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

My wife got a new laptop and despite my attempts to sway her she went for Ubuntu. After watching your thread here it feels really vanilla to me. On the upside she's planning to run Windows on a virtual machine if need be.

Cheezus. Ubuntu. Wow. One of the worse possible choices

Seriously, Arch-based is where it's at. XeroLinux is excellent for gaming and just all around being a great system.
Ubuntu is Debian-based and while there's nothing intrinisically wrong with that, Debian and Ubuntu are stuck in the "Stable" release category, so old crusty packages.
Arch, OTOH, is always up to date and stable and there's a way to go testing if you really are a mad lad.

It feels vanilla because it's the pablum of Linux distros. Pre-cooked, pre-boiled, pre-packaged, pre-digested canned distro. I also strongly dislike their proprietary Snap software packaging. You could also use WINE to run Win software.

Oh, and also, Ubuntu has telemetry built in. Just saying. Seriously, there are FAR, FAR better choices. Like, actual Debian, or staying with Debian lineage, the excellent Peppermint, in either Debian or Devuan based. Or any Arch based like Xero. Canonical cal eat a bowl of fuck with a side of go fuck yourself.the

Yeah, plain and boring, that's what it is.

At least when I dabbled with Redcore I got a feeling of adventure. Ubuntu is just like another day at the office.

And you’ve just scratched the surface of what Redcore can do. Being a Gentoo user I can see and appreciate everything that went into making Redcore what it is.
I only wish Redcore would sync with the Gentoo tree instead of it’s own though. Using the Redcore tree means that there’s some time before it mirror downstream Gentoo, I.E Artix is two weeks behind downstream Arch.
Gentoo is both an exercise in frustration and one of the most powerful distros there is.

But… well if her mind is made then I am sorry to hear you’ll have to suffer the worse Linux ever… worse than Linux Mint and Pop.

And… I don’t get it. Your girl works in IT… yet somehow chooses the worst bloody Linux distro that is. There’s a mystery for the ages

Oh. And Ubuntu uses SystemD. I suggest your wife googles SystemD CVE.
Neither OpenRC nor Runit have such blatant security holes.

I'll pass this along.

As far as I can tell she can't be bothered dealing with computer issues on her time off. It's a bit ironic for an engineer but that's how it is.

I can understand the feeling, but something like, say, Devuan, has the DNA of Debian and this is one that is very well regarded as rock solid. Ubuntu has Debian heritage actually… so she has chosen a poor man’s version of Debian.
I run Devuan, and have ran into basically zero issues. Steam runs fine, Libreoffice, Audacious, Opera… everything is flawless.

Devuan/Debian very, very rarely need any kind of intense maintenance.

The Devuan live installer isn’t super friendly but once you get the hang of it, it works just fine

Truth be told, she hasn't had the time to install anything on her machine yet and it's been an entire week. She's got her drawing tablet that needs to be installed (it's plug and play on Windows but a little more involved on Linux from what I can tell).

Oh. Yeah that kind of specialized hardware might be a bit more finicky on Linux, yeah.
But then again there’s no excuse, Ubuntu uses Debian downstream stuff so it runs on Ubuntu it automatically runs on Debian because Ubuntu is downstream Debian
Wipe Ubuntu and replace it with Redcore

I won't be messing with her machine behind her back. I'm not crazy!

Call it an Ubuntu theme…

Yeah I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to get away with that.

I finally figured out the root cause of the problem of the laggyness and slowdowns I was experiencing running MZ on Linux.
Turns one one magic command took care of my problem —
PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command%

I loaded up Redux, went to modify the event with the most dialogue I have, because that’s when the laggyness started and even after a full blown hour of running it, it NEVER lagged.

So now, I officially no longer need Win nor MacOS.
Everything will be moved to my ThinkPad which becomes my new work machine, since the only barrier to going fully Linux has just been smashed down.

A good day.

Awesome! That's one milestone for sure!

Yep. I’ve snapped up a 512GB SSD and plonked it in the Mac.
The ThinkPad is proving to be very problematic because of the old NVIDIA GPU. It requires legacy 340 drivers, which is fine because I found a patched version.
However those old drivers are not compatible nor do they support Vulkan, which is key to Proton…
So while I CAN get MZ running by downgrading to Proton 5.0, playtesting does not work.
And seeing as Proton is a modified WINE, WINE has the same issues.
So I am forced to use the POS Open source driver Nouveau. Which is garbage. However you can add 3D acceleration to make it usable so it’s bog standard.
I’ll have to use Devuan on this one as it runs the best. Artix flat out refuses anything to do with this Quadro.
Void had it’s own plethora of issues.
Still, win.

I can't begin to imagine how much time it took you to troubleshoot all these issues. Kudos on getting all these machines to work.

Actually the terminal is a very powerful tool if you only learn to listen to it.
The Vulkan error was “stash smashing detected”, Googled it up, found the solution.
The patched drivers came from GitHub, not the only one with legacy cards needing support and at some point NVIDIA drops support.
Linux gives you way more, way better quality info to troubleshoot your problems, you just have to take the time to do it.

Devuan was too fat even for a minimal install. Void seems to play along fairly nicely with the ThinkPad so I’ll try this. Void has risen from the ashes to become this champion recently. It is stupidly fast on my Mac with the SSD it’s not even funny.
It’s what I do, it’s what I enjoy, and what I love. I would rather research my issues and actively fix them than being a Windows pleb. Just waiting for the Ultrabay to arrive and I may just dual-boot a Linux/BSD Mac, just because.

MZ still lagfree after several hours

Spoiler:

I feel a new contender has earned it's place on this list

Venom Linux

Venom Linux is an independent, source based distro (like Gentoo) based on CRUX Linux and applying the KISS principle. It uses OpenBox by default which is a nice, light Window Manager and targets advanced users. Uses a terminal/nCurses installer

The good: Venom is fast, bloat-free and efficient. Scratch is superb. If something is not on the Venom repos, you can use tarballs or DEB packages to compile your own port. No SystemD (runit or the old school SysVInit)

The bad: Documentation is nearly nonexistant so you are on your own basically. Source based means longer updates and package building because of the compiling.

NVIDIA support: Proprietary driver. Worked fine
Intel/Mesa support: Yes
Package manager: Scratchpkg


Venom is still a young distro, but the support community on Telegram is great. 
I'll be honest, source based isn't for everyone. But it you a more granular control on package. 
Definitively a distro to watch closely withba lot of potential.

NuTyX

A French (HON HON) distro based on LFS and Beyond LFS. It is a pure 64 but, minimalist distro.

The good: Stupidly fast. Boots really quick and idles at about 280MB of RAM which is insane. Cards package manager is very good and efficient.

The bad: Installer is frankly very convoluted. It was not a major issue for me being used to tinkering but a less savvy user might be put off by it.
E.G: The installer assumes UEFI and will want to format your boot partition as ext4. If you are on BIOS boot, like my ThiccPad, you need an 8MB unformatted partition with bios_grub flag set. So if you let the NuTyX installer do its thing and format in ext4 you are left with an unbootable BIOS boot system.
I circumvented it by going with the install while not configuring bootloader then once in the installed system I installed GParted, set my partitions accordingly, installed and configured GRUB, and all was well
The repos are very limited. Ports can be built.
Pure 64 means no Steam and no WINE.

NVIDIA/AMDGPU support: Yes, with Vulkan.
Intel/Mesa support: Yes
Package manager: cards

280MB is incredibly good. I mean that's similar to XP with no frills. Too bad it's so hard to use.

Once you get past the quirks of the installer you are all set.
Cards is a great package manager, up there with Pacman and XBPS. I have not tried building ports yet but I have done so in Venom and it's fairly straightforward .
Of course, with a UEFI machine, the bootloader issue I mentioned is null and void. It's just the installer is hardcoded to expect UEFI and treat partitioning as such.
Honestly? If I could fix the pain in the arse that Flatpak Steam is, I would 100% daily drive NuTyX.

I am bumping this, because after a very frustrating experience with Gentoo composed of tantrums and vagaries, during which I absolutely dreaded the idea of attempting a system update because I knew something would go wrong with Portage, be it slot collisions, circle dependencies, USE flag issues, or all of those.
From those ashes, an old, unexpected champion raised from the dead...
Void.
I reinstalled it, started tinkering with it, and grasped it, and was able to turn it into a fully functional, performant minimalist daily driver.
Steam is working flawlessly with my Optimus setup, I just needed some packages that were not listed on the deprecated Wiki.
System updates are flowing along nicely (for a semi rolling distro)
I have a minimalist system just as I like it, and an incredibly stable one at that.
XBPS can even use .DEB packages if I so need it to

Two Gentoos have been wiped to make way for this returning champion. Plus, Void is an independent, not based on any of the mother sauces of distros.

https://voidlinux.org/

Is it user friendly?

Well it ships with Xfce by default which is good
It's a bit more DIY but once you get the hang of it, it's pretty bloody good
By default Void does not have sound enabled as it lets you pick between Alsa, Pulse or PipeWire. Personally I just install Xfce's PulseAudio plugin and add it to the status bar and voila you have sound
The package manager, xbps, was written from scratch by a former NetBSD developper and it's stupidly fast and easy
Say you want to install a package you just type
sudo xbps-install -S (package name)
System upgrade would be
sudo xbps-install -Su
There are multilib, nonfree and multilib nonfree repos also available
Most of what is needed for the average user is in the repos -- Steam, OBS, LibreOffice, KDE, etc

It's not as straightforward as say Redcore, but the minimalism and sheer efficiciency make Void well worth learning
If you have a Windows machine you can make a Virtual machine and test drive it see how you enjoy it
It's quite happily the king of my Acer Nitro 5 because it does absolutely everything I need and does it really well and it's rock solid
Plus, it's not based on any of the "mother sauces" aka Arch, Debian, etc, it is a purely independent distro

I'm so grateful for Redcore giving my old laptop a second life.

If I didn't had such an extensive game library I'd ditch Windows and never look back.