Same as you, I was somewhat already leaning towards Linux but seeing Windows 10 EOL announced around 3 years ago and seeing what new “features” are going to be implemented to Windows 11, I decided to hop ship.
The main reason for switch was privacy concerns, got redpilled by Mental Outlaw while he was still making regular Linux videos.
0 cause I feel there’s not enough content to have subscriptions so I just scroll by top/active.
Damn, I had a malicious version installed on my Arch machine. I’ve since done a system update which removes the backdoor, but looking more into it, it does seem that only fedora and debian(?) are affected/targeted but better safe than sorry.
Kitty for both X and Wayland - I like the customization (as in I already have the config file that I have backed up and can just plop it in), it works perfectly on any VM (used it on sway, hyprland, i3, awesomewm), though honestly I don’t see much of a difference between the terminal emulators. There’s literally no wrong choice or meaningful difference in my experience at least, but admittedly I just use a terminal emulator to run commands, neovim and system file editing.
Gentoo - too long compile time, especially on my dated CPU. I prefer my system to update quickly.
Linux Mint - don’t like apt, some packages I installed refused to work properly (like Lutris), and the color scheme which is admittedly customizable but I prefer rolling with defaults except when using WM.
Void Linux - after installing it I realized how much I actually missed systemd, couldn’t be arsed to symlink services manually. And yes, I realize that’s the whole point.
NixOS - realized how much there is to learn with the flakes and separating home configurations and whatever, and just gave up
Manjaro - I tried it twice at the beginning of my Linux journey, and both times the nvidia driver shat itself and gave me different problems that I couldn’t fix.
Maybe I’ve been spoiled by Arch though, as most of my problems probably boil down to “not the same packages”, “not pacman”, “need to learn new skills that weren’t in Arch” and so on. Though admittedly, I did try to explore with an open mind to find a new “cool” distro, but I’d always go back.
I fully agree that it’s bad for users who aren’t that tech-savvy, but I meant it in a more general sense - during my time on Lemmy I’ve seen a ton of posts bashing arch and commenters pretty much calling it a “good for nothing distro”, with the only more hated distro being Manjaro.
I don’t get the hate arch gets - it’s the perfect distro if you want to choose what programs you want to use, it’s not meant to be an out of the box experience. Been using it for 3 years, and sure it might take me a couple of hours to set up initially, but after that I don’t really have to do anything.
One of the things I really dislike about Linux is how when setting up, there’s a bunch of things you need to troubleshoot, look them up on the forums even though you haven’t really done anything wrong, it’s just how some software works or there’s a bug or there’s some weird setting that’s incompatible with your system.
I wish there were better defaults for software in the future or just better compatibility/more bugfixes so these cases get rarer and rarer, making it comparable to initial windows experience.
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sway on wayland (the only WM that doesn’t crash even though it lacks a lot of features), awesomewm on xorg (fast and very customizable, but has quirks)
Literally same, even the years match up lol
It’s natural - reddit does something bad, people look for an alternative, join up then start losing interest either after a while either due to toxicity, seeing content they don’t like, not having reddit features they used, or the low amount of content and start migrating back.
The user count will probably not stop dropping anytime soon, unless reddit does something again and blackout 2.0 happens.
I’ve switched to wayland full time, on amd GPU so I didn’t get any nvidia problems.
Used sway and hyprland as my compositors, and a large pro was incredibly smooth desktop experience, especially when browsing when compared to Xorg. No screen tearing, just smooth as butter scrolling. Also when gaming, I found the fullscreen/borderless experience to be way less of a hassle than on xorg.
That’s where the pros off the top of my head end. The cons are that it’s new, so it’s lacking in some software like autoclickers (can use scripts as workaround), and the security feature of applications not being able to read each others inputs, which does help against potential keyloggers but disrupts any push to use/talk applications. If you want to create an autoclicker script or use discord’s push to talk, you’ll likely have to bind it through a compositor with varying results, or be pretty much limited to using them in xwayland windows. And recently, it seems that my loading times of games on steam went up, though not sure how much of that is wayland’s fault.
Apart from that, yeah. It’s a shiny new thing that is perfectly usable, and if you want to - go for it. For your use case specifically, the cons probably won’t matter unless you don’t want to use a window manager, because then I’d probably stay away if I were you. The only desktop environment that supports wayland is KDE and last I’ve heard the experience is still rather experimental. But overall, is it worth switching for practical reasons when compared to xorg? In my opinion, no.
Speaking from personal experience, see you on your old distro in a couple of days!
Not really an opinion but I guess an experience - Manjaro was my first ever Linux distro.
I switched to it around 4 years ago and everything seemed to work except that I had this issue where if a game was running for 30 minutes or longer, it would progressively run worse and worse until it either crashed or I would just restart it. Didn’t really find any solution online, the issue didn’t happen on windows so I just switched back after 2 weeks.
Half a year later I decided to give it another shot, but I had a completely different issue I couldn’t figure out how to fix, so I switched away from it 3 days later to Mint. Switched back to Windows a day later because I wasn’t much of a fan of apt when compared to pacman, and arch (what Manjaro is based on) is this mythical distro that’s very hard to install and use, so I didn’t bother.
Then another half a year later I switched to arch and stuck to it, with minor distro hopping here and there but always came back to arch. Thanks to Manjaro, I knew pacman commands and had overcome the fear of the terminal, which did make the switch to arch much easier.
That being said, my opinion is that you should at the very least try it. If the distro gives you no problems - fantastic, but if gives you major issues like in my case, then at least you get to familiarize yourself with arch-based distributions and maybe try EndeavourOS or Arch in the future.
Just to add to your comment, steamtinkerlaunch is a compatibility tool that allows you to install any mod manager through a GUI. Pretty handy.
I have played modded skyrim on my Linux system, and it worked fine. It was somewhat of a headache to make Vortex work, but once I figured out the quirks, it worked fine (used steamtinkerlaunch as compatibility tool). Civilization too - 5 (with and without EUI) and 6 worked pretty much out of the box via proton. A friend of mine plays RDR2 and also has no issues, doing coop stuff and singleplayer or whatever.
I’d say in terms of your choice of games, you should be fine. Proton runs most games just like windows nowadays, and you get the added benefit of less system load. There might be some games that require a bit of tinkering to get working flawlessly, but chances are some user on protondb has a solution.
If you need a distro, a rolling release one might be your best bet, as having up-to-date packages does help with gaming.
My personal journey was Arch > Void > Gentoo > Arch > Nix > Void again > realizing there’s nothing really like Arch and going back for good. Hope this helps!
Welcome to the club - after starting to use window managers around 3 years ago at this point, I haven’t gone back. Whenever I’m forced to use Windows or a regular DE, I start instinctively abusing virtual desktops feature lol