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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Have been almost a year since I switched to Linux completely. I’m using CachyOS (an Arch derivative), so, you may have to adjust some things for your distro.

    First of all, your driver setup varies heavily on what hardware you have, obviously. All AMD (both CPU and GPU) being the easiest for setup and laptops with Intel CPU + iGPU and Nvidia dGPU being notoriously hard to manage (it’s also my case, which sucks). Look up what you need for your specific hardware.

    Next comes your display server and audio server. The bleeding edge here being Wayland + Pipewire.

    Wayland can be a bit bitchy on Nvidia GPUs, but it got a lot better over the last years. To use Wayland your desktop environment has to support it. Check with your specific DE. I’m using KDE Plasma, been quite happy since the switch.

    Pipewire is pretty easy to setup, just uninstall your old audio server, replace it with Pipewire and an adapter package for what you had (like pipewire-pulse for PulseAudio) and you are good to go. It’s very cool with tools like qpwgraph for audio management, easily the most mind-blowing thing I installed. Your friend came over and you want to send game audio both to your and their headphones? Easy. Been selling parts of my soul to get these sorts of setups on Windows for a long time.

    Next, use native software where you can. You can replace Notepad++ with VSCodium or Helix (the learning curve for modal editors is steep, but it’s very worth it).

    For Minecraft, TLauncher is… controversial to say the least, even for usage on Windows. Try PrismLauncher. Works great, allows to download modpacks from popular distributors and is pretty easy to trick into playing in offline mode without a Microsoft account, just look it up.

    Next, the translation layer. I’m using Proton-GE for everything via Lutris. While, as per GE, it is not a supported use-case, it’s what I’ve got the best experience with so far.

    As for dependecies, there is a good guide from GE for that.

    Hopefully it helps in one way or the other. You can also experiment with distibution of your choice. There are some gaming-focused ones that come with driver installation tools to make it easier for you, don’t hesitate to dump everything and start from scratch with a fresh install while you are not that commited to one specific distro.









  • Well, jokes aside, people who install Arch usually want maximum flexibility out of their system (I have no idea why you would torture yourself like that otherwise). And after some time spent with Manjaro, I can confidently say that it greatly sacrifices your ability to tinker with the system in the name of user friendliness. A great distro to start with, but if you still like it after a couple of months, you probably didn’t need Arch in the first place.