I switched to Linux and have no issues with gaming. There are a couple of settings that need tweaked in steam, but it doesn’t take a computer genius to figure it out, just follow a guide or video.
For a beginner something like Mint might be the easiest transition. I went with Garuda myself, and it’s worked well, but I feel it’s probably a little less intuitive that something like Mint.
For gaming, look into proton, and how to have your games run with it and you’ll probably be fine. Keep your windows key on hand in case you decide to revert.
HoloISO is SteamOS for non Steam Decks. That would be great option for something that “just works” and is designed for use from the couch with a controller. I haven’t tried this but I’m sure there’s a way to install Kodi for media too.
I don’t really know, other than the other 2 are updated on a nearly daily basis and Chimera is Arch-based (like SteamOS) with Gnome UI while Bazzite is Fedora-based.
Nobara could be a great choice for your setup. It’s a version of Fedora, made by a very well respected Fedora team member, setup with gaming in mind. It comes with many of the drivers you’d have to download using most other distros. Being Fedora based means you can tinker with anything you wanted to change. I recommend the KDE spin, KDE is known as the swiss army knife of environments. It’s super intuitive too. I’m actually in a bit of an emulator phase right now, I have had zero issues using KDE Fedora while figuring it all out!
Linux is probably not the wisest choice for gaming - that would still be Windows. Anyway, the distribution does not matter that much. You can install most Linux and cross-platform software on most distributions. Do not choose your system because of what comes as the default desktop, default package set et cetera. Try a few ones. Read some reviews.
GamePass is a service for mildly entertaining games (around 7/10 score). The better ones leave the service Netflix style all the time and for the games I’ve checked DLC was not included, so purchasing needed.
Destiny 2 fell down to mixed reception in recent months according to Steam. Most Sony PC games launch Steam Deck verified these days. Same for many other games. Since SteamOS is a Linux distribution, compatibility extends to other mainstream distributions.
Then it should be easy to create a script that install all that automaticcally. If your are cautious you should have a backup of your home anyway on some storage device .
.config stores many apps settings. But unfortunately some apps stores that directly in ~ as hidden files and directories. Personnally I make a backup of my whole home.
So is this possible? and if yes, how should I go about this? did someone make a tool for this already? Or(!) can I burn it to a flash and the drivers will correct themselves/I’ll deal with them later?
I think this is where a few respondents got the impression you are looking at this like a Windows install. It is not. All of the drivers, minus proprietary (also called non-free) drivers (i.e., Nvidia, file format support, etc), are already included in the installation. On laptops, this can get weird with some of the laptop-specific hardware, but most of it works out of the box most of the time. Exceptions are old WinTel-era wireless and networking cards which needed a terrible driver wrapper, but has long since fallen out of favor. Thankfully!
~/boot is at the root of the drive. Your home folder should be in ~/home/username. THAT you can copy wholesale. I believe. Don’t take my word for it. Deja Dup can do it for you, as well, or the entire system.
If you don’t encrypt the drive, yes. Some things you will have to reauthenticate, however, like your online accounts, but when those are reconnected everything should work as intended. That you should confirm, however. I don’t encrypt, though I should ;)
I’m not an expert in Linux, but I’ve been using it for more than 20 years. I used to be plagued by this issue, but since online services have matured, I’ve got most of my stuff synced up. That, and my NAS and an external drive for backups. I do have a few thoughts, though.
One, I believe you can simply copy your /home directory and restore your OS settings by restoring it to a new install. This strikes me as a limiting option, as it doesn’t allow you to distro hop, at least not seamlessly. Also, get an external drive for backups. I use Deja Dup for simple, easy backups and restorations.
Two, I would suggest you investigate either Fedora (getfedora.org) or Pop_OS! (pop.system76.com) as an alternative. Fedora is based on Red Hat, which is very mature, but strikes a nice balance between the latest software and reliability. Pop_OS! is Debian-based, which is also a very well matured OS, though System76 has made some major improvements. I use their Pop Shell extension for GNOME on Fedora 39 for window tiling, easily the best I’ve used on any Linux distro. Regardless, almost any other distro should be easier to get going over Arch. Sorry, Arch users ;)
Three, if you really don’t want to leave Arch, check out Manjaro. It’s Arch-based, but it’s quite a bit easier to set up.
Four, if you’d still like to try borking things, but without facing consequences, I’d set up a local VM using Boxes for GNOME or VirtualBox (www.virtualbox.org). That way you can test stuff without risking your functional system. Boxes is better, IMO, since it can install distros from the app itself. The list has at least 100 distros of all types to choose from, including Haiku and FreeBSD. It would be good, however, if you have at least 16GBs of RAM, though I generally run VMs with 4GBs of RAM, Linux can run fine with 2GBs.
tbh I bearly have experience in any distro, but Arch didn’t pose that much of a challange. I might switch, but I really don’t see the advantage I’d get. Maybe to Debian, I used it’s terminal. But, great Idea to mess around in VMs first!
Can you explain this step:
and restore your OS settings by restoring it to a new install.
I’m utterly useless with base arch 🤣 If it works for you, who’m I to complain 👍
I guess I should have made that clear. Your /home directory is where everything user-related is stored in invisible folders. All your settings for the OS and applications are kept in there. So, if you copy that directory and restore it to a fresh install of the same distro, all of your settings will be restored. It’s been years, but I’ve done it a few times.
The only thing you’ll really need to do after that is re-install all of the apps you installed. Once you have, however, every apps settings are restored.
Thank you. You wrote so much that I checked out your profile, I just wanna say: Enjoy your time on Lemmy! And that I am honored to have more then half of your all time comments be answers to me.
heading in a completely different direction that what you were aiming for, but the declarative distros (currently a subset of immutable distros) like NixOS and Guix are trying to solve just this sort of issue – their main focus is on dealing with development environments but a lot of people have been enjoying them on desktop environments as well
ex. with NixOS, your entire system configuration is stored in one master config file /etc/nixos/configuration.nix (that you can optionally keep synced with git) – the main config can be modularized (ie. break out the hardware definitions into its own include so you can still use the master config on both desktop and laptop) – and Nix has been making big strides with Home Manager, their own way of being able to collect and define all of your home directory config files and theming
currently, NixOS is not for the faint-of-heart, documentation (both quality and lack of) regularly gets critiqued – NixOS and Nix package manager are all configured in the Nix language, a functional language used nowhere else
Guix comes out of the GNU project so dealing with proprietary drivers is harder than it needs to be – Guix is configured in Guile Scheme
You’re not the only one who mentioned NixOS. But you warned me about the quality. Thank you.
Also, I’d really not want to switch of my current system. I already have data, configs and everything. I probably could re-do it in days, but seems like a lot of struggle to use a worse distro in the other 99% of the time when I’m not thinking about moving configs to my laptop.
It’s a better distro, not a worse one. This is because it has easy rollbacks, upgrades, etc. You never get stuck with a broken system since the previous state is in another entry when you boot. You only need to hit down arrow and enter to go back to the previous configuration even if you can’t boot right now
It’s really hard to [accidentally] permanently break Linux to the point of requiring a reinstall.
Here’s a really good tip: Keep a live distro (I use Mint) on a USB drive. If something real bad happens, you can boot into the live distro, and chroot into your OS and do the repairs you need. While also having a live distro with web access and a browser to help.
I broke my GRUB once (or twice) and fixed it again this way.
Keep a backup of your /boot folder, GRUB (or equivalent) configs, etc, also check documentation on Arch wiki for boot process. 99.9% of the time you should be able to fix things to at least get to a TTY after boot.
I have done something similar following this post - loads of others have created similar scripted installers for Arch for their specific use cases and this guide takes it one step further with custom arch meta packages that hold deps and system wide config.
You can also do similar things with tools like ansible or saltstack or similar tools. Though these all take the approach of define your configs and system to automate the setting up of a system approach rather than the backup or clone an existing system. So are more effort initially but are able to keep multiple system in sync with system configs with far less effort then trying to create a backup/restore system for organically created configs.
that wouldn’t work (I think) because my laptop has vastly different hardware
Should not matter, you can install all the packages all your system need - such as both nvidia, amd and intel graphics drivers and the kernel will only load the ones for the hardware you have booted with. Or if you really need different configs or packages for different systems the various approaches have ways to do that.
Most done with the latter. But the nice thing is once you have done it once it is much easier to keep things up to date and in sync from then on words. You can also peace meal it - setup one application at a time and migrate things one by one over to it.
painstakingly manually code every unique facet
That makes it sound a lot worst then it actually it. It is only a bit more effort then setting something up for the first time manually. And pays its self back many times over when you next need to reinstall or install a new system. Assuming you keep up with making changes to the code and not directly to your system each time.
This is basically the reason why I wanted to ask early. Two problems.
Already kinda late… And, idk how to configurate Firefox addons from the terminal. Even if I did, there’re a bunch of other apps too. I’d need to do so much research.
I don’t know by heart if it’s able to do your bidding, but perhaps it’s worth checking out penguins-eggs. I guess the following would be its elevator pitch:
“penguins-eggs is a console tool, under continuous development, that allows you to remaster your system and redistribute it as live images on usb sticks or via PXE.
The default behavior is total removal of the system’s data and users, but it is also possible to remaster the system including the data and accounts of present users, using flag --clone. It is also possible to keep the users and files present under an encrypted LUKS file within the same resulting iso file, flag --cryptedclone.
You can easily install the resulting live system with the calamares installer or the internal TUI krill installer.”
You dont even need a separate partition, just dont format and dont delete the /home folder. You can even keep the /etc folder as well to keep system wide settings.
I just copied my whole root partition to a new Laptop over netcat. It still has close hardware (Intel CPU, no extra GPU, etc.), but some differences in interfaces etc.
Things one might have to consider:
/etc/fstab will need to be redone
All interfaces changed, so network configs may need to be updated
Other programs relying on hardware or paths that don’t exist anymore need to be updated (eg. conky did not work due to i8k being not supported, other interface ids etc.)
But literally nothing that would break anything. Because Arch is usually installed manually, one knows what needs to be cared for, what could break or could cause certain issues.
Analyzing your comment in a different light. What your saying is if I copy my /home (someone said /etc too) over to my laptop, and back it up as well, I’m golden?
would different hostnames and usernames make a problem? As far as my knowledge goes it won’t as long as I also bring /etc over, but I have no Idea if /etc is connected to something deeper or not.
And also also, might seem like a dumb question but I had to edit a file to automount my other disks at startup, won’t it like break everything if my system only gets /home after boot or something? Caz I have enought free space to copy over my existing /home, delete it, partition, and mount it back. What’d the benefits and dangers be?
if I copy my /home (someone said /etc too) over to my laptop, and back it up as well, I’m golden?
/home yes., but ideally only files and dirs starting with a dot (so called “dotfiles” under your home dir. tar cvfa homedots.tar.gz /home/username/.??* should take care of it.
Please note it will include some large stuff that’s probably not needed, like .cache, or some individual caches for other apps that don’t use .cache, like the browsers.
Don’t copy /etc, it’s usually machine-specific.
would different hostnames and usernames make a problem?
Hostname no (if you don’t bring etc). Username technically yes, you may want to rename the home dir. The user id and group id are important too but usually off it’s the first user on the same distro it will receive the same ids (typically 1000 nowadays). If not, you can change that manually and recursively chown 1000:1000 -r /home/username.
To clarify, /etc can have things that are relevant for the machine so you may want to back it up, but it’s not usually transferrable directly to another machine because it probably doesn’t play the exact same role. It has things like service configs, network configs etc.
Even if you’re trying to migrate a machine to new hardware and the machine will play the same role it’s best to pick and choose files from /etc/ on a case by case basis. What I do is grab a tarball of /etc and set it aside, then if I need to redo something the same way it was on the old machine I can dig through the tarball and only use the relevant files.
Like I said it’s extremely specific. For example if I want to reconfigure the SSH daemon that’s usually a couple of lines which I know by heart (turn root login and password logins off) which I can do by hand; if I want to reconfigure CUPS printing it’s best to use the CUPS admin interface to autodetect the printer, you don’t usually want to mess with its config files; for some things like /etc/fstab or NFS or RAID I may want to copy some stuff but edit the disk UUIDs; for some things like Samba I could in theory copy the config straight over. It varies.
The list of installed packages may also be relevant when you migrate to a new machine. Different distros have different commands for obtaining a list of installed packages, and different ways of using that on the new machine to restore the same package selection. This is useful and typically can get you started much faster on the new machine.
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