I have a home built PC that I want to get off Windows 11.
Specs:
- Ryzen 3700X, upgrading to a 5800X3D soon
- RTX 2080 Super
- 500GB NVME for OS, 2TB SATA SSD for files, programs, etc.
- 1440p Ultrawide monitor
- an 8bitdo Ultimate controller
Usage:
- I usually play indie games, emulators, and occasional AAA games. Most of my library is on Steam, with some games on GOG, e.g. Cyberpunk.
- I have an original Steam Link in my living room, and I use it to play games from my PC on the couch. Does Steam on Linux even support this?
- I also write game mods, so I need a distro that is a good fit for software development (C++, Python, and Lisp).
- Random miscellany: I use mullvad VPN, stream movies from a friend’s plex server, and use an SFTP client to back up photos and videos from my phone.
I’ve been an on/off Linux user in the past, so I know my way around basic/intermediate terminal usage and configuration. Buuuut every previous attempt to move to Linux ended in disaster, so I have little patience for asterisks, strings attached, etc. If you’re offering a distro I’ve never heard of before, you’re probably gonna be hard pressed to convince me.
Thanks for the help!
Fun story about why I’m such a curmudgeon about this:
Long before Proton even existed, I once researched how to run a Windows VM for gaming on a Linux host machine, with GPU passthrough. At the time I had an Intel iGPU and an Nvidia discrete GPU, so I figured the iGPU could run the host, while the discrete GPU could run the guest.
I asked around reddit and some of my tech savvy friends on what the best distro would be to accomplish this. A few people steered me toward Debian, because I expressed concern that the system wouldn’t be stable or would be difficult to work with.
Well, turns out Debian was a fucking terrible choice. First I had graphics driver problems, naturally. Secondly, I couldn’t even install qemu if I wanted to because it wasn’t in the apt repositories that shipped with Debian. So I had to learn to add those. Then I had to learn how to stop Debian from recognizing the nvidia GPU during boot, so that the PCI device could be reserved for the passthrough. That was a monumental headache to figure out. And finally, once everything was set up, I learned that nvidia had more or less disabled their consumer-grade cards from being used in a virtual machine. I spent over a month trying to get that working, and eventually just said fuck it and stayed on Windows. And I caught a ton of flak for that, because obviously I should have known that nvidia was a bad choice of GPU, and I should have just purchased an AMD GPU instead… in the middle of GPU mining bubble, when cards were going for $500 a pop.
I’m really hoping to not have a repeat of that experience.
Yeah, some people are really bad at recommending a Distro for specific usage.
When I started with Linux, quite a while back, I was recommended gentoo.
It’s now my least favorite choice 😁
Are you sure that wasn’t just a cruel joke? Lol
Actually, I’m not really sure. I mean I was sure at that time that it was a recommendation but as I am an autist (unbeknownst to me at that time) it could’ve been one of those ‘obviously’ not serious recommendations.
Debian has a non-free repo containing non-open-source software that it hasn’t historically enabled by default, but I don’t think that that’d apply to qemu. I’m pretty sure that’s all open-source.
goes looking.
qemu’s been in the Debian repos since…checks sarge, which was released as a stable release in 2005.
And it was in main, not non-free, so it should have been there as an out-of-the-box enabled repo:
https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20050312T000000Z/pool/main/q/qemu/
QEMU only came out in 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU
It looks like it was packaged in Debian unstable since 2004, though I wouldn’t recommend jumping right on unstable to a new user.
bazzite is really great and user friendly
highly recommend and run it myself for years