Finally migrated from Windows to Linux. For anyone wondering, what is the state of Linux as your primary OS for home PC\laptop in 2023.

I’ve finalised my Archlinux installation yesterday, I dropped of Linux more than 10 years ago and experience in 2023 in comparison is awesome and beyond even wildest dreams back then:

  • For average user looking for more out of the box experience I would suggest something Arch based (people in comments suggest EndeavourOS, please do your research). Archlinux installation took me quite some time
  • Almost everything works out of the box, by just installing corresponding package
  • KDE Plasma environment is fast and beautiful
  • Pipewire audio server (Jack\Pulseaudio replacement) works great
  • Wayland window server is not there yet, especially if you have Nvidia with proprietary drivers and want to use VR. Waking up, session restoration and other scenarios have issues. Use X11.
  • Wine is great!
  • Music making - Bitwig Studio DAW has linux native version, yabridge allow you to use windows VSTs, which are easily installed via wine
  • Gaming works out of the box with Steam for majority of titles, some games have native linux version. Performance is great. In worst case windows game might loose 5-15% in performance. Was not case for my titles
  • Gaming outside steam is fine too. Use Wine, Lutris, Proton
  • VR is a mixed bag. Not everything is there (Desktop view, sound control and mirroring, camera, motions smooth, lighthouses do not wake up os go to sleep. I use my phone to turn them on/off). But if its not the problem for you, quite some titles work. Tried: native HF Alyx, Lab, windows: Beat Saber and Boneworks. For me it’s a surprise, I did not count on it. Performance is great.

So overall my experience is great. Eventually I’m going to get rid of WIndows on other computers and laptops at howe. I can finally wave goodbye to Windows, with lots of ads and bloatware. Alway glad to help with answers regarding installation while my memory and history logs are fresh. ^^

  • Diplomjodler@feddit.de
    691·
    2 years ago

    I wouldn’t recommend Arch to Linux beginners, though. It’ll take quite a bit of tinkering to get to work and you have to develop a pretty detailed understanding of the whole thing. Which is absolutely fine, of course, if this is what you want to do. But if you just want something that works with minimal hassle, try Mint.

  • Caveman@lemmy.world
    322·
    2 years ago

    Arch is the one of the last things I’d recommend for an out of the box experience.

    I’d recommend Fedora with Gnome if people are coming from iOS and KDE if people come from Windows.

    • Oikio@lemmy.worldOP
      5·
      2 years ago

      I hope people will take my post with a grain of salt and do their own research anyway.

  • Presi300@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    2 years ago

    I agree with most of your statements, though not with all of them.

    I’d say use X11, only if you’re on nvidia and you’ve got 1 monitor or monitors with the same resolution and refresh rates and are ok with having to disable the X11 compositor and having no animations while playing games… You also have to be ok with tearing while gaming too… It’s a lot, and the next version of plasma, plasma 6 is supposed to fix all the jankiness with kde on wayland, as afaik GNOME on wayland is stable on nvidia, I’m on AMD so I can’t confirm though…

    EndeavorOS is great, though I’d also suggest trying out nobara (or fedora if you’re not gaming… or recording).

    I’m really surprised that you managed to get VR working at all, didn’t know that worked at all on linux.

    • Oikio@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • monkinto@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        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.

        Very confused by this statement, are you implying Gnome isn’t actively maintained and updated or am I missing something?

        • Oikio@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          2 years ago

          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.

    • Fredol@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 years ago

      I don’t like the questionnaire nor its recommendations when I think about it in the pov of someone who hasn’t used Linux ever.

  • KindaABigDyl@programming.dev
    81·
    2 years ago

    Personally, Ardour > Bitwig. Couldn’t ever figure out how to do anything in Bitwig. Very complicated an unintuitive.

    Ardour is also unintuitive but 1) I did eventually figure it out and 2) it’s at least free

    • Oikio@lemmy.worldOP
      71·
      2 years ago

      I’m coming from Ableton Live, which I’ve used for a very long time and got used to, Bitwig turned out to be similar (I think I’ve seen that company was created with people from Ableton), so it works for me. But it’s better to try everything first of course.

  • Oikio@lemmy.worldOP
    4·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • pathief@lemmy.world
    4·
    2 years ago

    Does Archlinux take some time to set up but then is as easy to maintain as Manjaro or does the struggle never end?

    Always wanted to try out Arch but feel intimidated by all the people telling me not to :P

    • pchem@feddit.de
      8·
      2 years ago

      In my experience, once you’ve got Arch set up, it less work to maintain than Manjaro. On Arch, you have noticeably more frequent, but smaller, package updates. On Manjaro, compatibility issues with the AUR may occur, which happened a few times for me, while that won’t happen on Arch.

      • MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml
        2·
        2 years ago

        On Manjaro, compatibility issues with the AUR may occur, which happened a few times for me, while that won’t happen on Arch.

        You can prevent that by using their unstable repositories which mirror the Arch repositories.

      • pathief@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        I ended up installing Arch on my 2011 Macbook Pro with archinstall and everything went surprisingly smooth. Only had a small hiccup with the wi-fi drivers, as is tradition. Loving it so far.

    • Oikio@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      2 years ago

      When you set it up - it just works. For me installation took 4-6 of hours (I had to read all the topics), until I had bare bones operating system with desktop env. Just follow wiki installation guide (precisely! I made couple of mistakes, because was not paying attention) and you will be fine.

      Rare problems during update I had 10 years ago seems to be even rarer today, just check out feed https://archlinux.org/ before update, or after. You can always rollback any package with pacman using local cache. Lots of solutions are easy to find on the internet.

  • Pantherina@feddit.de
    4·
    2 years ago

    Wait until you find out that your BIOS and Firmware are also proprietary! Gotta get rid of those, but Coreboot/Heads is a real rabbithole and needs lots of work to be usable.

  • ᦓρɾιƚҽ@lemmy.ml
    3·
    2 years ago

    I recommend ZorinOS for new-new people.

    I settled on EndeavourOS.

    NixOS is tempting me, but ultimately I don’t believe it would be an improvement for me rn. All I do is yay from time to time to update my system. It just works.

    Honorary mentions to Fedora and OpenSUSE, which I used, but they demanded more input from me. On EndeavourOS everything just works, so I enjoy it the most.

    • Chobbes@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 years ago

      NixOS is great and you’d probably see benefits from using it even if your usage is fairly simple to be honest (and potentially some challenges as well, haha). If nothing else easy rollbacks are a win on the rare occasion when a system update borks something. That said, there is a learning curve, and if what you currently have is working for you and you don’t want to switch… Then you don’t have to switch :).

  • utopiah@lemmy.ml
    3·
    2 years ago

    Glad to hear. Few remarks that I hope will help. I’ll start with Wine to clarify it’s a clutch. Sure it’s a useful one but IMHO the beauty of Linux is that you are in control, you have more agency. Wine per se is great because it gives you more options. Unfortunately most of the time Wine is used to run what is not available in Linux and that is usually not open source. Consequently you bring with you little black boxes, spaces where you lose again control. The deeper problem IMHO is that you assume there are no alternatives. In truth in most cases there are numerous alternatives, they just aren’t clones because having more freedom to explore means they can be genuinely new solutions with interfaces that are thus unfamiliar. So… yes enjoy Wine but I’d suggest to take just a bit of time to search and try open source alternatives. This lead me to an example. I work in VR so when you mentioned desktop view I thought it was interesting. Yes you don’t have whatever M$ is proposing (honestly used it years ago with WMR but can’t even recall it) but you have “simple” things like ALVR (I even use SteamVR on Steam Deck) and IMHO deeper explorations like XRdesktop https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xrdesktop/xrdesktop that allow you to manipulate actual windows in space, not “just” on a 2D plane. Anyway enjoy the discovery it’s a worthwhile adventure. I work and play, VR or not, on Linux for years now, it’s literally liberating!

  • euphoric.cat@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    2·
    2 years ago

    Started using linux more myself and can’t believe I wasn’t earlier, apart from mid vr support which I’m keeping a dedicated windows partition for, the games run faster in some cases, mangohud is better than any fps monitoring tool on windows, kde feels way snappier to use and doesn’t bother me like windows, its the obvious choice