What would you reccomend/use for an alienware laptop m17r5 with amdcpu (idr) and gpu 6850mxt. Idc about adjusting the keyboard lights, I changed it once and never touched it again. I play games like cities skyline, noita, etc. and some vr stuff rarely like vtolvr and warthunder. I use blender and houdinifx.
I’ve seen PopOs reccomended for Blender users but I think thats because it comes with a lot of stuff you need for Nvidia, which isn’t relevant to me with an all amd setup.
Cachyos seems to be the move for best performance with rendering and simulating, was wondering about other options I have since I dont need to worry about nvidia drivers.
I dont like the idea of using ubuntu because of snap packages, but its not a big deal.
While I like tinkering, I do want it to be relatively stable, not suprising me with issues when I need it.
Currently Interested in: CachyOs Debian (leaning towards here if I go the stable route) EndeavorOs Mint (seems popular, is it just simplified?)
EDIT: Went with CachyOs for now, works well, only issue was auto install didn’t work and I needed to manually partition and set the flags for boot and the os drive, other than that it’s been very fast and intuitive using KDE plasma. Recently tried Hyprland with the JaKooLit config, since ML4W didn’t want to work and had bugs, , I like it more than I thought I would.
Might try EndeavorOS and Bazzite on another ssd, they also look interesting.
PopOS is in a rough state. The stable ISO is using absurdly an absurdly outdated desktop, and the beta using COSMIC desktop. I personally love COSMIC, but it is far from stable, so I would not recommend it to most users.
CachyOS is a great distro. The performance gains from its changes won’t be huge, but the people acting like its nonexistent are silly. They also make many upcoming performance improving features like NTSYNC available early in their default kernel.
I definitely wouldn’t go Debian or Mint for gaming personally. I don’t like stable distros with such slow release schedules for gaming, mainly because of stuff like the prior mentioned NTSYNC. You don’t get those new features for a long time.
I saw people recommending Bazzite, which is a distros I highly recommend. The only issue I have with Bazzite is that installing kernel modules they don’t ship is pretty much unsupported and requires a lot of jumping through hoops. Most people won’t need this, but it matters from some use cases like if you need steering wheel drivers.
Have you tried EndeavorOS, any thoughts?
Yep, that was actually my second distros when I switched to Linux a few years ago (right after PopOS). Its a good distro, essentially Arch with a better out of the box setup. If were to go with an arch based distro today, I’d probably choose CachyOS for the package and kernel optimizations, but both are good.
Arch-based distros are definitely CLI centric, but if you don’t mind that then its great! Just keep in mind it is a rolling distro, breakages aren’t super common, but they can occur. A backup using Timeshift is probably a good idea. Also, I wouldn’t rely too heavily on the AUR, remember they are unofficial packages and are more prone to breakage. Id prefer flatpak for GUI apps at least.
You can install them, just not by default and not reccomended*
I think flatpaks aren’t supported by cachy because they inherently have some performance issues?
they work, they just don’t have the same optimizations as the packages in their repo. that’s also true for AUR packages.
I tried cosmic and wasn’t a fan, felt too much like windows, really like kde plasma, like it more than windows, surprisingly like hyprland too, didn’t think I would. Helped that the config I used had a tips/shortcut menu that was obvious to find.
I’m surprised to hear that, I don’t think cosmics default configuration has much in common with windows. It uses a MacOS style dock and and status bar by default. The workflow is also very customizable. I personally use it with just a status bar and always have tiling on, similarly to how one would use Hyprland or another tiling wm, since that’s what I used before cosmic. I love plasma too, but the fact that you can’t have separate workspaces per monitor unfortunately makes it unusable for my workflow.