9mo ago

Building a brand new machine and leaving Windows for good

I'm sick of Windows, and especially what it's become, and the way its trending looks like it will only get worse. I'll be building a brand new PC this summer and want to choose a Linux Distro instead. In preparation, I'd like to try out a virtual machine with a Linux distribution. I am solidly familiar with Ubuntu, but I think it's time to try something that may cater to my specific needs more.

I use my machine for work and gaming (mostly Steam). I am a fullstack software developer and use a second MacBook as well for my daily work needs.

I've had Manjaro, and OpenSUSE recommended to me by a friend who likes both of them but he doesn't game much and doesn't need various software development tools.

Are Manjaro or OpenSUSE good choices? I know there's a tonne of distros out there, and I'm trying to narrow things down a bit. Hopefully this community has some helpful advice.

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: First of all, thank-you everyone for your help and positivity. It's been less than a day and the amount of advice and ideas is fantastic. Not too mention the noticeable lack of negative comments (a huge reason I left reddit more than a year ago), thank-you all for reaffirming my reasons.

I've got to admit, I'm a little overwhelmed by all of the advice, but in a good way. I will be scrutinizing all of this advice and laying it out into a roadmap for both my distro testing, as well as PC building. You are all making this community a helpful and spectacular place. I hope one day to be able to pay it forward! Please keep it up!

54 comments

I’ve had Manjaro, and OpenSUSE recommended to me by a friend who likes both of them but he doesn’t game much and doesn’t need various software development tools.
If your friend is familiar around Linux, then I'd advice you to just stick to the distro they're using themselves. That's probably the best course of action.

Manjaro has had a few flaky things happen with their organisation, so I wouldn’t trust them, Endeavour OS is apparently a decent alternative to them.
OpenSuse is apparently pretty good, am yet to move to Linux for gaming (will next month when I build myself a new machine lol, might go with fedora, which is what I use on my laptop)
- The problem with alternatives is that every step towards another alternative loses a huge number of distro users, leading to insufficient manpower. If I were you I'd stick with recommending Manjaro. But if Manjaro's untrustworthy then maybe something even more mainstream.
  
  I typically recommend pop!_os over Manjaro
  Realistically, though, most distros will work well for gaming if you install steam, proton-up, and maybe lutris so long as you don't need Nvidia drivers
  
  You make a good point about users. Mint, Ubuntu, Arch and Manjaro top the Steam Survey usage stats but Arch and Ubuntu have double the users of the other two, and it drops off very sharply after that.

To me, a distro doesn't really matter (unless you're gonna be gaming), as long as you pick one of the popular ones. It's the desktop environment that you'll need to choose. My only advice to you is to go full red with your new PC, AMD all the way. That way, you won't need to mess with drivers or any of Nvidia's shenanigans. Everything is baked into the kernel and is plug and play. I write software, too, and I use Endeavour OS, and have been for the last 2.5 years. Not suggesting that you use it (this is something you'll have to conclude for yourself), but this is what I use and I love it. For gaming, I'd pick a distro that ships new packages (rolling release), so you're always caught up on the latest improvements for gaming on Linux. We also have distros that are fully dedicated for gaming, like Nobara, Bazzite.... Etc.
- Seconding bazzite, although a Linux noob looking up “how do I do X in Linux” might be better off with something Debian based (and non atomic)
  Debian KDE (because it uses a recent Linux and Wayland), allow unfree software, and install Steam, goes a long way!

I personally prefer Debian or Linux Mint (Edge edition). They're very, very solid.
But the real question is, why are you building a new PC? If you already have a PC and you want to leave Windows behind, all you have to do is nuke Windows and install Linux (after trying first a live CD to make sure it works for your computer). You see, if your PC is a bit old, as long as you have 8+ GB of RAM, and a CPU of the last decade, you're ok with Linux. Linux needs ~1/3 the RAM Windows needs. Only 3D games might require a faster cpu and gpu, but Linux won't.
- I'm building a new PC because my current one is quite old. I won't retire it though, and have yet to figure out what I'll do with it (probably stick another Linux distro on it too 😆). I'm hoping to take advantage of having a brand new setup as an opportunity to be done with Windows completely.
  
  That's exactly what I did at the start of this year. I made it a point to get an AMD graphics card. Glad I've never had to deal with Nvidia issues.
  
  That's what I did a couple of months ago. New PC, got rid of Windows and moved to Arch. The old PC is running Arch as well, and acts as our media PC.
  
  definitely keep windows on it to begin with. once you're fully settled-in on linux and haven't even looked at windows for at least a couple weeks, make one last backup... then nuke it or repurpose it.
- Mint is amazing, but it isn't the best gaming experience.

The only thing to be careful with about building a brand new computer is sometimes the linux kernel takes a little while to catch up and support the latest hardware for some things. So maybe if any components you're planning to use are very new, look them up and see if they are supported yet.
As for a distro I always recommend Mint. Your plan to try out a bunch of them on a VM is a great idea.

I hear Bazzite is good for gaming but I haven't personally used it.
I use Linux Mint on my machines (except my NAS which has TrueNAS going on it) and I've got no complaints so far other than my vertical monitor being a little tough to have a vertical login screen (though that's so niche it's barely even worth bringing up) and I'm not even sure that's an issue on other distros (I don't distro hop)
My experience with Manjaro is from a decade ago (oh God I'm old) so it really doesn't apply to anything modern but I have heard it recommended at least a few times and a friend of mine swears by it for everything (he always reminds me it's based on Arch BTW)
My other friend who uses Linux swears by Pop!_OS and he loves it. I personally don't really dig the default look of it.
All three of us primarily play indie titles if that makes any difference for you.
Personally I'm moving away from Windows this year (ideally before the end of June) so I'm curious what distros others here recommend as well
- I second Bazzite! I daily drive this for my gaming and every browsing, with some occasional forensic analysis. It's really really great!!
- I use bazzite, and it admittedly isn't the best for out-of-the-box development work because of it being atomic
  You can just make a container for your development, but I'd rather not (I just layer packages atm and I'm working on making my own image based on it that has the stuff I want)
- I recently built an AMD based gaming computer with Bazzite and it works fantastically. I have found that atomic distros from Fedora just work, and Bazzite makes gaming super simple

Anything you pick, make sure to first do a web search on how well your games work on Linux.
- Good call! I already did this.. wasn't sure if there was a better way other than installing steam on the vm and logging into my steam account to see which ones were installable. I suppose this doesn't tell me how well they'll play though does it.. 🤔
  
  protondb.com will tell you how well an individual game will play, as well as any tinkering steps you might have to use (in the comments)
  
  Proton can run any Windows-only game on steam, you just have to enable it in the settings. The ones for which you didn't have to enable this either have a native linux version, or are officially supported in Proton, and should run very well. The other games may have more issues, but even those might work excellently out of the box.
  
  Something like "proton your_game_here".
  Beware that on the Linux land you're on your own. People say "things just work except [something]". I don't say that because it feels like moving the goal post every time something gets fixed just to face the next problem for a niche person like me.
  The reality is, you never know. My favorite title apparently worked in 10fps. Nobody could figure out why. Then some update on something suddenly fixed it and that's when people finally confirmed it was a software bug all along.
  Even people saying Linux can play any game admits "if you can't spend good efforts, you're not for Linux."
  
  ProtonDB is a pretty helpful site to gauge the compatibility of any given game. Users report their own hardware, distro, and Proton version(s) tried, along with a summary of how well it all worked.
  
  ProtonDB for Linux support of Windows games (turn on compatibility in Steam)
  AreWeAntiCheatYet to see how well online Windows games with anti cheat will work
  Linux Gaming Wiki is an ugly but functional site with good info and recommendations!
  Happy gaming!

There's the distro chooser website, but that might be a bit basic for the amount of experience you have: https://distrochooser.de/
I jumped to Linux as a tech savy, Linux beginner and went through a bunch of distros before settling on Opensuse Tumbleweed, and it has been great. Fedora gets mentioned a lot as well but I never got round to trying that. If I were to choose today with a bit more Linux experience, I might choose Endeavour OS.
My understanding is that as far as gaming goes, some distros have some pre-intsalled conveniences, but you could game on any Linux flavour. If it's just going to be Steam games, then Steam handles Proton and game compatibility itself. It might be worth looking up things like GPU and peripherals compatibility.
- I advice against using https://distrochooser.de as it's horrendously outdated and doesn't offer accurate information. The results will also bombard you with a bunch of distros that have lost all of their relevance.
- Thanks for the distrochooser link. It was helpful and pointed me to Fedora 😀
  
  Ooh! And bazzite is a gaming-ready Fedora distro (that actually makes gaming easier and smoother for you!)
  I can really recommend it!

Debian is pretty good for me. Before I used Debian I ran gentoo from scratch (idk what the newfangled name for that is, but the one where you compile everything). Before that I ran Slackware and before that I ran red hat in like 98-2002.
Set aside some cash for four or five big drives and make your old pc a nas.
You can have it operate as a Time Machine target for your Macs.
- A NAS is exactly what I'm considering doing with it. Good call!
  
  If you have a couple of free pcie4x slots, the hp sas host and expander cards will make your life better.

I have seen a lot of people say they moved from Manjaro to Endeavour (including myself), but I don't think the two are trying to solve the same thing. Manjaro wanted to create a more stable version of arch (and had some shortcomings that ended up being deal breakers for many people), but endeavour just wants to be a more convenient way to install arch.
I would recommend Fedora, Debian, or Mint. I've also heard good things about OpenSUSE.
Also, alternative to running in a VM, put ventoy on a USB drive, then drop isos for all distros on it, and live boot them one after the other to see how you like them.

If buying a graphics card is in your plans, but AMD. Nvidia does better cards, but AMD works with less bugs on Linux. I just switched and I'm quite happy with the results.
For distro, Mint is a safe bet.

The OS on the Steam Deck is Arch based, just like Manjaro, so I imagine it'll do games.
I'm a fullstack developer as well, and use Arch as my daily driver, and have for the past 9 years. While I can't speak for Manjaro directly, just the upstream, I have some coworkers that use it without issue. I think it'd be fine for your needs, at least worth trying out. I hear a lot of bleeding edge horror stories thrown around but in that 9 years 95% of problems were of my own doing, and the 5% were easily fixed with a rollback of a package. Out of that, my downtime isn't worth mentioning it's so negligible. I feel my coworkers on macos have more issues with major version upgrades by far.
On Arch-based distros, pkgbuild is a great way to handle custom packages when needed, and the AUR is gives me almost everything I need that isn't in the official repos. It's a great developer environment.
I'm very interested in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed as well, was thinking of trying it out as my next distro on a personal machine to try out something new since I've been on a single distro for so long, but not because I need anything new, just sounds like fun.
- Yes, SteamOS is arch based, but the games run over steam runtime (wich is debian based) that's why the steam-native package exists. I use endeavour btw.

I use OpenSuse for gaming. A great distro.Highly recommend. An up to date kernel, stable and just works.
Had bad experiences with Manjaro so personally wouldn't recommend.

I haven't had problems playing games like Skyrim, The Witcher 3, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Terraria, Portal, etc on Manjaro GNOME.

I always hear amazing things about opensuse. I didn't like it but I didn't have any issue with it. Just preferred fedora over it. I'd say give it a shot
Nowadays distro doesn't really matter. Just pick something that clicks with you. Almost everything is a flatpak now so it'll install on any distro. If you come across something only packaged for Ubuntu or Debian you can use distrobox.

I'm not familiar with OpenSUSE or Manjaro, but if you are familiar with Ubuntu, then I would recommend either Linux Mint or Pop OS. Both are Ubuntu-based, and Pop OS has a Desktop Environment that is very similar to macOS. Pop OS is also suited for gaming with Steam, but then again, I think Steam works well on any Linux distro. The team behind Pop OS is currently doing some major revamps to the OS, but these changes are not yet released for stable use.
If you are building a new machine, I highly recommend you check to see if your HW will be compatible with Linux. You might want to pay close attention to the GPU and Wifi card. NVIDIA requires special drivers to work with Linux, while AMD works out of the box. As for the Wifi cards, depending on the wifi drivers that are installed in the distro, you may have to tinker a bit to get that to work. I recommend having the option to use Ethernet at the time you are setting up the distro, just so you have internet access to download what you need.

I'm very particular to Fedora based distros, mainly because they sort of just work and keep at the cutting edge of the spectrum with little to no headaches.
If you want to go immutable, Bazzite is pretty solid for gaming, so is Kinoite.
But I can also recommend some Ubuntu/Debian based distros, as they are easy to maintain. PopOS and Linux mint are very good options as well. I would also suggest staying away from Ubuntu itself.
I've tried some arch based distros over the years, but end up dropping them because I find them unnecessarily convoluted to maintain and troubleshoot, but that's just me.

I have heard that Nobara Linux is great for gaming but I can not confirm since I use Arch btw

If you like Ubuntu I can only recommend Debian with KDE desktop (don't install the default gnome DE).
I just switched recently and it's a very clean feeling. No snap and no nonsens. Just stable and trustworthy.

Manjaro is a fine distro and it could work well for you however it's based on Arch and the problem with Arch-based stuff for beginners is that there's a lot of stuff about it online and some of it is wrong. It's fairly easy to break your system by following random advice if you don't know any better. It doesn't help that Manjaro has some important differences from Arch and following advice meant for Arch can sometimes break it.
So if I were you I'd stick with the usual beginner recommendations like Mint or PopOS.

Pop OS, Linux Mint, Debian, Ubuntu

OpenSuse is a good choice as long as you don’t need nvidia optimus support or anything for weird hardware

Even though I don't typically recommend an immutable distro to people with minimal Linux experience, as a dev and a gamer I've been pretty happy with the various uBlue images. Bluefin is a great out of the box image for devs and the uBlue images have a lot of compatability improvements over the Fedora ostree image their based off of. Bazzite is another good one specifically built for gaming.

My tip would be to make sure of your storage partitioning: Keep all your data entirely separate from system stuff then you can swap out distros pretty much as and when you please. Also: Debian stable, then testing when you're comfortable

Use Debian.
Manjaro has had major package policy issues in the past. Trying to bash arch into a stable release cadence doesn't fucking work. Don't know how true this is today, but it was a pain a couple years ago when I rolled it.
My best luck with proper Linux development was on Debian and it's derivatives. If you don't need bleeding edge shite, it's great.
If you want something more up to date, debian based stuff like Ubuntu and Mint work well
- Manjaro has had major package policy issues in the past. Trying to bash arch into a stable release cadence doesn't fucking work. Don't know how true this is today, but it was a pain a couple years ago when I rolled it.
  It's been working fine as far as I'm concerned for about 4 years now. But you really have to accept the fact you're not on Arch and follow Manjaro updates at their own pace, and use a LTS kernel and so on. You have to let go of the bleeding edge.
  Most of people's problems with Manjaro stem from trying to make it into something it's not.

You can check my post history but I'm a dev who also play and had no problem with Linux for years. I don't play emulation (which is cool, even have a RPi with arcade joystick) but modern games (Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3, Ruiner, and some indies) including VR (Half-life: Alyx, Virtual virtual reality, Eye of the template, Cubism, etc) both on desktop and on the SteamDeck. Well it's been few years and I can tell you the tinker to play ratio is easily 99.9% in favor of playing. I don't tinker with drivers or anything of the sort (unless I have to work with CUDA, but still then no problem) but it's true that before buying a game I check ProtonDB to insure it will actually work.
Now in terms of distribution I'm not sure it matters much, what I would though highly recommend is that you make few extra partitions, at least /home this way if you do decide to format (because you somehow broke the OS, want to hop distros, etc) then you will keep you data without having to copy anything on another drive or even slower through the network. It makes changing a breeze.
PS: IMHO as a dev do tinker as much as you need, it's the best way to learn and see which distro is actually the best for you, just backup your data first then you can go "crazy", enjoy it's definitely worth it, even more so as a dev who can at any time say "Oh... that part sucks, I can change it", it's literally liberating.

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