I really can’t answer that either I’m afraid, as I’m using one of the “gaming distros” (Garuda Linux) and just haven’t had anything but good luck with it really. I tried Bazzite on my laptop, but was having some nvidia driver issues and decided to try Garuda before diving into trying to fix it and, well, Garuda “just worked”. The last general use distro I used was Manjaro probably 5ish years ago and I hated it, had nothing but troubles (and have since learned that Manjaro is kind of notorious for falling apart).

you have to change the init configurations for every single game you download (even if it’s just for enabling gamemode)

I haven’t had to do this for a single game I’ve played. Am I lucky? What does “gamemode” do? (Am I missing out on something?)

The worst I’ve had to do to get a game to work was change to “Proton Experimental” in the compat settings for one game that had basically just launched. (I also remember the EA launcher being terrible when I played “It Takes Two” with my partner, but I don’t remember what was terrible about it and also remember them having problems on Windows so I don’t know if it should count or not, lol). My partner is still using Windows, and we game together a lot, and honestly I think they have games crash far more often than I do. Games take longer to launch for me though - “Processing Vulkan Shaders” takes up to a minute or two if it is the first launch since boot of a larger game. No idea what happens if I skip it, so I don’t.

It’s honestly been such a breath of fresh air, I am so grateful for the talented people making this shit work so well, especially in the last several years.

That “about” page is fucking wild. They spend like half the page sucking themselves off over how great of a job they did designing their own logo, and then the other half telling the user the proper way to reference the company and its products. I really want to spend some time on the live chat breaking all the rules, like not capitalizing every letter of their name…

Welcome! So happy to see new converts, and even more when they have an “it went well” story!

I’ve been using that for ages to share my screen, but it doesn’t bring over the audio which can be annoying, but otherwise works great. I am sure there are ways to get the audio into it, but it felt like it would be more trouble than it was worth.

Wait, what happened to Ondsel? I’ve been using it for the last several months as it just seemed to make more sense than FreeCAD did…

I disagree with dual booting at the early stages. I like dual booting (or even better a VM if that covers you) once you’ve figured out what works and what doesn’t (assuming something vital is in the “doesn’t” category); but, if you are trying to decide if it is right for you, I don’t think it does you any favors to be able drop back into old habits so easily. My recommendation is drop a bit of money on a second hard drive, pull the windows drive out and install just Linux. See if it works for you, if your “must-haves” are running painlessly or not. You still have the safety net if things go REALLY badly of just popping in the old windows drive and changing your boot options in the BIOS, but you will be less tempted to just boot Windows every time you use the computer - until you really have to.

For a start, in practice you aren’t likely to actually reboot and load into a different OS very often. You can’t really give something new a fair shake while you are still spending most of your time somewhere else. Minor things, like how you like your system to look/work will just push you back to windows because it’s easy and you won’t ever look at the options to find out that it can do what you want (and likely more). Second, there is the pesky windows updates that likes to fuck with the boot loader.

This is really only advice for an enthusiast that really wants to try Linux. I know some will disagree - everyone’s experiences are different, but it is definitely my preferred methodology and helped me make the leap.

Am I the only one that pronounces it swa-penis and giggles every single time?

It looks like the installer in the background of picture 2 is seeing sda6, what issue is it having, can you post a screenshot of that whole window without other windows on top?

What did you use to create the partition? Free space that is listed would be space that is not formatted or allocated in the partition table at all, it doesn’t really know if that space is available to take or is being used.

Also, having the partition (probably the entire drive actually since you’ll need to edit the partition table) mounted while you are trying to edit the partitions can cause issues.

Ouf, :(

I did say I was dense… lol

I use Okular all the time. I am so dense I didn’t even realize Krita and Okular were both developed by KDE…

I didn’t think either were noticeably worse than in gimp for my use, but you might be comparing to a higher bar (or your use is more intricate than mine), lol.

I have quite liked the ability to turn on snapping for lining things up, and managed recently to freehand a very nearly perfect hexagon with it’s help… But I really wish there were some options for drawing polygons though… Even mspaint has the option to draw some basic shapes like stars and arrows and various polygons with just click and drag.

I second Krita. I’ve used gimp for years but recently tried Krita and now I rarely open gimp anymore on purpose.

Garuda Linux hands down. Arch at its core but has just enough hand-holding for me to be comfortable and able to do most things via a GUI out-of-the-box.

I might not have made the switch when I did if I hadn’t found this distro.

Bazzite for an honorable mention, running it on my laptop and recently had some update troubles as it hadn’t been booted up in a while and ended up rebasing to the newest image (and discovered there was a specific image for Asus laptops with nvidia GPUs). The rebasing process really WOW’ed me…

Exactly. The average Joe sees he can’t just download hacks and suddenly be good, assumes the anti-cheat works, and then when they still get owned complains about something else instead of cheaters and is happily giving shady game publishers the highest level access to their computer like its nothing.

Anti-cheat doesn’t actually need to eliminate cheating, it just needs to make the masses think it works by slightly raising the bar for entry into cheating. Cheating is still rampant, players just feel better about it and complain about smurfs more because they dont think its possible to get around kernal level anti-cheats.

Honestly I’d be much happier if the industry moved away form terrible anti-cheat software in general.

My install does not seem to do this. I removed the windows drive when installing Linux on a new drive. Put both drives in and select which one to boot in the bios. Its been that way for about a year and, so far, grub updates have never noticed the windows install nor added to grub.

That’s with bazzite, can’t speak for any other distro as that is the only dual-boot machine I own. Bazzite does mention they do not recommend traditional dual boot with the boot loader and recommend the bios method so maybe they have something changed to avoid that?

My install does use btrfs (but unfortunately since I reused the other drives they are still ntfs formatted) and it does regular snapshots, but to the same drive. It isn’t completely borked yet so I’m hopeful I can “clone” to a new drive and rma the bad one (10 months old so should still have mfr warranty). I’ve used clonezilla in the past but had read it doesn’t support btrfs, maybe that info is outdated? I did see some promising tools for doing basically the same job through btrfs though. I planned to work on salvaging what I can tonight. Worst case scenario, all my personal files are synced to a cloud storage service so I’d just be out installed programs and configs if I have to reinstall from fresh.

I’ve been 100% on Linux since July of last year. I thought I was currently having my first major Linux fucked up situation that I just could not figure out this weekend.

It has been very depressing, after trying to convince friends and family to give Linux a chance and keep an open mind for months, I was beginning to feel like a fraud and a liar.

But, after hours of software troubleshooting turning up nothing I’ve discovered I’m in the early stages of a dying ssd… My first major problem, and it’s hardware related. It sucks but it is also a relief in a weird way.

And I’m finding out about it way earlier than I likely would have in windows thanks to btrfs. But it’s also funny because if I had been having similar issues in windows I probably would have ran hardware diag much sooner, but because I’m still a bit of a Linux newbie I assumed I broke my OS and wasted hours troubleshooting software.