Getting rid of Windows -- Blood's list of Linux distros

So as a follow up to my other thread, this will be a list of my experience with various Linux distros, in which I will include strong and weak points and my overall thoughts.

Artix

Artix is a fork of Arch, created back when Arch decided to adopt SystemD. At first it was heavily dependent on Arch repos, but in time the Artix crew was able to port a very sizeable chunk of packages with SystemD dependencies stripped out. It is still possible to use Arch repos if needed.

The good: A LOT of packages. Bleeding edge so always up to date. OpenRC is solid and stable. Choice of desktop environments and units -- OpenRC, runit, System66, all with their own strengths. GUI installer.

The bad: Using a different init means you will have to spend some time and brain cells to get some stuff working.

NVIDIA support: Closed driver, no freezing.
Package manager: Pacman

Fedora

Fedora is the FOSS version of Red Hat Enterprise. It is one of the oldest still active distros. Fedora is well known for it's bedrock stability.

The good: GUI installer, super stable, rolling release.

The bad: Fedora does not ship with proprietary drivers. You have to install repos and to a bit of tinkering to get closed source stuff working like NVIDIA. No Optimus switchable GPU support.

NVIDIA support: Yes, no Optimus Manager.
Package manager: DNF

OpenSUSE

OpenSUSE is the FOSS version of SUSE Linux, a competitor of Red Hat. There are two versions, Tumbleweed, a rolling release, and Leap, a stable build.

The good: YaST is a great system management tool with GUI. Super stable and smooth.

The bad: NVIDIA drivers break the system for a reason I have not figured out yet.

NVIDIA support: Broke my system.
Package manager: Zypper

Void

A completely independent (and by that I mean not based on Arch, Debian, etc) distro started by a former NetBSD developer. Void is very close in spirit to the BSD and feels like a Linux/BSD hybrid in a way. Void can be set up with ZFS which is a HUGE bonus because ZFS is

The good: No SystemD. Very stable. Offered in a musl version also. Supports ZFS!

The bad: Being small and independent, updates are not as frequent. I have nothing else bad to say about Void.

NVIDIA support: Broke my install.
Package manager: XBPS. Uses prebuilt binaries but DEB packages can be converted and compiled.

Arch

Ah yes, one of the bedrocks of Linux. Arch is a minimalist not quite user friendly install process that will give you a barebones system to build on top of.

The good: No useless unwanted packages. Install what you want and need. AUR, the largest selection of Linux software available bar none. Bleeding edge yet stable with very frequent updates.

The bad: SystemD. AUR packages can in rare cases break dependencies and ruin updates. Have not had that happen myself but I heard stories

NVIDIA support: Works perfectly. Optimus Manager also.
Package manager: Pacman

Several Arch-based distros exist.

Gentoo

Ah yes, every Linux user's master trial. Gentoo is a source based distro instead of binary so everything needs to be compiled. The good thing is that you have absolute control over absolutely everything about your install. So in terms of raw performance Gentoo is by far the best.

The good: No SystemD! Portage is . Customizable to a degree you cannot imagine.

The bad: User unfriendly install process that takes a long time because of all the compiling. It will take at least 3-4 attempts before being successful. Not an issue for me but it will push away potential users. Portage has a steep learning curve.

NVIDIA support: Works perfectly.
Package manager: Portage

A user-friendly version of Gentoo called Redcore exists and it's a good way to get familiar with Gentoo.

Manjaro

A more user friendly Arch with a GUI installer.

The good: Hardware detection is really good. Comes bundled with Steam out of the box.

The bad: Updates are at least two months behind Arch.

NVIDIA support: Works just fine.
Package manager: Pacman

XeroLinux

Another Arch based distro with emphasis on the desktop and eye candy.

The good: GUI installer, choice of packages at install so you can theorically bypass AUR for basic stuff like Optimus Manager and other utilities.

The bad: Uses the KDE desktop by default. It's really a pain in the arse to remove because it breaks a LOT of dependencies. For a distro focused on "eye candy" I am not impressed. It's basically just Latte docks over a KDE desktop

NVIDIA support: Worked perfectly (Arch lineage)
Package manager: Pacman

Slackware

No list would be complete without the OG of all OGs, the almighty Slackware. It's what I cut my Linux teeth into initially and it's a distro I still very much dearly love to this day. It's closer to the BSDs in spirit.

The good: No SystemD! Super stable and solid, wide selection of packages to choose from. No bleeding edge, Slackware is slow to adopt new things until they have proven themselves.

The bad: Slackpkg does not handle dependencies. So if you want to install something you will need to manually install all dependencies in the spirit of UNIX. Infrequent releases.

NVIDIA support: Works just fine
Package manager: Slackpkg

Elementary OS

A *buntu based distro selling itself as a MacOS replacement. Uses a custom desktop environment called Pantheon to somewhat mimic the look of MacOS.

The good: User friendly, GUI installer, GUI package manager.

The bad: *buntu lineage. Devs try to charge money for eOS (check out their website if you don't believe me). APT package manager.

NVIDIA support: Works fine
Package manager: APT

FreeBSD

And I close this list with one of my personal favourites. FreeBSD is a direct descendent of AT&T UNIX, which has evolved into it's own OS, and a very good one at that.

The good: Legendary stability and rock solidness. Reboot not necessary after updating. Linuxulator means you can pretty much run anything that runs on Linux on FreeBSD. Native ZFS

The bad: Linuxulator while quite good isn't perfect. Steam gaming is still very rough. Only natively supported Linux games can run and Proton does not work with FreeBSD.

NVIDIA support: Worked perfectly. FreeBSD has a native hybrid driver for Optimus.
Package manager: PKG

In conclusion: All of the above have their own strong and weak points. But Arch and Artix to me stand a cut above because they are not broken by the NVIDIA drivers.

In the end, it's about finding something you are comfortable with and that works. All of those have varying degrees of difficulty with Gentoo being the Master level.

You've been busy. This should be stickied.

It's what I had time to play with at work. My Acer Nitro secondary HDD has been quite the guinea pig if I may be so honest. I kept looking and distro hopping hoping to find my perfect distro, and it was Arch. Then I realized the problems with SystemD, and Artix came to my attention.

I originally allocated 90GB to Artix because I wasn't sure how it would work out after a pretty bad experience with the LXQt version. But the Xfce version blew everything out of the water, OpenRC works great and my system uses even less RAM than Arch did. I stretched the partition to 250GB and I may end up reclaiming the 500GB I gave Arch for Artix.

I tried to give a shot to distros with all levels of difficulty, from the entry level Elementary OS, to medium like Void and Arch, and to flat out master level of Gentoo. FreeBSD I would cly as advanced. It definitively requires brain cells but adaptation also as BSD is different from Linux even though it is also ssimilar, if this makes sense.

I left out Debian, *buntu and the "entry level distros" because quite frankly I don't care about those. Not to say they don't have their place in the ecosystem, it's just not for me. I don't mind digging to find a solution to a problem, I don't mind tinkering and I hate having a pre-heated pre-packaged distro. Arch gives me a barebones system and that's how I like it, I build on top and add what I want instead of trimminh useless fat. Plus the more useless packages installed the greater the risk of breaking dependencies while cleaning up. KDE was just nearly impossible to remove from Xero.

Having to trim useless fat is exactly what we've been doing with Windows so it's ironic to end up in the same predicament.

I had to go out of my way to get rid of Cortana and some of that Windows bull that comes with a new OS install so I'm not looking forward to finding myself in the same position when I decide to give Linux a proper go.

Generally speaking, even the canned distros while they bundle packages generally only have useful stuff like an office suite, file manager, music player, video player and so on, so really it's nowhere near as much of a trim as it is with Winblows. It depends on your choice of distro.

Personally I like having entire control over my system and choosing what I want to install and what I don't, and it's why I. especially fond of Arch and Gentoo, you build a system the way you like it with what you want on it.  That said Artix comes bundled with some packages and a GUI installer but the final ISO is 1.2GB, IIRC, which is significantly less than say, OpenSUSE at 4.7GB. The worst offenders have to be the *buntu, and Elementary.

If you know what you are doing and are comfortable with command lines it's no issue removing dead wood and it's generally a good idea.

Cortana was ridiculous. Holy shit that pissed me off about Win10. All that telemetry bollocks... No wonder Win is free, you are the product now.

Everything Win does Linux is catching up at lightning speed. Gaming with Proton has came so incredibly far it's almost unbelievable. Sometimes I forget I am running a Win game on Artix!

If there's one downside of Proton and this might be exclusive to the program, but MZ slows down to a crawl after 30-45 minutes of use. I just need to save, shut it down and restart and it's fine. But, it happens faster with Arch so is this a SystemD thing? I am not sure.

This is interesting. If I didn't have an oversized gaming library I would be tempted to do it your way and ditch Windblows. Truth is after years of relying on a laptop as my main machine I'm looking forward to playing on a machine without having to worry aout thermal throttling all the time. I had to undervolt my laptop and keep an eye on temperatures all the freaking time. I actually gave up on games that would push it too hard. I've grown to distrust Unity Engine titles and loathe GeForce Experience. I'm definitely looking forward to switching to AMD.

Well, after tinkering with a lot of distros and wiping my HDD more times than I can count, I have finally found my chosen one distro.

And this chosen one is Void.

I liked Void, so I had to dig as to what was causing the black screen issue. And I have isolated it to nouveau, NVIDIA's open source garbage driver. It was promptly blacklisted from all necessary configuration files and banished forever... and this took care of the problem. Now, the proprietary NVIDIA driver is running just fine along with Optimus. The proprietary driver contains the prime-run package, which punched in CLI, effectively switches to the NVIDIA driver. I can run demanding games like Wasteland 3 and Doom 2016 with zero issues, other than some occasional artifacting. Proton has came a LONG way and every passing day becomes a bigger threat to the Windows ecosystem.

Software wise, most of what I use daily I was able to obtain on the Void repos. I ran into some Lib issues with Steam, and Lutris is not offered and so is Minecraft, so I downloaded those from Flatpak. If you are not aware of what Flatpak is, it's a distro-neutral package installer solution. That means if something isn't in your chosen distro's repositories, just install it with FP. It also handles dependencies so no issues there. Of course, Void cannot compete with Arch and the AUR. But that's not the point. XBPS allows building of packages from source also so if a crucial piece of software you use is nott available on the Void repos or Flatpak, compile it yourself and voila.

Updates aren't as bleeding edge as Arch, but they are the critical stuff i up to date, I.E the kernel is on 5.19, the latest release. Other packages are on the stable release which is just fine.

I am very fond of Pacman, but to be honest, XBPS beats the ever living hell out of Pacman. XBPS chews through updates quickly, cleanly and efficiently.

Hardware support is excellent as is the case with pretty much all Linux distros.

Void also uses runit instead of SystemD. Runit is a fantastically well written, efficient piece of software that does what it's supposed to and is not in the way, unlike SystemD.

So the bottom line -- Void is intended for more advanced users, but once you get the hang of it, it is a fantastic dstro. Being a fully independent one it is also not based on anything else (Debian, Arch, Gentoo, Slackware)

Void has earned not only it's place on my HDD, but it's earned the entirety of it.

High praise. Sounds like your quest is finally over!

Yes. That said I will miss Arch and the AUR, but Artix packages I needed had issues with SystemD dependencies which are nonexistent in Void. I will try my hand at building XBPS packages from source soon enough.

Void feels very much like a BSD and that's a good thing. I love the BSDs but it's not quite viable yet as a desktop for my use. Steam Proton does not work (although WINE Proton does), amd hardware support is more limited.

Getting the entirety of my HDD is a feat not many before have accomplished. But I don't have the time or patience for a fresh Gentoo install amd Slackware not tracking dependencies is an issue for me. Ioved OpenSUSE and understand the problem likely was the same but I not switching again. Not whem Void does everything I need and does it bloody well.

In the end, Artix ended up redeeming itself --

Turns out that to run Steam natively on Artix, you need the Multilib repos from BOTH Artix AND Arch enabled.

Now I was able to bypass that completely using Flatpak which handles dependencies on it's own, but good to know.

That said I am not taking back my choice of Void as my chosen one. It is fantastic and after seeing me tinker with it my coworker wanted to try it so I switched his dual boot from Win10/Fedora to Win10/Void.

I also tried Devuan (Debian without SystemD) on an old 32 bit machine and I have to say I was not terribly impressed. Kernel was at 5.13 and that GUI installer was... weird. Plus there is so little documentation on it that hell might just run Debian.

I could not ever get FreeBSD working on the POS Macbook. So$ething in the UEFI conflicts and freezes FreeBSD. Oh well.

TL;DR: Void still awesome and king of my HDD. Artix my second fab. FreeBSD unfortunately drops off my radar for now.

So you're still hunting for a better option? It's truly a never-ending quest!

Oh no, Void is my chosen one. But it's foolish to put blinders on and not look at what other distros have to offer. Some distros are general purpose, others more specific (Alpine). But at the end of the day my old Macbook runs Artix and my new one will also, but my main machine runs Void and that's not changing. Artix performs better than Void on Mac hardware so it's a no brainer when it comes to dealing with Mac hardware quirks.

I got seven laptops. Each one will run something different depending on specific needs I have for each machine.

Seven? How can you find a use for that many laptops? Are you collecting them?

Yep.

Nitro, my main machine, runs Void. Used for both gaming and work.
Macbook 2008, runs Artix, used for work and light gaming when bringing my Nitro is not possible or risky
Asus Eee, runs Devuan, pure work PC when I need something compact and battery efficient
Macbook 2012, will run Artix and replace my 2008
One Dell running Devuan, work and basic gaming when I need a bigger screen
Another Dell I cannot use because GPU is borked, working on it
Toshiba Satellite running Alpine used as a server

How do you manage to keep track of all your systems? It must take a lot of time to maintain them all?

Artix has regular updates as a bleeding edge distro so I need to regularly update but it's a straightforward process.

My Nitro as main machine is my focus, Void isn't updated as often as Artix but really, it's not that necessary.

The 2008 Macbook is my secondary machine, I copied all MV and MZ projects on a flash drive and copying back and forth between the two whenever I do any work on any of those projects.

Eee and the Devuan Dell I update every now and then but being that Devuan is a Debian fork and that Debian is not known for being keen on updates rather sticking to stable, old packages instead of bleeding edge like Artix. Beyond that my necessary documents and even music and videos are on a flash drive. Both are 32 bit so no Steam and way too underpowered for it anyway.

The 2012 Macbook will need a RAM upgrade (I have 16GB of DDR3 in ne of my drawers actually) but it will have enough juice for RPGMZ. I am also kind of wondering if it will be Artix or if I am going to take a risk in installing Void on Mac hardware. We'll see when it gets here.

Toshiba Satellite is my game server so it's only powered on when I need to run, say, Minecraft or something else of the sort.

So this technically is kind of Linux related (well, UNIX/BSD), so I will add it here.

MacOS. I upgraded my Macbook Pro 2012 to Catalina (10.15/the latest version before 11). It is a really superb work OS, chocked full of little quality of life tweaks and an excellent performance.

However... Things hit a snag with gaming. For multiple reasons. First, Steam's Mac library is pretty small at 7000 titles overall... And mine shrink to about 50ish based on my library.

The second snag is that OS Catalina dropped all support for 32 bit and is a pure 64 bit OS. Now, not a problem per se... buuuut it becomes one when you can no longer run 32 bit Steam games. So my Steam library shrinks even more.

GOG -- Nothing of my library runs on Mac. Dragon Age 2 does but 32 bit... So won't run.

So bottom line, MacOS, while a superb work OS, is the worse possible choice for gaming. So this Mac will be recycled as a Linux box... Artix with runit and KDE Plasma.

They weren't kidding when they said you don't get a Mac for games!

No you do not... Apple hardware is slick, but is prone to thermal issues (both of my Macbooks get BLISTERINGLY HOT), and unless you get in the higher range, it's usually very underpowered.

My 2012 Macbook Pro has an Intel HD 4000 GPU. A bloody built in GPU. For a line of machines that's meant for serious video, music and image editing. It is a joke. Now don't get me wrong, with a RAM upgrade to 6GB and Redcore instead of MacOS, it's a fine machine and I am throughly enjoying it. But add those factors to the abysmal number of games and the inability to run 32 bit games (I suppose killing off 32 bit was "courageous", like killing the 3.5mm headset jack on iPhones) makes this a very bad proposal for gaming. You could viably get a significantly better PC or laptop for a fraction of the price.

But, like I said, throughly enjoying the MBP. I just don't understand why Apple sticked with Broadcom for WiFi chipsets, a manufacturer that is notoriously bad under Linux. Artix just wouldn't recognize it despite the proper driver being installed, but Redcore came to the rescue by having this bloody Broadcom Airport bollocks working right out of the box. Gentoo never fails to deliver. I need to get my feet wet again and then make a Gentootop with this Macbook and squeeze optimal performance out of it.

EDITED

Devuan

Devuan is a fork of Debian, without SystemD. Devuan uses SysVInit which is an ol' reliable and better than SysD.

Debian is a distro with fixed releases (every 2 years IIRC) and isn't rolling like Arch, Artix, Fedora, etc. Although, by modifying your sources list you can switch to chimaera-backports or Ceres, which is sort of a semi-rolling release with newer packages. Devuan Chimaera by default has kernel 5.10, which is crusty, but then again, STABLE. By upgrading to chimaera-backports, I went up to kernel 6.0.0.12, which is not bad, Arch is on 6.2 so only two major releases behind, which I feel is a healthy balance between stable and bleeding edge.

Package manager is APT. Having used XBPS and Pacman almost exclusively needless to say I was in unknown territory. But after some headscratching and some research I for the most part figured it out. APT has Aptitude, while slower, it handles dependencies far better and if you encounter any issues installing packages.

Devuan can also install .Deb files via Gdebi.

The good: Apt and Aptitude are surprisingly good. Devuan mirrors downstream Debian, so Devuan has access to a library of software only rivalled in quantity by Arch's AUR. The simplest Multilib to set up there is, because it gave me zero headaches with Steam. MZ fired up the first time without any issues whatsoever, unlike other distros where it would start and close because of Lib32 clusterfuck.

The bad: By default, old and outdated packages. Installing on some hardware can be a pain in the arse. No non-free software/firmware included in the installer.

NVIDIA: Not working. Optimus: Not working.

I'll be honest, Devuan was a royal pain in the arse to get working properly on my MacBook Pro 2012. Just doing a clean install with GRUB, would not boot at all, like the HDD was blank. This was fixed by installing rEFInd.
Updating to Ceres (testing branch) directly from the base Chimaera ISO would result in an Error 1 while making initramfs, and yield an unbootable system.
The solution was, install rEFInd for the first boot, then upgrade to chimaera-backports, update vmlinuz image, update grub, and another update/upgrade just to be safe.
Broadcom/Airport Extreme I got working using b43-firmware from the repos.

So many distros use Debian as a base I thought it was worth learning Debian. And whenever I have a chance of not using SystemD then I do, in this case, Devuan. And quite frankly, Devuan was a bigger pain in the arse than Arch/Artix ever was.

I would not recommend Devuan for beginners. It is better to start with a Debian/Devuan based distro, like the excellent Peppermint, and when you have an idea of what makes Debian/Devuan tick then upgrade to the base distro instead.

https://www.devuan.org/get-devuan

Here is a screenshot of Neofetch on my Devuan build, along with MZ booted up in the background

Spoiler:

Devuan review amended following more in-depth experience with it.
Peppermint (Devuan based) will be added to this list also.

Update about OpenSUSE --

NVIDIA no longer breaks my system. Prime-select is the equivalent of Prime-run on Arch, but this time around on SUSE I am using PRIME Offload instead of just NVIDIA. It uses the Intel integrated GPU for lighter tasks and sends the most intensive to thr NVIDIA card, and performance is exactly as it was on Artix.

Tumbleweed is uo there with Arch about updates, on kernel 6.1.8.

YaST is a great tool, but Zypper was a breeze to learn.

OoenSUSE gets a solid recommendation.

Kudos on managing Nvidia... Optimus is already a pita on Windows.

For the most part, and for most distros I have tested NVIDIA is a pain I can deal with.
Optimus-manager/Bumblebee is the wrong approach. NVIDIA-PRIME offloader is the way to go, and for Arch, Artix, OpenSUSE and others whose name I forgot it exists as a script which makes everything super easy to run. But, on Devuan I have to add a line of code to all my Steam libraries to get it to run properly.

Devuan kept giving me shit when installing NVIDIA drivers about a missing SystemD dependencies which for a non-SysD distro is irrelevant.

Nobara Linux

Nobara is an offshot of Fedora Linux aimed to make Fedora more user-friendly, gaming-friendly and streaming-friendly.

Fedora by default, does not bundle any proprietary software in it, like at all. To get access to those proprietary, third-party stuff, you need to enable non-free repos. In GNOME, this is straightforward enough but if you have a Fedora spin that uses another DE, then it's more convoluted.

Nobara has the typical Calamares installer (versus Fedora's Anaconda), and the install is straightforward enough. Upon first boot, you will see a menu pop up with several options, installing proprietary NVIDIA drivers, AMD drivers, proprietary video codecs used for watching videos, and also recording/streaming with OBS or some other tool.

Package manager: Yum/DNF, same as Fedora, RPMFusion.

The good: Nobara sets you up with everything you need to get going quickly. Steam is build in, and Nobara also has a GPU switcher for Optimus machines which pretty much does the same thing as the Prime-Run script on Arch/Artix. It by default runs on hybrid mode, spreading the load on both GPUs depending on the task. Performance is pretty much on par with Artix, and it handles all my games save for the very newest ones very well and the newest ones have some DirectX issues.

The bad: Nobara uses SysD. It defaults either with GNOME or KDE, which neither I am a big fan of.

Updates mirror downstream Fedora so about once a week you get updates.

The bottom line -- Nobara is a gamer and quality-of-life friendly version of Fedora, which I have a lot of love for. A terrific choice for gaming especially if you are cursed with Optimus tech like I am.