Sure. I didn’t want to originally as I hate being that guy when someone asks “x or y” shouting “try z!”, lol.
If you are primarily planning to game on the computer, I’d recommend popOS to new to Linux users. System76 has some good tweaks for gaming performance behind the scenes and excellent driver support all out of the box. You can get all of these benefits on other distributions, but it’s work to get them that I wouldn’t recommend to someone not yet pretty comfortable in Linux.
Beyond that, there are 2 others I’d recommend to keep an eye on, maybe not jumping in as your first foray into Linux, but are really good once you have some confidence built up. Those are Bazzite (an immutable fedora off shoot built around gaming, even as a steam deck replacement os but the desktop version is also pretty great as far as my experiences) and Garuda (rolling release arch derivative also geared toward gamers, is usually pretty impressive in benchmarks compared to other distro out of the box). Bazzite has a lot of those same popOS tweaks out of the box, and primarily uses flatpak for stuff you install, so you don’t need to update your entire system just to keep discord happy. Garuda does a good job holding your hand compared to vanilla arch and has a lot of handy stuff setup and installed out of the box, but it is a rolling release so expect to run updates often (for this reason I’m not a fan of using it on an only occasionally used system). Bazzite does recommend against dual booting in the traditional sense using grub, they recommend removing other drive with an os during install and then using bios to choose what to boot, and that’s the biggest reason I’d recommend being more comfortable before trying it. You know your comfort and skill level better than anyone else here.
All that said, I’m not discounting Linux mint - it’s a great os choice for all around use, especially coming from windows. But it may require more tweaking and fiddling to get the best gaming performance out of compared to something built around gaming. Ultimately, same thoughts about fedora - it’s a great all around os, but if your primary concern is gaming it might take more work to get the best experience possible. Not to say your experience will be bad without all that effort either, it’s all to be taken with a grain of salt.
I just hope asahi Linux takes of because the M3 looks sick but I’ll be fucked if I get sucked into the apple ecosystem. I’d rather be forced to use Windows on arm.
I don’t know what GPU you have, whether it is AMD, Nvidia or Intel, but if you use Nvidia, the standard tool is nvidia-smi (if you install the proprietary drivers from here with the optional cuda package, you can access the command) . You will need to combine it with the watch tool for real time info.
I don’t know if there is a unified tool for that but I use btop and nvtop side by side. I don’t really care but if there is one, I’d like to know as well.
I had good experiences with the Zenbook-Flip Series from Asus. Linux support is great, build quality too. It even survived a big drop with only the screen falling out, but still working. I just inserted it again. Battery life is also great which is perfect for university.
Palm rejection did not work reliable however. I just got used to disable the touchpad with a keycombo whenever I started typing longer passages of text.
alias battery='upower -i $(upower -e | grep 'BAT') | grep -E "state|to full|percentage"' # Get the battery level of my laptop server when I ssh into it
alias audio="yt-dlp -f 'ba' -x --audio-format mp3" # Download the audio version of a youtube video
alias wttr="curl wttr.in/Chicago" # Get the weather of my city in the terminal
Terminal Navigation
alias ba2sy="cp ~/.bash_aliases ~/Sync/" # copy my current iteration of my aliases to my shared syncthing folder so that it's accessible across devices
alias sy2ba="cp ~/Sync/.bash_aliases ~/" # replace the current iteration of my aliases w/ the synced version from my syncthing folder
alias mba='micro .bash_aliases' # open my aliases file in the modernized version of 'nano'
alias reload="source ~/.bashrc" # Quickly refresh my system so that the latest alias file is loaded
alias l='exa --group-directories-first -hlras modified --no-user --icons' # exa is a prettier version of ls. Options toggled: Human-readable, long format, reverse output, show hidden files/folders, sort by modified, hide the 'user' column since I'm the only one that uses the computer, and show the icons to make it look fancy```
Replaced Commands
alias cat='batcat --theme=ansi ' # Replace generic output of cat w/ a formatted version. This is bat (batcat in Debian)
alias rm='trash ' # Instead of auto-deleting files, put them in the 'trash' bin for 30 days, then delete.
Server & Docker-related
alias lazy='/home/macallik/.local/bin/lazydocker' # Run Docker
alias pad='ssh MyPad20334' # shorthand to ssh into my server
Not a symlink, but you can add source /path/to/aliases one your bashrc file to load them from another file. I do that and keep all of my dot files in a hit repo.
Out of the box, would only help searching shell commands that have been run, so for files, things like “vim file.txt”, which is obviously not usually how files are edited (you’d use the file browser in a text editor or IDE)
However if you find a way to list all files on your system by modified time, you can pipe it to fzf for a slick fuzzy find search.
I can’t tell you the number of times I have in fact edited files using vim even with a WM and DE. I just treat my laptop like it’s a server I connect directly to now
Oh, or even better how many times I used the terminal in VSC to vim edit something 😂
Hardware wise dell xps 13 2-in-1 is a good choice. However folio is horrible, magnetic stand is way too weak and I still cannot figure out deep sleep/hibernation. Aslo fingerprint scanner doesn’t work.
Another thing is that Linux is not the best choice for a touch device. I’ve tried gnome and kde and they both suck. I’ve also tried plasma mobile and it feels like nearly days of touch screens.
Have you considered Pop OS from System76? Pop OS has a GNOME-like DE where the dock is fully displayed. It’s very much like the macOS DE. The current stable release uses a GNOME-like DE, and the developers at System76 are working to make it into their own DE called Cosmic.
I’m using a Dell Inspiron 2in1 and from the linux side everything runs great. In the three years I have this laptop I tried multiple distros and all worked fine. Besides that the biggest problem was to find a program to make handwritten notes. I really recommend Rnote as it has matured very well over this year and is the only option if you need an infinite canvas to draw on.
I can’t recommend you the hardware tho as it is really aweful. The trackpad gets stuck sometimes and does not come back up with the keyboard showing the same symptoms now, the aluminum chassis gets greasy really fast and the hinges aren’t the best either. Also you must use the cheapest version of all Dell pens because the screen is only compatible with that one pen.
It was a panel that mimics a dock. I can’t remember if it was the existing task bar with modified settings or another panel that can be chosen. However, it’s so customizable that I got it to mimic the macOS dock almost perfectly without downloading anything else IIRC.
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