I definitely second Fedora. I started on Manjaro when windows 11 kicked off their shenanigans and moved over to Fedora since I used it a bit in college. I also got my brother to use Fedora and once he got used to the slight differences he was off to the races. (I was pleasantly surprised since he isn't technical at all, he just wanted something setup so he could play PC games occasionally).
Yeah, I've been pretty happy with Fedora. Bleeding edge which is nice but generally good stability from what I can tell. Only time I borked it was, well my fault really. I've dabbled in other distros and really that's why I'm glad there's so many. Everyone can get their favorite flavor.
If you want something bleeding edge that is still stable, Fedora is the way to go.
Second. There's really no point to Manjaro. Use Fedora, use some OS that's actually just an install script for Arch, or just bite the bullet and install Arch yourself. Manjaro's problem is it's still Arch under the hood and therefore you will have to maintain it like you would Arch.
I should write a guide on this, but the short version of what you can do is run the games either directly with WINE, or use a patched version of WINE that will give you a near-identical Proton experience. The reason that's desirable is Proton has a lot of patches that are either on the way to upstream WINE, or might never make it because they are essentially hacks instead of stable code deserving of being in the upstream WINE project. But the end result is a lot of games are immediately playable at equal to or sometimes even better than Windows performance. Note that this can also be true with just the normal version of WINE you get from your Linux distro, depending on how new that is and the games you want to play.
Like RussianEngineer said, most emulators just have a default Linux version, and you're best off using that. If you're trying to play older games that were made for Windows, you can try to use Lutris (A game manager/launcher) + Wine-GE (a well-regarded custom wine). Using Lutris is really beneficial because once you set up the game, you can just launch it from the GUI. Sort of like Steam, come to think of it, but with a little elbow-grease applied.
https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/wine-ge-custom#installation is the custom Proton version. I always just do the "manual" route.
for outside of steam there's WINE, which is the basis of proton. proton is WINE but with extra patches to make it run the newest games better
for retro stuff i assume you mean emulators, most emulators have a linux version or at least there is a emulator for the console you want on linux
Most games work great on proton. , and sometimes even better than on Windows. Elden Ring runs dramatically better on it.
It's great with the exception of games that use Easy Anti Cheat and equivalent types of software
It seems like any video/guide meant for mainstream audiences will just throw random shit at you without diving into any of its controversies for quick views while all the less flattering information stays in dedicated and advanced forums.
On one hand, you're right. On the other hand, consider that every branch in this graph involved some kind of controversy, if not at least a divergence of requirements. There are a lot of complicated historical, economic, and legal reasons embedded in this as well. It is a really deep subject to dive into when someone's asking "how do I get started?" That said, a 45 minute video which reviews this history landing on a handful of recommendations would be really cool.
You can just switch to the arch repos, there are a few weird pains but the shift is pretty seamless.
Go Debian, is my advice. Non-profit, extremely serious; less cutting edge, but more stability and security. And nothing prevents you from spinning up a more cutting-edge chroot environment in minutes thanks to debootstrap.
Newer versions of each added the
archinstalltool that you can run from the live cd. I haven't tried it, but it probably makes things a lot easier.
this is made even more hilarious by the fact that they use Let's Encrypt, which makes it incredibly easy to automatically renew your certificate
someone translate the context, you nerds, I wanna dunk on the losers too but Im too dum
Manjaro Linux, a notoriously incompetently run distribution, has let their cert expire on their software subdomain. This is the fourth time a manjaro cert has expired. Wiser people caution against using Manjaro for various reasons, but it portrays itself as Arch Linux but with an installer and has a cool default theme so it's a noob trap that gets recommended more than it deserves.
their website (to download software) broke. it should never break. nobody else's website and package delivery system breaks.
Tangentially related, does anyone have experience with NixOS or Guix? I got a little curious to try NixOS yesterday but I have no idea if it's worth the time spent learning the Nix language.
My use case is I want to learn by setting up a home lab, basically just Linux hosting a NAS and a bunch of services in docker containers.
Nix sounds attractive because it has a declarative package manager, so that later if I wanted to expand this single system to a cluster, it'd be trivial to duplicate the system. And it'd let me play around with software without worrying about making sure it's all cleaned up when I'm done.
I wanted to go with arch due to familiarity, but I think rolling release is not a great idea for a server.
NixOS is very interesting, but learning how to set up complex software (like Apache / Nextcloud / Postgres / Matrix (synapse) / etc) can be more time consuming than normal, since not only do you need to read the original manuals, but you also need to cross-reference them with the Nix manuals and oftentimes even the Nix packages themselves. Additionally, some problems which can be fixed with a quick workaround (i.e. GDM using the wrong monitor by default and showing the login prompt on a TV in the other room) become much harder / impossible to fix "The Nix Way(TM)" if there's no setting for you to adjust. When you make a mistake in your Nix scripts, the error tend to be very cryptic and not so helpful in my experience. Once you get something working the way you like though, it's pretty snazzy. The goal is that you invest extra effort up front configuring things, but this dramatically reduces the maintenance burden in the long run, but your milage may vary depending on how mature certain systems are.
After trying out NixOS for a couple months, I ended up returning to Gentoo. Also, don't use NixOps (a third party project). It is steaming trash.
I've used NixOS for the better part of a year now and I really dig it. Having versions to roll back to means you can experiment and basically never fuck things up. Every package you could want is all ready to go. Guix looks pretty great as well, but just haven't gotten around to trying it yet.
I've messed with NixOS coming from Arch. If I'd try again I'd do Guix just so I don't have to learn a new language. I also think Guix is rolling release and IIRC NixOS was really far behind on a lot of packages. If a distro is doing a standard release schedule they need to have a large team and community testing all their packages which Nix doesn't.
Docker and docker-compose basically negates the point of Nix. The only services you really care about are already declared and pinned in you're
docker-compose.ymlfile. NixOS was a good idea but it's not something I'd want to tie myself to. If someone's going to come up with a declarative operating system it's going to be something like docker-compose-OS.I love Nix. Have used it in pretty much every device I can find for a couple of years now. It's really good for development projects because you can make a custom shell with all your tooling available without installing a ton of garbage system wide, and also without container/vm overhead. Home manager is also fun for desktop customization.
I think you'd find the Nix language easy to learn. There's decent guides, a repl to play with, and a lot of examples. You don't even need to fully understand the language to configure NixOS either. I'm pretty sure the NixOS tools can deploy configs to other machines directly over SSH, like Ansible does. You could use that to keep your cluster in sync from one machine, maybe with a CI hook.
The biggest issue with Nix is the confusing tooling. Right now, there is a big shift going on in the community to a new package management solution called Flakes. Flakes are great, but they don't yet have all of the features you might want and most documentation doesn't mention them yet. There's also the matter of Nix being like a little bit too flexible, so there's a lot of ways to do everything but no one correct way.
I’ve been using Manjaro for years on multiple machines. I still like it. This article did not convince me otherwise
