Migrated from Windows to Linux. Decided to share list of answers/statements I was looking for before did it (and could not find).

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.

especially if you have Nvidia

This is something that needs to be highlighted over and over again: Don't buy nvidia if there's ever a chance of running anything but Windows.

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.

don't recommend manjaro. instead - vanilla arch or endeavour os

Gaming outside steam is fine too. Use Wine, Lutris, Proton

And Heroic Games Launcher.

For picking a distro, I'd rather recommend https://distrochooser.de instead of just saying "Arch or derivative". IMO it should be in the sidebar. Opinions @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml @nooter692@lemmy.ml @MarcellusDrum@lemmy.ml ?

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.

Welcome back to Linux!

That sounds fantastic. Long term Linux user here. I hope you like the world of Linux and Free Software.

migrated [...] to Linux 10

I don't think there is a Linux 10. Arch has installer version numbers like 2023.09.01 After that it's a 'rolling release' that means there are no version numbers, it changes continuously and is constantly updated.

Archlinux installation took me quite some time

That is correct. Arch Linux isn't recommended as a beginners distro. YMMV. If you managed to do it: Nice. You shouldn't have. But you're probably fine, now that it works and you've probably learned more in the process than lots of other people have in the first few weeks.

Music making

Make sure to also check out the free software for music making. "LMMS", "Ardour" and similar.

Gaming works out of the box with Steam

That's also my observation. Steam works fine. And Proton is awesome. Also, check out a few of the free games from your package repository. I like "0 A.D.", "Supertuxkart", "Super Tux Party", "Supertux", "Slingshot", "Mindustry", "Minetest", "Performous", "Sauerbraten", "Hedgewars", "X-Moto" Just to name a few. There are hundreds more.

Archinstall is included on the Arch installation ISO. Which makes it a bit easier to get into Arch Linux.

Arch, KDE, Wayland, pipewire... Not the most easy for a first jump but lot of goods choices 👍

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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

I recently found an Android app on F-Droid called "Linux Command Library" and for the first time I'm not as intimidated to try Linux for my main driver/gaming rig. Previously, I had always fucked my installs up by facing an issue I wanted to fix, and using any info online to do so, even if I had no idea what the command was actually doing. Almost always I end up fucking everything up and needing to reinstall.

I've been saving posts and comments regarding Linux info for the last month on Lemmy and cannot wait to take the plunge and finally rid myself of Microsoft!

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.

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

I see you're using KDE (I love it too), have you had a look at KDE Connect? It's an app to connect your phone seamlessly with KDE, and it's one of the things Linux does way better than Windows

I switched because w10 got too heavy for my old shitty laptop. Now I got new shitty laptop with w11 and will soon it will be cured by Linux.

My old laptop will retire as server.

For gaming, I would add Heroic Games Launcher for Epic Games ang GoG titles. Otherwise a great summary. Welcome back to Linux! I made the switch a couple of years ago and have not had Windows installed on any of my computers since.

I started with Arch too! Thinking in drop it only if is for Artix or ParabolaOS

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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.

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!

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

Have you tried ardour btw?

I always thought that arch was more difficult to get started w due to my experience with it from 2003/2004; it was MUCH more difficult to install and use than red hat or Debian at the time because both only required an installation cd and the ability to click on "ok"

It's nice to know it's gotten better, but I'm an old fart now and you'll have to pry Debian out of my cold dead hands before I'll consider anything else. Lol

Any chance we can get Oculus Quest 2 to work on linux?

Now proceed to update Arch like a rolling distro. For a newbie, Ubuntu or Ubuntu based easy distros are better. I have a whole guide on Linux/Windows computing.

Your suggestion for arch-based distros isn't the best. Tumbleweed is a more friendly alternative for those who want rolling.

wine staging for yabridge btw, should mention that

Please stop recommending Arch...

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

A simple install of Debian + GNOME install (with all the defaults, easier to install than Windows) will provide you with a useful store that can even load flatpaks... and there's nothing that easy an practical on the KDE land.

Almost everything works out of the box, by just installing corresponding package

^No extra package required

Wine is great!

No it isn't. It is a piece of shit that does a garbage of a job to get Windows application to "run". It doesn't run old/basic applications well nor does it run useful modern applications such as MS Office without constant glitches and hours of hacking around

TL:DR; the Linux experience might be great but it isn't for everyone and anyone. If you need to do your job and not constantly be dealing with small annoyances that will curb your productivity it isn't, most likely, for you.

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