I had a similar issue. I actually wrote myself a text document listing out all of the programs I generally use post-install and any additional setup I did, so that way whenever I am setting up a new system I can quickly refer back to it and save myself a lot of time over doing one-off installs as I run into them.
Welcome! Coming from Windows myself, I made the jump to Manjaro (It has certain issues and I do not recommend it), then to Arch less than a year after. I have been on Arch full time for around 2 years now. After the initial setup, I have found Arch to be pretty low-maintenance and no harder to maintain than any other distro, hardly requiring more than the occasional yay -Syu --noconfirm in the command line to update things. As someone with less computer knowledge than an IT professional, I think Arch’s reputation for being difficult is overblown IMO, and I suspect mostly due to intimidation from the more involved setup process prior to the availability of the install script.
I don’t know if you have any familiarity with Linux already from your work, but regardless of what distro you go with, I would go into it with a mindset that you are learning a new skill. Some things are simply done differently in Linux than Windows and will require getting used to, such as how drives work using mounting points rather than drive letters.
Realistically, setting things up for the first time often requires additional steps and may not “just work,” but when using my laptop and gaming desktop from day to day, it works just like any other OS. Gaming has been great for me generally, and the work Valve has done to improve game compatibility on Linux has been spectacular. Most Steam games do, in fact, “just work” for me.
In the 2-3 years I have been using Linux, I have rarely had things spontaneously break as many folks seem to worry about, or if I do it is because of companies not supporting their Linux communities, like Discord not pushing out updates on time, or major-event changes like the move to the Wayland graphical stack on KDE 6 which undid some of my desktop customization settings.
Oh no, I’ve been caught, haha. Good memory!
To my defense, the story seemed relevant to OP’s question, and the post that it was originally in has been deleted, apparently.
The Arch installation tutorial I followed originally advised using LVM to have separate root and user logical volumes. However, after some time my root volume started getting full, so I figured I would take 10GB off of my home volume and add it to the root one. Simple, right?
It turns out that lvreduce --size 10G volgroup0/lv_home doesn’t reduce the size by 10GB, it sets the absolute size to 10GB, and since I had way more than 10GB in that volume, it corrupted my entire system.
There was a warning message, but it seems my past years of Windows use still have me trained to reflexively ignore dire warnings, and so I did it anyway.
Since then I have learned enough to know that I really don’t do anything with LVM, nor do I see much benefit to separate root/home partitions for desktop Linux use, so I reinstalled my system without LVM the next time around. This is, to date, the first and only time I have irreparably broken my Linux install.
I have not played CS2, sorry.
Arch gamer here. I can confirm that it works well.
What is your use case? For me, something like a fileserver which I am mainly SSH-ing into anyway, I may not install a DE at all, but if this is going to be a general-use desktop, I see no reason not to install the DE right from the beginning, and selecting a DE will be part of the install process of most Linux distros, or some distros have different install disk images that you can download with any given DE which it supports.
If you are very concerned about keeping your system lean and want full control of what gets installed, you might want to look up guides for installing Arch Linux. The initial setup process is more involved than other distros, but once you have it installed, I think its reputation for being difficult is overblown.
Thanks for the reply!
I tried this, and it does not seem to have helped much, if at all. Visual elements like scroll bars and text boxes in Steam continue to flicker, and apps like Discord flicker or go completely black randomly. My main use case for this desktop is gaming, so sadly without more of a fix I am not sure that I can move away from X11 yet.
I do not think your issues are in any way unique. I am also using Plasma 6 on Arch with a 3080 Ti. Initially, it simply booted to a black screen with nothing but a cursor, and no ability to do anything.
Adding the changes to /etc/mkinitcpio.conf per @markus@hubzilla.markusgarlichs.de 's reply as well as adding those kernel params to my /boot/refind_linux.conf, and now it boots into a desktop, but I am seeing large amounts of flickering, windows going black, or visual elements flickering in and out. Looking at my installed packages, I already had both xorg-xwayland and wayland-protocols (per @Varen@kbin.social 's reply) installed.
It seems like there are still more steps before what I would consider a usable result. Personally, it was not “obvious” to me when Plasma 6 rolled out that I needed to do any of this.
Sorry for the late reply. It sounds like it could be due to the dGPU if your battery life is terrible. I don’t know if that method would work or not. I had to try a couple different things before I eventually settled on envycontrol.
I am not sure what graphics you have, but I have an older-ish laptop with hybrid 10-series Nvidia graphics which do not fully power down even with TLP installed. I was finding that it continued to draw a continuous 7W even in an idle state. I installed envycontrol so that I can manually turn off/on hybrid graphics or force the use of integrated graphics. I noticed my battery life jumped from 2-3 hours to 4-5 hours after I did this, and unless I am gaming (which I rarely do on this laptop) I hardly ever need the dgpu in this.
I also use TLP. I have tried auto-cpufreq and powertop, and I found TLP offered the most granular control and worked the best for my system/needs.
I have a laptop with integrated Intel graphics and a desktop with Nvidia graphics. I use Wayland on the former right now as of KDE 6. I have noticed some odd behaviors, but overall it has been fine. The latter, however, just boots to a black screen. I have neither the time nor the desire to debug that right now, so I will adopt Wayland on that machine when it works with Nvidia to a reasonable degree of stability.
Yep, I dual boot on my laptop so that I can run certain programs for my schoolwork as well. I use Refind as my boot manager so that I can easily select one or the other on startup.
Blah blah blah blah blah…
tl;dr the author never actually gets to the point stated in the title about what the “problem” is with the direction of Linux and/or how knowing the history of UNIX would allegedly solve this. The author mainly goes off on a tangent listing out every UNIX and POSIX system in their history of UNIX.
If I understand correctly, the author sort of backs into the argument that, because certain Chinese distros like Huawei EulerOS and Inspur K/UX were UNIX-certified by Open Group, Linux therefore is a UNIX and not merely UNIX-like. The author seems to be indirectly implying that all of Linux therefore needs to be made fully UNIX-compatible at a native level and not just via translation layers.
Towards the end, the author points out that Wayland doesn’t comply with UNIX principles because the graphics stack does not follow the “everything is a file” principle, despite previously admitting that basically no graphics stack, like X11 or MacOS’s graphics stack, has ever done this.
Help me out if I am missing something, but all of this fails to articulate why any of this is a “problem” which will lead to some kind of dead-end for Linux or why making all parts of Linux UNIX-compatible would be helpful or preferable. The author seems to assume out of hand that making systems UNIX-compatible is an end unto itself.
My particular testing was with an SSK SD300, which is roughly 500MB/s up and down. I have benchmarked this and confirmed it meets its rating.
I have thought about buying something like a Team Group C212 or Team Group Spark LED, which are rated at 1000MB/s. The 256GB version of the C212 is available on places like Newegg and Amazon for around $27 USD at time of writing, but they make variants as high as 1TB.
I have done some basic testing, and the speed of the USB stick you use does make a noticeable difference on the boot time of whatever you install on it.
If I recall correctly, A low speed USB 2.0 stick took around 30-60 seconds to load (either time to login screen or time to reach a blinking cursor for something like an arch install disk). If this is something for occasional use, even this works perfectly fine.
Slightly faster USB 3 sticks in the 100MB/s range can be had for only around $5-15 USD and work significantly better, maybe 7-15 seconds. These usually have assymetric read/write speeds, such as 100MB/s read and 20MB/s write, but for a boot disk the read speed is the primary factor.
Some high end flash drives can reach 500-1000MB/s and would load in only a few seconds. A high speed 256GB stick might cost $25-50, and a 1TB stick maybe $75-150.
An NVMe enclosure might cost $20-30 for a decent quality 1GB/s USB 3 enclosure, or $80-100 for a thunderbolt enclosure in the 3GB/s range so long as your hardware supports it, plus another $50-100 for a 1TB NVMe drive itself. This would of course be the fastest, but it is also bulkier than a simple flash drive, and I think you are at the point of diminishing returns in terms of performance to cost.
I would say up to you on what you are willing to spend, how often you realistically intend to use it, and how much you care about the extra couple seconds. For me, I don’t use boot disks all that often, so an ordinary 100MB/s USB 3 stick is fine for my needs even if I have faster options available.
As others have mentioned, secondhand laptops and surplus business laptops are very affordable and probably better value for the money than a chromebook. My understanding is that drivers for things like fingerprint sensors, SD card readers, or oddball Wi-Fi chipsets can be issues to watch out for. But personally I don’t care about the fingerprint sensor and only the Wi-Fi would be a major issue to me.
A couple years ago now I picked up a used Acer Swift with 8th gen intel and a dent in the back lid for something like $200 to use as my “throw in a backpack for travel” laptop, and it has been working great. In retrospect, I would have looked for something with 16GB of RAM or upgradeable RAM (8GB soldered to the motherboard, ugh), but aside from that minor gripe it has been a good experience.
The Arch installation tutorial I followed originally advised using LVM to have separate root and user logical volumes. However, after some time my root volume started getting full, so I figured I would take 10GB off of my home volume and add it to the root one. Simple, right?
It turns out that lvreduce --size 10G volgroup0/lv_home doesn’t reduce the size by 10GB, it sets the absolute size to 10GB, and since I had way more than 10GB in that volume, it corrupted my entire system.
There was a warning message, but it seems my past years of Windows use still have me trained to reflexively ignore dire warnings, and so I did it anyway.
Since then I have learned enough to know that I really don’t do anything with LVM, nor do I see much benefit to separate root/home partitions for desktop Linux use, so I reinstalled my system without LVM the next time around. This is, to date, the first and only time I have irreparably broken my Linux install.
Not my preference personally, but cool.
For most things it has not been an issue. Mice and keyboards have all been plug and play for me. Bluetooth headphones also work just fine for me. Setting up a printer was probably easier to do than in windows. My USB DAC, external hard drives, USB SD card readers, etc. have all been plug and play.
A persistent issue in Linux, however, are gaming peripherals. Anything which requires proprietary vendor software to configure RGB settings may be an issue. OpenRGB detects and allows me to configure the RGB on my Logitech G Pro Wireless Mouse, and I picked up a secondhand Drop CTRL mechanical keyboard which I was also able to reprogram in Linux, but broadly speaking any peripheral which requires dedicated software to program may or may not allow reconfiguration on a case-by-case basis. The last time I had to boot into Windows was to re-bind the key-map on an off-brand USB footswitch, which was a one-time fix and then it has worked fine since then. Similarly, the RGB on the keyboard in my Gigabyte laptop can only be configured from Windows.
On the laptop side, the main things to watch out for will be compatibility issues with fingerprint readers and certain oddball WiFi chipsets, but generally speaking my peripheral experience has been good.