Different people deal with things in different ways. Some (most?) people feel like learning linux is undesirable or a chore, while others embrace the sense of discovery and exploring a new and exciting thing. After using Windows for decades I don’t want the same experience, I want something completely different.

Before I installed Linux I played a bunch on a virtual machine. I installed several distributions, desktop environments, hardware compatibility. I ended up landing on EndeavourOS more than a year ago. Never borked my setup, never had update problems, never had a problem I couldn’t solve (more like Arch Wiki solving it for me).

I like to learn things by doing things, I like to fail fast and learn from the mistakes. EndeavourOS provided the exact experience I was looking for and would recommend it to someone with a similar mentality. I wouldn’t recommend Arch (or arch based distros) to people who aren’t tech savy, but people make it seem more complicated and brittle than it actually is.

I’d just like to vent that these kind of discussions are one of the big turnoffs of the Linux community in general. People speak “in absolutes”.

You either do it this way or you’re a dumbass. You either use the distribution I like or you’re doing it WRONG. You shouldn’t use Arch because you’re not experienced enough, you should use Mint for an arbitrary amount of time before you graduate to the good stuff.

You friends get way too worked up over other people’s personal preferences and push your biased and subjective views as facts.

Is Arch Linux the right fit for a newbie to Linux? The right answer is “it depends”, not “never”. Would I recommend Arch to my mom? No. Would I recommend it to my programmer colleague who already lives in the Powershell? Sure, why not.

Optimized gaming distros often have stuff pre-installed, such as nvidia drivers, steam, heroic launcher… But you can pretty much install whatever you want and replicate that behavior.

Bazzite in particular provides a fantastic gaming experience but, in my personal opinion, a bad desktop experience. It’s great for devices used almost exclusively to gaming, not so great if you have to work every day.

If you’ve already installed vanilla arch on your laptop then you’re good to go, that’s the hard part. EndeavourOS has a very user friendly installer but still uses Arch’s official repos. I like to think of it as a quickstart installation, but still feels pretty much like arch. I wouldn’t recommend Bazzite to a main computer, especially since I believe their gaming stack is optimized for AMD.

Gaming on arch/endeavour is pretty straight forward

• Install your nvidia drivers
• Install steam
• Go to Steam > Settings > Compatibility and enable “Enable Steam Play for all other titles”
• Play your games

Boot up a VM and install vanilla Arch Linux using the wiki instead of archinstall. Notice that Arch Linux isn’t very pretty out of the box and take the time to set some “sane defaults”. Imagine having a person who is new to Linux to jump through all those hoops when they’re not even sure if Linux is for them. Imagine all the little things that could have gone wrong in this process and how a clueless person would react to them.

EndeavourOS is extremely easy to install. Next next next and it’s done. It looks pretty out of the box and has sane defaults. The only reason I don’t recommend Endeavour to newbies is because it lacks a software manager/store, which REALLY help newbies out. The very frequent updates are also not for everyone.

I love EndeavourOS but it’s certainly not for everyone.

Isn’t Pop OS super outdated right now, tho?

Is there a (Linux) command I can run to check my power consumption?

In C++? I’d rather be shot, thanks :P

Check out keyd, it’s very powerful.

The only thing I miss from Windows is Voicemeeter. God, I loved that thing. I miss it so much.

Handling the audio and adding what were once simple things like noise supression has been a really really shit experience.

Why so you care so much about point 6? Feels like overkill.

It’s like going to a vegan community saying “meat isn’t so bad”. You’re obviously not going to get good responses.

I use freerdp with Wayland, works OK.

You wish. Most tech companies will get you the cheapest laptop they can get away with.

I remember being denied a 64bit laptop when developing a 64bit only application lol.

I have several clients with this kind of setup. I’m always baffled at the amount of hoops I have to go through to connect to my Linux server. Sometimes I have to remote desktop to a windows virtual desktop and then use the citrix session to another windows machine VIA BROWSER so I can finally ssh to the machine. Are they trying to bore attackers to death?

I have tried the PROTON_HIDE_NVIDIA_GPU=1 before and I can tell you it definitely helps. The game is unplayable without it, to be honest. The VRAM still fills up but it’s not instantly, it takes quite a while. Makes the problem manageable.

Edit: Several people have reported that this VRAM bug doesn’t happen on AMD cards. If you happen to have one, you might give it a try.

Unfortunately I do not. I bought this nvidia card long before I switched to Linux and boy, do I regret it.

I believe that config needs to be in the working directory context of the game, but maybe I’m misremembering that.

Yep, I tried that as well. I have the exact same file in /gamedrive//SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Diablo IV/

If upon starting your game, it immediately starts using 10GB of vid mem, then that is what is needed by the game to run. Setting this to 8GB is going to magically make it run by using less.

But the game does quickly fill 10GB with both low and ultra settings. It hints to me that the game doesn’t need 10GB to run. It just makes use of the available memory. My theory is that using 8GB would at least make my desktop usable. Currently, switching to my browser in the second monitor can break the game. If I never focus out of the game it doesn’t break.

• Problem occurs in both x11 and wayland
• Window vs fullscreen makes no difference
• ProtonDB has some additional flags, I tried them all
• I tried several proton versions from 8 to 9, GE and no GE. Made no difference

See if you can force a specific renderer that is more stable.

What are the available options? I haven’t tried this.

Thanks a bunch!

It’s a gigantic money sink, it’s going to be extremely hard to come up with a profitable (or break even) alternative.

I stopped using LinkedIn because it totally turned into Facebook. Everyone is just posting memes, motivation quotes or soccer.

Nah, your ISP doesn’t give you enough bandwidth to host your own mini YouTube. You vastly underestimate the bandwidth required to run the service. It’s massive, which is why PeerTube is having a hard time gaining traction.