Hello there!
After some lurking on r/Unixporn and its Discord, I’m more and more tempted to try Linux as a daily driver. While I’m by no means a pro, I’ve been using WSL at work the past year and generally I can fiddle around finding solutions when something doesn’t work.
These being said, the main requirements I would have from a distro is to be able to run League of Legends (saw that it’s pretty straight forward using Lutris) and not be insanely complex from the get-go (wouldn’t want to jump straight into something like Arch), I intend to use something like Hyprland.
So far I am split between OpenSuse Tumbleweed, NixOS, Fedora and EndeavourOS, but would gladly hear alternatives.
LE: Read (and tried to reply to) most messages. I will come back with an update once I decide my pick and see how it goes. Thanks everyone!
Of those I think I’d recommend Tumbleweed, it’s a great polished distribution with some extra helpful administrative tools (yast for instance). It’s rolling but feels as stable as a normal dist to me.
The others are far from bad though! I just have a soft spot for suse and opensuse :)
Ubuntu or pop_os could be nice starting choices as well since they’re so big and well supported.
Also recommend Tumbleweed. I’ve distro hopped for many years, and currently am using Tumbleweed and have no plans of leaving soon. It really is the best I’ve ever used.
I wouldn’t recommend doing a Hyperland setup right away on first time ever using linux. Just run with KDE or Gnome for a while until you’re comfy then you can try Hyperland. The reason I say this is check this page:
https://wiki.hyprland.org/Useful-Utilities/Must-have/
“Must Have
This page documents software that is critical / very important to have running for a smooth Wayland / Hyprland experience.
DEs like KDE / Gnome will do this automatically, Hyprland will not (because you might want to use something else)
A notification daemon
Starting method: most likely manual (exec-once)
Many apps (e.g. Discord) may freeze without one running.”
So you have to do a LOT more setup and configs to get Hyperland up and running. Just use KDE lol. Tumbleweed rocks with Plasma.
The btrfs rollback feature is also a huge pro, allowing experimentation without any real risk.
Not really fancying about Ubuntu to be honest.
Do you have any Tumbleweed tips/hints? (˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧
Not the other person, but openSUSE is amazing. You just have to add the Packman repos as explained on their wiki. Haven’t used it for gaming and such yet so can’t really give more specific tips regarding that.
Hmm… been a little while since I used it but always update your system with sudo zypper dup (dup is basically a distribution upgrade which each update of Tumbleweed counts as) and it doesn’t come with Nvidia drivers out of the box so if you need those follow this:
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_drivers
And you can install a whole bunch of extra stuff not from the built in sources from the OBS (openSUSE Build Service) with something like opi:
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:OBS_Package_Installer
That’s just some things off the top of my head :)
Oh and I started a rather active thread about linux gaming distribution choices a while ago, it could have some useful information:
https://beehaw.org/post/785887