surprised, it was something I did not expect to work at all. My setup for reference: I have Nvidia proprietary drivers, SteamVR Beta and Valve Index. I had problems with sound (cracking, quality and etc), but using sof-firmware helped to choose proper output channel on Nvidia GPU via Pro profile and it just started working.
It wasn't my first try, I used arch before. And I would not recommend it to anyone without prior experience or at least software engineering related background.
I did, it looks nice, it's just that Bitwig feels more at home for me.
I am using default wine package, which should be development.
Two monitors do work (second display is my tv), I tried it couple of times - just worked,but maybe I need to retest.
Currently I have stationary pc. But ten years ago closing lid worked for me on laptop. I think arch wiki has good guidance about this topic. It was not a plug and play experience for sure.
I saw that people had success with ALVR. But I can't say anything from experience.
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I'm playing two games at the moment:
Yet another run in Nier: Automata, second playthrough, first time on steam deck. It runs surprisingly well.
Stardew valley. For steam deck it's a killer game - 8-9 hours on a battery, perfect for resting.
I also have Snowrunner and Vampire Survivors as my go to games.