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

RIP. Even though she got a lot of shit from the youtube community, at least she was a bit better than what youtube currently has.

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.

Directx 11 in this case, played bg3 on Linux and that was the only option that worked, and it did work quite well.

As for when to use one or the other, just check protondb. People usually leave what they played on, they even leave some useful launch commands or solutions to issues that could possibly arise, so it’s always worth a look.

My very first distro was Manjaro actually - I tried it twice but there would always be some graphics related issue I would encounter that I couldn’t troubleshoot as a beginner (even though I’d spend a week looking for a solution on forums), and I’d move back to Windows. Finally getting the courage to try out Arch which was considered the “big scary meme distro” was what made me stay with Linux.

The biggest thing for me was that I actually knew what was installed on my system and what the function most of the major programs served (things like xorg, multilib graphics drivers, pipewire/pulseaudio, desktop environments/window managers), so whenever I encountered an issue or wanted to customize something, I would sort of know where to start looking.

Of course, all this depends on the person - not all power users are the same. For me, arch worked best but someone else might gravitate towards fedora, debian or whatever else and their way of doing things.

Arch isn’t a bad choice for a new Linux user who was a power user on Windows. You get to actually know what’s installed on your system which can really help during the inevitable troubleshooting, though it’s definitely a trial by fire when it comes to manual install and setting up the environment.

Recommending Gentoo to a new user though is a war crime.

99% of distro hoppers quit before finding the perfect distro

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.

It’s not the biggest issue I managed to fix, but it was definitely the hardest to figure out a fix for:

Whenever I would boot up any game on my Linux machine I would have microstutters ever so often, and it was frequent and lengthy enough to be very annoying, and thus started my 2 month long quest to figure out what was going wrong.

To cut a long story short, the compositor I was using had suddenly decided to do a breaking update and change the names of the backends they were using.

Seeing many comments here shitting on this decision by google, is this really that big of a deal? I’ve personally never used the cached feature of Google and if I ever needed to see a page that is currently down, it’d be via wayback machine. If nobody used the feature, why have it waste a ton worth of storage space? Feel free to prove me wrong though.

Thanks for the correction, I’ve removed the section from my comment.

I’ve been playing League casually from time to time on Linux, and it’s just a shame that they’re adding Vanguard to the game since that kills any compatibility it had under wine. Though, knowing League community, a lot of players on Linux are so addicted to the game, they’ll switch their operating systems for it or buy a second computer just to play.

Yeah I used it as well, but I was missing a couple of dependencies and realized that I have to move the loadorder files around in order for mods to be loaded. Was pretty annoying but it worked in the end.

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.

me, trying to setup Skyrim mods to play Skyrim CO-OP with friends and constantly failing to setup a mod manager:

I know this is quite unprompted, but did you install correct video drivers? You gotta install proprietary nvidia drivers and its 32-bit libraries instead of nouveau

It’ll probably be fine, although I’d personally pick some rolling-release distro for better performance.

In any case, besides the release model I’m pretty sure a distribution you use doesn’t matter that much. Usually every somewhat popular distro has the same few packages you need for games to work (32-bit libs, wine, steam, whatever).

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.

No, and once I became aware of the fact realized that I was kinda screwed when it came to video games.

Every single video game I have purchased is on Steam, and considering its DRM and licence business model, I had multiple conversations with my friends who also had the same worry and wondered what would happen if Steam shut down one day. Valve did state that they’ll remove the DRM if the platform shut down, but there’s no way of knowing the future as million things can happen and for all we know, they might change their minds or not be in a position to remove the DRM once the time came.

I haven’t used Ubuntu, but I had a similar setup to yours in the past, and on Archlinux I couldn’t run any game until I installed 32 bit nvidia drivers (on arch the package was named lib32-nvidia-utils), and that’s my first instinct - maybe you don’t have 32 bit drivers installed?

Now, as I haven’t used Ubuntu much I’m just going off of online reference so there commands might not be 100% correct, but try doing this:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 to add 32-bit app support

sudo apt install -y libvulkan1 libvulkan1:i386 to install the vulkan drivers, including the 32 bit one. I’m not sure if this will have the same effect as lib32-nvidia-utils package on Arch though or if it does the same thing, but hopefully it works.

As for League, it does work on Linux quite well, but the installation is a little bit unusual. The gameplay though is literally the same as on Windows, no performance loss there at least in my experience.