Breaking free from Windows

Alternatively. If you do not like the look and feel of LXQT, there is an Xfce version. Xfce uses more RAM but with a bit of tinkering can look very sleek and modern.

Xfce is my personal go-to for both my Acer Nitro and old MacBook 2008. LXQt is very customizable but looks more basic. For a really old PC like 1GB of RAM the memory savings of LXQt will be worth it but 4 or more GB go for Xfce.

https://spins.fedoraproject.org/xfce/

I forgot my main laptop so I had to work with my old MacBook 2008. Forgot I installed Fedora on it. A base Xfce install runs at 867MB of RAM which is about 200ish more than Arch. I am so used to Pacman I forgot dnf commands

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Nice. I'll have to check but I believe it's a 4GB RAM laptop.

Proton 7.0 is really doing good work. "Fallout" 4 running on Ultra on Arch Linux with zero issues whatsoever. Now I am not so convinced mods will work but this is a really great start. Winblows is getting closer and closer to fucking off of my NVME SSD... and Arch is proving to be an absolute MVP as usual.

I don't have your expertise and it looks like you're making it feel easier than it actually is but I've been thinking about switching away myself. The only thing is that with my luck and considering that some of my favourite games are old or somewhat obscure it's not a question of whether I will run into problem or not but rather how I will cope with that stuff when the proverbial shit hits the fan considering I don't have much time for games these days.

With that being said I've made my mind to switch teams and ditch Nvidia. See, I'm only interested in 1080p and I have no interest in spending too much on a new rig so I'm eyeing an RX 6600 (which is going to set me back quite a bit -those prices are outrageous) since it has the right amount of power and looks like it won't be heating too much (I've been using laptops for too long so my main concern is dealing with heat and making sure I can keep temps in check).

For the older games GOG stuff can be run through Lutris. I am running the old Might and Magic stuff through Lutris and this includes the old crusty DosBox ones.

NVIDIA is a royal pain in the arse but then again it depends on your distro. Arch and the Arch-based are the only ones that don't break with the NVIDIA closed source driver. I have drivers 515 installed and it's working fine. I built Optimus Manager from the AUR to switch between GPUs and it's great.

ATI is the smart way to go though. Not fighting drivers and issues is always better. That said, in my current setup it's working well enough so I am not complaininng. No more NVIDIA in the future though.

Fedora will require you to install the non-free repos and then the NVIDIA driver. I am not aware if there's a way to switch GPUS though I don't think you are unfortunate enough to have a PITA Optimus laptop...

Arch really isn't that bad. Just follow a list of commands and that's pretty much it and then install what you want on top. It will take some time to setup but for the tradeoff of being rock solid I don't mind spending a few brain cells and some time.

I fucking hate Optimus tech because it has plagued me for years. Literally. I mean having to switch or make sure the right card is going to be picked after every other driver update is something that makes me go nuts.

The old laptop only has an integrated card so no heavy gaming. I'm thinking of giving my current laptop to my mom so she will have a powerful machine for a change and keep her old laptop as a backup for light duty gaming (mostly indie stuff and games from the 90s) and very basic stuff when I'm on the move. Windows 10 and the AV have crippled its performance but switching to a less demanding OS may give it a reprieve.

I've been looking at options for my desktop and I can't justify spending more money on a card. The RX 6600 already costs a premium (over €300 which makes it the most expensive part) but it will generate less heat and it isn't stuck at that awkward VRAM setting like the 3600 (who in their right mind thought 12gb of VRAM made any lick of sense?) and I won't even mention the other Nvidia cards.

The only thing that aggravates me with Optimus Manager is that it defaults to integrated so I have to login, switch to NVIDIA which logs me out and then relogin. That said if it was ATI/AMD it wouldn't be such a pain.

The NVIDIA open source driver sucks and is old. Closed source kills installs in some distros so really, fuck NVIDIA. ATI is fully open source and has been for years. NVIDIA are only putting more work on the OS kernel because they are under pressure from a hack.

And yes a lighter distro will make a world of difference. I always advocate Arch, being that it installs only a base system and nothing else and then you add what you want on top, but this can take a while. That said if it's a backup machine then no big deal. Plus if you run into a snag or forget something needed to work like networkmanager it's easy to chroot back into the system from the bootable USB and just fix it from there. I cannot guarantee that all your old and weird obscure games will work but if it runs on GOG odds are good it will run just fine and that includes the DOSBOX stuff.

Plus the selection of software on Arch is THE largest including AUR. Pacman doesn't have something? AUR will.

Beyond that, Fedora has a Xfce version, OpenSUSE also offers Xfce and the YaST GUI config tool is really good. Xero has discontinued the Xfce version and I do not recommend KDE for older hardware to put it politely.

OpenSUSE has two versions also, stable and rolling. Personally I prefer the rolling release model, install once and upgrade. With the rolling release you may occasionally run into issues with some packages but I've never had that happen, and Arch is the most bleeding edge stuff there is. No other distro I know is on kernel 5.19, yet I am.

The package manager, zypper, is also really good.

I'll be sure to pick your brain. The only one I tried before was Lubuntu and it was pretty painless.

GeForce Experience is something I won't miss. That was so useless it actually messed up my games the last time I forgot to get rid of it. Making it optional was such an improvement.

Well most of my knowledge is Arch or Fedora but I am always down to learn so if you decide to go with OpenSUSE it will be a learning experience for me also. I really liked OpenSUSE but FUCKING NVIDIA... And yeah I have very unfond memories of Experience also... *shudders*

I just realized, Lubuntu is *buntu with LXQt... So you are already familiar with LXQt.

I wouldn't say familiar but I did try it out on an old machine and it was remarkable how well it worked.

Btw I've managed to snag an RX 6600 (for €330) which I'm going to pair up with a Ryzen 5 5600X for some good old 1080p gaming. I may look into dual booting options but I'm still on the fence as I know I won't be able to ditch Winblows (mostly because of all the games that are going to be a pita if I do).

Dual booting is a reasonable compromise. Ryzen processors are

I remember you saying so (repeatedly) which is why I looked into these CPUs when I started planning for my new rig. I'm going to use some AIO (Master Liquid ML240L V2 RGB) since it's reasonably priced and should work nicely. I don't care for the lights since I will be using a closed case without glass but with some soundproofing. I couldn't find anything cheaper for water-cooling plus it got some pretty decent grades for an entry level system.

EDIT: thinking about dual booting, I'm considering having Winblows as my main and take a chunk of my HDD to create a partition for Linux. That way I could theoretically boot Linux from the HDD (which would be a tad slower but totally separated from Winblows and give me an option in case my SSD gives up on me). Do you reckon it would be practical? How much space would I need to set aside for Linux considering all the heavy gaming will be under Winblows?

Ehh I am not a fan of watercooling TBH... if it goes wrong it's your entire rig that bites the dust. I would prefer bigger more silent passive fans to cool down, but your rig your call mate.

And yeah, splitting your HDD certainly is an option. Your chosen Linux will install GRUB bootloader (well except if you do Arch then you have to do it manually) which will allow you to boot independently from Winblows.

As far as storage goes, if your heavy gaming takes place on Winblows I would say 60-40% or 66-33%. For Linux you only really need a 512MB FAT32 EFI boot partition, swap equal to your RAM, and however much space you want to allocate to your root (/) partition.

Plus there's a way to mount and access Windows drives from  Linux via a NTFS support package so really you could viably end up running your Steam games on your Win HD from Linux.

Winblows takes up my 256GB NVME SSD, Arch takes half of my secondary HDD. The rest was used for various tests but will be reallocated for a fresh Gentoo install so in all effect Arch and Gentoo will be HDD flatmates.

Really, it's up to you how much space you want. But nearly if not all Linux is very dual-booting friendly.

Thanks for the tips. I'm in no rush but I believe dual booting could ease up the transition and in the meantime I'll try and salvage my mother's old laptop and get rid of Windows altogether. It's a 2013 machine and while it served her well for all these years it's starting to show its age especially when starting up thanks to all the bloody updates Windows keep running in the background (and the antivirus is not helping). I'm hoping switching to Linux may give it a second wind (Lubuntu did wonders on the old 1gb RAM machine I tried it on a few years back so with 4gb of RAM this one should be more than ok).

I'm aware that watercooling can be a concern but I really value silence and quiet which is why I've decided to take a gamble (plus a friend of mine has been using such a system for years now and his temps are ridiculously low even during the heatwaves). I've picked a silenced case to keep things quiet, my reasoning is that the AIO should be able to handle the CPU and I don't expect the RX 6600 to contribute too much heat so the three case fans should be enough. I really don't want a machine that sounds like a freaking jumbo jet taking off.

For the record I ended up undervolting my laptop because I couldn't stand the noise it made trying to dissipate heat and I never looked back. It may have had some impact on performance but that's something I'm willing to cope with considering it's making a lot less noise and running at more manageable temperatures (at least for a laptop).

Mate, PLEASE skip this *buntu bollocks. I know it's an easy way to quickly and painlessly get Linux running but pound for pound a well built Arch will stomp the piss out of Fedora and out of a *buntu any day of the week. The *buntus are losing a lot of ground because they are so terribly bad. Once it was the gold standard, nowadays not so much. I am not even going to mention snapcraft -- it's a bit like Flatpak but Flatpak is universal while Snapcraft is for the *buntus only. And it's terrible.

Fedora runs superbly well on 4GB of RAM and this Macbook used to run Arch with even less RAM usage.

I take your word for it. The only reason I brought up Lubuntu is because that was the one I tried and that was probably six or seven years ago (I can't even remember exactly).

So do you reckon I should run Xfce or Fedora with the 2013 laptop?

For a circa 2013 machine I would absolutely say Arch, but I know you might not have the dedication nor patience to pull it off and that's fine.

Xfce is very lightweight on resources and while LXQt is also very light personally I feel Xfce is the most well-rounded DE of the two.

So the Fedora Xfce spin would be my goto for this machine. It's what's running on my 2008 Macbook, and it idles at about 867MB of RAM, which is not too shabby, given that my Arch idles at 674MB.


https://spins.fedoraproject.org/xfce/

Or, there's Artix, which is Arch minus SystemD, you have a choice of DE and there is an Xfce version. Now, personally, I had issues with Artix and Steam because of the Multilib. You are supposed to enable Arch's multilibs but it didn't work for me.

Artix has a graphical installer also.

https://iso.artixlinux.org/weekly-iso/artix-xfce-openrc-20220822-x86_64.iso

Or there's also OpenSUSE. I don't remember at which amount of RAM my install was running but it was in the 880ish MB of RAM IIRC.

https://www.opensuse.org/

I personally would go for Tumbleweed, the rolling release. Leap is a stable release like Debian but it's out of date as it's released, just like the Debian Stable releases.

That's a lot to ponder. I won't have the patience it's true but even if I had I no longer have the time to dabble into such pursuits. A more hands off approach would be more my speed right now. :p

With that being said I think it's a cool opportunity to wet my toes before getting to grips with dual booting.

There's really nothing to dual booting. The Linux installer (except if you do Arch which you do manually) installs GRUB and GRUB detects other OSes and allows you to boot them. My Arch GRUB lists Fedora, Redcore, FreeBSD, Arch and Void.

But yes it's a good way to get your toes wet and get familiar with Linux

I am going to give Artix another try.

I downloaded the Xfce ISO and I will eliminate most likely Fedora to make some room.

I went with the OpenRC version. It's what's available for Gentoo and not having to bother with SystemD means OpenRC is immune to all the CVE of SystemD.

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=systemd

I found a guide on how to make Steam run properly on Artix. It's worth a try at least, it's my slow 1 round evening anyway so not like I don't have the time. Plus being an Arch splinter NVIDIA won't be a pain

Here is the complete list of SystemD related CVE. Unfortunately SystemD has been adopted as standard, so sometimes using others like OpenRC, runit can cause some compatibility issues.

That said my Arch install is too well-rooted for me to remove it although I would love to be rid of SystemD.

When I get the extra 5GB of Mobile data my carrier is supposed to give me because I made the switch to a bloody VoLTE compatible SIM card (yes this bargain brand STILL DOESN'T HAVE VoLTE so calls sound like trash) I will give installing Gentoo another run.

Now I realize this is digging pretty deep in the rabbit hole. It's not something you need to concern yourself with. But skipping SystemD means extra security. With the big distros tho it's difficult to avoid...

How does Steam run on Fedora? I was thinking about using Gog installers and play offline but Steam would be the easy way to go about it (provided saves can be transferred -which seems to depend on individual games- the fact that the Steam Deck is running on Linux is encouraging).

Steam Deck is running on Arch no less. Turns out bleeding edge is better than Debian's crusty old stable packages.

steam runs just fine on Fedora including Steam Proton. As I said you will need to enable non-free repos and install the closed-source driver but you will be golden.

Sounds like there are possibilities to manage something nicely and put the old laptop to use. Thanks for all the advice.

Indeed, Linux rejuvenated even an old POS XP era Eee PC.

And yeah, there is no shortage of options -- as you get familiar with Linux you may find out stuff you like better, or less. I think my next mission will be to compile a list of everything I tried, listing pros and cons and such useful stuff.

My gripes with Artix might be history after all -- I was able to enable Artix's Lib32 for Steam and it's working fine. I need to dig more but so far, so good. If all works, I could ditch SystemD and still have Arch.

Edit: So yeah takes a few extra braincells to get around the SystemD dependency in some packages. I got fucking NVIDIA working and Optimus Manager also. Proton 7.0 is ready and I am just waiting to be on my WiFi to download games. Everything about Artix is Arch, minus SystemD. Pacman works just the same.

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