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A man after my own heart.
I had a whole bunch of machines and I just realised I haven’t booted Windows on any of them for a couple of weeks. I daily drive Tumbleweed when I don’t need any advanced Adobe features or play games that run on Windows only.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say I will ditch Windows completely, but it is nice to have options.
This generally works for people who only need command-line or headless access though. I’ve been waiting for proper GPU virtualization and partitioning to actually work on consumer gpus for so long now that I’m doubtful it will ever be a thing. And the hardware industry has gradually transitioned to single GPU setups now so PCIe lanes for multi-GPU setups are harder to come by, especially with recent motherboards dedicating more and more PCIe lanes to NVMe slots. Still, even GPU pass-through with VFIO is not a trivial thing at all to get up and running. Its a travesty that CPU virtualization is so mature and far along in the consumer space, juxtaposed with a seemingly absolute big fat zero on the GPU virtualization front.
You could get away with using VMWare for their proprietary GPU virtualization feature but besides simple sandboxes for testing, I will not personally get too far into it as the experience is not great.
Hello OP, warm welcome to the schizophrenic community that is linux! I’m running this exact same setup as you intend to.
Couple of points I’d add:
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Nvidia and linux is a shit show. You either use the gimped mesa drivers (not so good), or the closed source drivers (even worse), especially on Wayland. If you still want to try it out, I suggest you stick with X11. I was using a 3080Ti and gave up trying to get it to work on Wayland+KDE Plasma v5 without screen glitches and bought a 7900XTX instead. AMD works out of the box without further configuration. I’ve had nothing but issues with Nvidia. For the GPU neckbeards that are going to achytually me, please don’t, I have no skin in this game as I have a bunch of cards from both.
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I am not a pro nor expert in the foundations of linux, but I more or less know my way around its fundamentals (enough not to get into too much trouble), so I would actually suggest not getting into a rolling-releasing distro like Tunbleweed until you are super comfortable with a little hands-on and figuring shit out. Pop!_OS might be a better bet for your use case for now because it comes bundled with Nvidia drivers, but it uses a GNOME derivative (cosmic DE) so you don’t actually get the KDE experience.
Having said these, I absolutely adore Tumbleweed and KDE, I’ve been half daily-driving it but the gaming experience is not the absolute best (be prepared to experience weird glitches and crashes). If a flawless gaming experience is non-negotiable to you, stick with Windows. But if you’re ready to explore the quirky wonders of linux, the beauty of it all is the experience and the real reward is the friends you make along the way.
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This is the umpteenth time I’ve come across this project but I just don’t get what they’re going for here.
These are just custom images, are they not?
If I wanted Ubuntu I’d use Ubuntu. If I wanted Fedora I’d use Fedora. Maybe I’m not getting it but I wonder how big of a population that’s out there that wants some Ubuntu mixed in with a touch of Fedora and some buzzword salad thrown into the mix.
I actually did the whole KDE shebang with archinstall. I never really expected that Arch btw deigned it too opinionated to just provide an audio and Bluetooth interface. Instead I have to choose between pulse audio and pipewire and bluez and a bunch of others. I just didn’t have the patience nor time to look into what and why these options are presented, and this was after I already wasted days figuring how to get my pc to boot with my 12th gen Intel and Nvidia gpu combination.
Turns out there’s a bunch of kernel finagling you absolutely have to do first before it even decides to boot from the gpu and not the igpu. Oh well.
I mean, who doesn’t love to have candy crush and facebook automatically bundled with their OS? I mean, I had a fantastic two years waiting for the never combine taskbar feature to be released. The never-ending prompt to make edge my default browser is also utterly refreshing. m$ is so ahead of the game, they even anticipated my needs by shoving onedrive prompts in my control panel. How about that Office 365? Have you tried it yet? No? Well you’re missing out my man, in case you change your mind I’m going to put it right there in the front page of settings so you’ll never miss it.
Ex arch btw user here. I noped out and wiped after thinking I had it all nailed down, then I tried to connect my Bluetooth headphones and I came to a grand awakening. I am too old for this shit.
Installed Tumbleweed and been happy ever since.
I replaced my 3080 Ti with a 7900 XTX, reinstalled Tumbleweed to start fresh, and KDE on Wayland has been running great so far. Before, visual glitches galore, GPU refusing to output a signal if iGPU is not blacklisted, hardware video decoding outright does not work, etc.
Now, with AMD, I have not yet experienced graphics-related issues in weeks, fingers crossed.
Same, does it work? If it means booting into a DE and being able to move your mouse and type on your keyboard, sure most distros can do that.
It’s those little gotchas everywhere that gets you. Enabling video acceleration on Nvidia in firefox? Getting LDAC to work on Bluetooth? Etc. etc.
Do most distros work? Yeah, only if you don’t mind software encoding, or compiling from some user-provided repos.
I have a few hobby boxes running all flavours of distros, but whenever I need something to just work with no caveats, I go back to w11.
Yes indeed, it just works when I need it to. Just 10 minutes ago I regretted installing Arch as I had some trouble trying to get my WH1000XM4 to connect. I was able to figure it out eventually as I was missing a bunch of missing packages for bluetooth and bluetooth audio that for some reason archinstall decided wasn’t part of the core packages. There was zero prompts from KDE as to why the pairing was failing and I had to figure out with some trial and error which ones were missing and which ones I needed. And after doing all that I still couldn’t get LDAC to work.
Seriously reflecting on my life choices right now, should have stuck to a distro with some sensible defaults when I just need shit to work. Of all the problems people have with M$, windows always just worked for me. Perhaps Linux and I just aren’t fated to be together. I always come back a couple of times a year to try out the state of Linux and while it has gotten a whole lot better, its always these little gotchas that result in me telling myself “maybe next year will be the year of linux”, which has been happening for the past ~15 years for me now.
Which GPU are you using?
I spent a good 10-20 hours just trying to get it to boot to a largely error-free experience with SDDM and KDE. I set out to daily drive Hyprland and what a shit show that turned out for me on Nvidia GPU and Alder Lake CPU.
The basic gist is you have add nvidia, nvidia_uvm, nvidia_modeset and nvidia_drm to your mikinitcpio conf, regenerate your initramfs, then adding kernel boot parameters nvidia-drm.modeset=1 and i915.modeset=0 before it can even boot to a usable state. Apparently since 6.0, the igpu grabs the display and refuses to give it back. I don’t know how the fuck any “normal” user is going to figure out how to do all of that. Then I spent another evening trying to figure out how to get VAAPI working properly. There’s lots of outdated info in the wiki and not much else to go on, but I figured it out eventually.
BUT, having said this, I do recognise when you go Arch, you’re asking for all of these jank. And, for science, I wiped and tried out endeavouros, and it was surprisingly painless, mostly just worked out of the box (I didn’t check if it was nouveau but it might have been, I also didn’t check if VAAPI was working).
In the end after what seems like 400 wipes and reinstalls, I got it working just right. But it wasn’t painless and it certainly isn’t meant for the faint hearted.
Yes I know the fault largely lies with Nvidia and their shitty proprietary drivers, and so on. But the exact same machine worked just fine in W11, without a single jank or terminal command (not 100% true because I did run OOBE\BYPASSNRO to skip the online junk).
Moral of the lesson: go vanilla Arch if you are comfortable with figuring out shit on your own. Otherwise, stay the hell away and pick a starter distro like Fedora or Pop!_OS that is mostly jank-free.
obligatory I use Arch btw.
Ubuntu was my first-ever training-wheels gateway to Linux. I started from 8.04 Hardy Heron, and it felt like such a counter-culture move back then and I wanted to be part of the ‘cool’ edgy goth kids that DGAF about the mainstream normies.
15 years later, I still daily-drive windows, but I have many linux boxes for various specialist use-cases, mainly for scripting or self-hosting services, and still have 22.04 server versions running here and there. But this will be my last version of Ubuntu, and the only reason its still there is because migrating them is going to be no fun.
The Ubuntu today feels like a completely different animal than when I started. My breaking point was the ‘upgrade to pro’ message on every
aptrun. I DON’T WANT TO SIGN UP FOR YET ANOTHER METERED ACCOUNT. I use Linux to escape all the mainstream commercialism and monetization once in a while when I’m up for it. Next thing I know, it starts popping up in Linux OS’s and even terminals asking me to login with an account so that I can be monetized.Don’t get me wrong, I know people need to eat and companies need revenue streams to pay their staff. Linux was my occasional escape back to my engineering and tinkering roots, but corporatism is creeping in like what happens to all good things (eventually).
Most people just want a browser and a word processor plus simple spreadsheets once in a blue moon. For extremely simple and popular use cases many distros already work okayish OOTB, including those with GNOME DE.
While I absolutely don’t like GNOME and its design principles (prefer KDE), but I can see why it works for many people.
Now, for anything but the most popular use cases, that’s a whole different story altogether. I just spent the whole weekend installing and reinstalling every imaginable flavour or Arch and OpenSUSE and trying to get Hyprland or KDE to work on my NVIDIA gpu without issues and failing, then trying to stop my screen from flickering like a drowning sailor desperately trying to Morse code and SOS while on Alder Lake iGPU, and failed too. Two hours ago I wiped for what seemed like the 420th time and went crawling back to W11.
I first beheld the glory of the cube in 2009. It was transcendental. I almost felt my soul leaving my body and ascending to a higher plane of consciousness, where few have treaded and those that truly grasp its majesty, yet fewer still. I was swept up in the spiritual, yet fleeting, ephemeral, and mercurial experience that was like no other. We were no more than ants trying to understand Einstein’s Relativity, or dung beetles oblivious to the sonorous rapture of Mozart.
I flipped the cube for a couple more times to show it to my unimpressed wife, and promptly never booted into Ubuntu since.