Thanks, and that’s what I was thinking might be the case. CachyOS has an easy tool for switching kernels, and I have a vague memory of needing to blacklist certain parameters during boot, but I’ll have to look into that more. Somebody kindly shared a migration guide link elsewhere to look at, and I bet it talks about some of the things you’ve mentioned.
Hopefully I can get away without a reinstall!
Thanks, but NixOS was a bit too esoteric for me. I love the idea, but I could not wrap my head around the syntax no matter how many videos I watched or how much documentation I read.
Handy to know! I would have had an XFX card, but the Nvidia card dropped in price first.
Perhaps I can do the installation just before making the swap. Good to know!
Oh nice, so you swapped from a 3080ti to a 7900XT?
I tried MX Linux, and it didn’t work with my hardware at all! Something was broken with the desktop shell or window manager that drew everything in the wrong places
That’s not to say it’s bad, but it definitely isn’t as plug-and-play as some other distros.
They’re virtually comparable in features, but there’s no denying that the more open nature of AMD naturally leads to fewer pain points. I haven’t had any significant ones (and not ones I know would instead work with AMD), but there could be things that aren’t working well now that I’ve just taken for granted, since I only have the one GPU.
Generally speaking, either GPU should work great for most people for common workloads.
Thankfully, I don’t do much GPU computing outside of simple video editing and games. Cuda was never a selling point for me; it was mainly raytracing, and generally speaking, I don’t use it much anymore now that I’ve experienced the wow factor.
They also did not “inject malicious code into AUR packages” because of some insecurity that needed fixing. They simply took over orphaned packages then modified them.
I agree, but I wanted to clarify this point for anyone: they didn’t “take over orphaned packages” themselves, they took over the individual install processes, provided by the AUR for packages, that have likely been abandoned by the maintainers. The AUR doesn’t host the actual code for software itself; it’s just a set of instructions that tells the client where to grab code from and what to do with it.
Sure, but “works with nVidia” isn’t the same as “works with everything,” since there’s a lot of other hardware to consider, though I’d imagine the latter case would be mostly easy for an end user to work around.
That’s all I’m really pointing out with that part, and if I’m wrong, then it’s only good news for the rest of us.
But the benefit of SteamOS is going to be marginal at best since lots of distros are already highly capable for gaming. Waiting isn’t going to bring with it some magical improvements that makes it the default choice over CachyOS, Bazzite, PikaOS, etc.
I suspect you’ll be disappointed or frustrated by SteamOS, since Valve isn’t really all-in on maintaining a universal distro like other projects (and that’s okay); more likely, it will always be Valve-hardware-first that just happens to work on some other hardware configurations.
IMO, you’re better off jumping into whatever distro interests you rather than expecting SteamOS to fit your use case. My personal choice was CachyOS for daily use and gaming, and it’s been great, but PikaOS would be one I’d consider for another build. I also run Bazzite on an older laptop for some light gaming and HTPC stuff, and that’s been rock solid.
Cool, so the creator of the meme is mad that liberals are choosing people who are actually doing something rather than those who are saying, “Just be patient, we need more bodies!”
The fascists will either be long gone or will have solidified their power by the time there’s “more people.” There’s no more time left to wait for some romantic revolution.
Then start the revolution. What’s stopping you? I see lots of talk of a revolution, but nobody seems to want to be the brave one to die for it.
I would agree with that wisdom in general. I don’t think any package manager would prefer a user piecemeal updates like that.
You would run Windows software with Wine (Bottles is great for this). If you can find an older installer, you would (in theory) install it in a specific directory structured for Wine (called a wine prefix).
If software is too big or heavy, there’s ways to manually install a specific package version on Arch, or you can tell pacman not to upgrade a package you have already installed by noting it should be ignored via a specific section of your pacman.conf
I’m not sure what you mean. There’s a specific section in /etc/pacman.conf for ignoring specific or group/meta packages. You absolutely can ignore specific packages and run a typical pacman -Syu to update everything else just fine.
ETA: and you can upgrade a single package with pacman -Sy <package name>
Can confirm. I have an old 2015 laptop running Bazzite, and it still updates and runs like a champ (and though that’s Fedora, it should be functionally identical to Arch or Debian for most things).
For arch I just have a snapper pacman hook to automatically create snapshots for my btrfs system so I can roll back if an update is just not working.
And if they go with CachyOS and choose Limine as the bootloader, it will be set up automatically! You can also install after the fact, as I did, but I agree that having hooks before and after package updates is very helpful and has come in handy a couple of times.
You’re still in the mindset of Microsoft/Apple. “The latest” doesn’t mean software bloat. Hell, I just updated my packages last night, and the space they took up went down. Package updates typically bring improvements, and I’m always excited to see what optimizations they’ve added. Sometimes, major version changes (e.g. 5.4 to 6.0) bring big changes you might not want or need, but…
…nobody is forcing anything. You get to decide what gets upgraded and when. Arch/Debian isn’t some overarching company dictating when updates happen and what gets updated. It’s a community-driven project, mostly by hobbyists, and updates happen in a piecemeal fashion as individual package maintainers make improvements.
It sounds to me like you should try out both options in a VM. And if you’re planning on Debian, be sure to give PikaOS a try, too.
Oh, thank you! I would have absolutely missed that little detail.