I’ve been using this hp gaming laptop with win10 since 2 years ago with an old dumb LG screen for coding/emulate (35%) or gaming (25%) and other 40% without the 2nd screen (browsing/documents).
I’ve used fedora/red hat in university but it was almost 10 years ago for specific software (emu/simulators) so I’m kind of noob in general terms and I’m afraid I’ll be leaving dual boot just in case.
I’ve read some posts before about out of the box distros (because the nvidia gtx 1650ti mainly) but I’m not sure if I should go for bazzite or cachyos or opensuse tumbleweed or a better distro that fits great in my case and about desktop, KDE (plasma) is my choice at the moment.
Thanks in advance.
Edit: I appreciate your comments and warnings (mainly about arch/gaming based distros and other tips). I didn’t want controversy but I use that laptop for almost everything at home and I’m realizing that I need to invest more time both learning and extracting backups because the machine is limited and I’m willing to become a full linux user in the mid term.
Fedora is way different now, and has basically taken the old throne Ubuntu used to carry as the default to try. Clean, simple, rolling releases, it’s good.
Ubuntu’s reputation has been tarnished due to forcing Snap packages on users, sneaking Amazon-based software into default installs, and showing ads. I’d steer clear.
Arch is still Arch. Wiki is still amazing, but distro is work.
Ignore anyone who says anything about a “gaming” distro. There is literally no performance difference.
CachyOS is maybe the one distro that could claim performance improvements over the others, but like in the ~10% target area, nothing super drastic.
Since you’re familiar with old school distros already, steer clear of immutable until you find a need for that complication in your life.
I’ve never heard of anyone suggest a gaming-focused distro for performance reasons.
It’s always for compatibility and shit-just-works reasons. And that is wildly different between distros.
That was a secondary point to just ignoring the “gaming” distros, but this thread alone has a bunch of people pushing Bazzite because someone simply said the word “gaming”, and not recognize the majority of what OP said he would be doing is not gaming.
Immutable distros are a PITA for coders for a number of different reasons, so should not be recommended simply because of that. They have no benefits to workflow, only extra overhead to the other work OP is asking about,.who even said they are largely unfamiliar with anything except older releases. Suggesting they jump right into the fire with an immutable distro is bad advice.
Legitimately if you’re a programmer and you think using a container is a pain in the ass, you should stop programming.
Source: 20 plus years software engineer, if I didn’t have containers I would go ahead and hurry along my retirement.
Using a container isn’t the issue. I’m an upstream developer on containerd and I just don’t want to have to think about it. It’s a needless hurdle. Containers have their place, and it’s not for the desktop and doing desktop things.
Heya! I’m one of the ublue maintainers. I run the Project Pavilion at KubeCon, any chance you’re going? I love to talk about this stuff in real life! Our project is based on bootc, which is going into sandbox into the CNCF, so there’s lots of stuff to talk about!
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Let’s agree to disagree. I think it’s the single best thing to come to the desktop in the last decade and using containers as build environments has made my workflow immensely better.
We don’t even need to do that. Go and ask on any public FOSS project mailing list and see who is running immutable. Not many.
Using containers as a build environment is fine as long as long as that’s the final step is distributing something. That’s what containers are for. Not for desktop workflow.