Yeah, I’ve considered VR for a long while, but between the already existing headaches, and the Linux related headaches I’ve heard of, I’ll just wait until I’m retired for VR space games, VR racing, and VR porn. Hopefully it’ll get better before I’m dead.
Everything people are saying here checks out, but you might struggle with VR. I haven’t tried VR on Linux yet, but I’ve heard some things about support being pretty janky. Maybe others with experience can weigh in.
This is entirely plausible, but I don’t know if it’s there yet. I’ve long since moved to AMD GPUs so I can’t really fiddle and find out. Give the open source drivers some time to mature.
Until then, you are reasonably safe running Linux with secure boot turned off. I’m no expert on the matter, but I’m not familiar with any ongoing threats to boot loader in Linux distributions. Stick to your official repos to be safest, unverified user maintained sources like AUR and COPR are possibly more likely to harbor security threats, don’t use them if you don’t need to or don’t know what you’re doing. Password your bios and require a password to log in to your operating system. Common sense is a better defense than secure boot.
There’s a ton of them on Etsy
Love it when people speak with authority and are confidently incorrect. Eugenia is right.
You could potentially use flatseal to grant the flatpak the necessary permissions, and you might find out what those permissions are by looking for other users experiences with the flatpak version.
Or, you find the .deb file and it installs natively without being sandboxed. OR, you can find a PPA repository for it, load said repository and install your software.
But those things require learning a little. Linux rewards self starters who can use a search engine and forums. Hope this maybe points you in the right direction.
I would recommend Linux Mint. Yes it’s faster to update than Debian, but it doesn’t push the envelope nearly as fast as Fedora or Arch based distros.
Linux mint is just super easy, user friendly, you could use Mint without ever touching a terminal if you wanted. BSD would be a great pet project to fiddle with, but if you’re looking for a rock solid backup machine with zero fuss, Mint is perfect for that.
I spent my first year of Linux installing a new distro, or same distro with a different DE probably every other week, sometimes more than once in a week. The Linux ecosystem rewards self starters with curiosity and the ability to search for answers.
LearnLinuxTV is an amazing YouTube channel, high quality distro tours and reviews, as well as tutorials at various levels of mastery. ItsFOSS and Phoronix are great sources for Linux news that help you build some awareness and vocabulary. The official forums of almost every distro are extremely helpful places to find solutions to problems. You just kinda have to be motivated to seek out the answers you need as they arise.
That’s one thing I find particularly neat about Fedora, it has all of these software package groups that can be either added on at install, or installed at any time, including:
3D Printing
Administration Tools
Audio Production
Authoring and Publishing
Books and Guides
C Development Tools and Libraries
Cloud Infrastructure
Cloud Management Tools
Container Management
D Development Tools and Libraries
Design Suite
Development Tools
Domain Membership
Fedora Eclipse
Editors
Educational Software
Electronic Lab
Engineering and Scientific
FreeIPA Server
Games and Entertainment
Headless Management
LibreOffice
MATE Applications
MATE Compiz
Medical Applications
Milkymist
Network Servers
Office/Productivity
Robotics
RPM Development Tools
Security Lab
Sound and Video
System Tools
Text-based Internet
Window Managers
I got a laptop with a touch screen for a young kid in my family, installed Fedora Workstation with its native Gnome desktop, and touch worked great without any tinkering.
Gnomes workflow is a big departure from windows, but with its gesture navigation on a trackpad, I think it’s a highly superior way to use a laptop. My desktop gets KDE Plasma, but if I had a laptop it would use gnome
This means we need to keep being the best community we can be. Welcoming, helpful, and distro agnostic. I might occasionally Stan for the distros I love, or talk a little smack about ones that left a bad taste in my mouth, but when we’re helping new users, we need to meet them where they’re at, and give them the little boost they need to stick with it.
Hell yeah, I’ll give it a look. I’ve almost made it a hobby to research the shit out of the most durable and long lasting items I can buy, and things that are capable of being maintained or repaired since I’m kind of a tinkerer. I also buy American or union made whenever it’s an option.
Boy oh boy have I been waiting for the opportunity to plug my favorite can opener. It’s a “turning one” as you call it, from a company called OhSay. American made, and built like a brick shit house, I have no doubts it’ll outlast me. Google it, I think they’re like $15-20
Yeah, let’s be real, if you like manjaro, okay whatever, but no one should be using manjaro when EndeavourOS exists.
Which makes me wonder, if manjaro tanked, what other twists on an Arch based distro aimed at gaming and content creators could spring up in its place? Something with the level of execution of EndeavourOS but with its own comprehensive GUI tools?
My suggestion to you, is please oh please replace Manjaro with EndeavourOS. It does everything Manjaro does but better. The learning curve will still be the same.
pacman: EndeavourOS has yay installed by default, which is an AUR helper. It interacts with pacman and builds your packages for you. yay -S steam for instance calls up pacman and builds the steam package from the repo and takes some of the head scratching out of it. Very easy to use. A simple “yay” to update, no sudo needed, yay will ask for a sudo password when it needs it.
Shell selection: bash is fine, and bash is enabled by default in EndeavourOS.
But the real reason to use EndeavourOS, aside from having an arch based rolling release distro, is its community and support. An amazing forum, tons of documentation between EOS and arch itself, and fantastic wiki that guides you through various tools and utilities you may want to use.
It is a terminal centric distro, but you can easily install GUI tools for things you don’t want to do in the CLI.
I would even be down to correspond and help you out if need be. Manjaro looks cool when you’re in those early stages of outgrowing Ubuntu, but it’s not the distro you’re looking for, I promise.
It’s just a generally solid, stable, and easy to use distro. I use EndeavourOS nowadays, but when I was first getting started Mint was what I always returned to after spats of distro hopping. As far as it’s primary DE, Cinnamon, it’s less “windows like” and more “not gnome like”. Every DE that isn’t gnome could be called “windows like” in my experience.
This is the real answer. In this day and age where a 16gb USB stick can be had for literally $5usd on Amazon, it would be silly not to have a few kicking around. I don’t think any Linux distro live environment media requires more than 16gb, and it’s more than enough for updating a bios. I even used one to update the infotainment system in my vehicle last week. Kind of a necessary tool.