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This was me in 2022 or 2023. I have posted on HN about my shift a few times. I gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows Pro in order to make an "offli

This was me in 2022 or 2023. I have posted on HN about my shift a few times. I gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows Pro in order to make an "offline" account, I spent $2000+ for a gaming rig, and I couldn't add new users, one program told me to use the other program which brought me back to the original program... I had to go out of my way, buy a license just to make it work. I just went and installed Linux finally. I was on POP_OS! for a good year, but been on Arch Linux for one year plus now. I know its a "meme" to talk about how great Arch is, but when you want the latest of something, Arch has it. I use EndeavourOS since it had a nicer simpler installer (idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro) and if you just use "yay" you don't run into Pacman woes. Alternatively, I'm only buying Macs as well, but for my gaming rigs, straight to Arch. Steam and Proton work perfectly, if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.

dgritsko 9mo ago
What made you switch from Pop OS? I just installed it on a couple of old PCs I had lying around for my kids to play around with/learn from.
- condensedcrab 9mo ago
  Probably same reason most folks who are capable of running Linux don't stay on Ubuntu, etc.
  - dgritsko 9mo ago
    I'm genuinely curious as to what the key differences are (especially those that would cause someone to switch), as someone who is pretty tech savvy but whose use of Linux as a daily driver is admittedly pretty weak.
    - giancarlostoro 9mo ago
      I would say EndeavourOS is the "Ubuntu" to "Arch" if you will. The installer is easy, and it comes with "yay" out of the box which is a frontend to Pacman which holds your hand in just the right ways. If I want to update my OS I type "yay" into a terminal, hit enter and confirm the packages needing updating (or select which ones I want) and type my password, and that's it. In the past with Manjaro I did a system update with Pacman, and problems ensued.
    - Lex-2008 9mo ago
      not OP, but for some it might be availability of latest versions packages (say, you've heard about new major version of Bash or Vim being released today, and wondering how soon it might be available in your distro packages), and, as someone else mentioned, less update stress due to lack of "major version bumps" - just remember to subscribe to https://archlinux.org/news/ https://archlinux.org/news/ and watch out for entries requiring "manual intervention".
    - wafflemaker 9mo ago
      You usually try a few distros, until you find the one that does whenever you needed, and then you stick with it for 15 years ;) From my own experience: 15 years ago, when (except for academia), Linux was very nisje, it was hard to use it. Random rare errors would pop up. On Windows you would know someone who knew what to do, but with Linux? So I chose Ubuntu, because it had the most support. Solution to any error could be found on askubuntu (?) forums. But if you had a friend, you would choose his system and get help from him. I once had university admins very happy to help me with something and even give me some tips. Nowadays it really doesn't matter that much, other than extra easy (with an LLM everything is already easy) installation of drivers (POP os?)/initial programs you used on Windows (on Mate it takes 10min due to a special GUI appstore). BUT there are reasons to switch. Like Ubuntu's pushing of very annoying snaps, making it very hard to get Firefox without a snap. Snaps are annoying, because they don't have a cleaning mechanism and old versions just clog your hard drive. They take forever to launch and it's just not a good idea for a browser. Don't mind snaps for other things. There is also Desktop Environment support and support for hidpi monitors and such. Other than that, there is a little of philosophy. Like super FOSS and idealistic like Debian (i guess? Pls correct me if I'm wrong). Or more business aligned, like Redhat/Fedora. Or elitist that like to waste their users time and make them read manuals for fdisk like Arch, where you have to format your hard drive without GParted or any other GUI. I'm no pro, but that's a little that came to mind if you wanted to know what mattered in the past.
  - hamdingers 9mo ago
    Folks capable of running linux pick the best distro for the job at hand. They are tools, there is no progression like you're implying. My homeserver is Ubuntu, my gaming PC is Arch.
- giancarlostoro 9mo ago
  There was some 3D printer slicer software I needed that wouldnt run, when I finally figured out why it had to do with GLIBC being out of date. I have used Debian since like 2008, and Ubuntu since the mid 2010s so I am accustomed to doing PPA's and what not, but something in me broke and I wanted to finally try something more bleeding edge. I nearly went for Fedora but the version I wanted to try didn't even boot (I don't like to waste any time with command line incantations anymore) so I looked up EndeavourOS I don't remember how I found it, I think a friend said someone they knew used it (turns out they dont LOL) so I gave it a shot. I had bad experiences with Arch before because of Manjaro, but in hindsight, I think the main issues I had were more to do with how Pacman can get insanely nuanced. When you update packages you have to know what you're doing, it will update all weird, its not like Debian or Ubuntu upgrades where it installs / uninstalls what you do and don't need unless you tell it to be that nuanced.
- hamdingers 9mo ago
  Long term stability is less important for gaming computers than having the most cutting edge (and theoretically highest performance) drivers. That's why the community leans so heavily towards arch.
W3zzy 9mo ago
''By the way, I use Arch''
- bee_rider 9mo ago
  The meme was “I use Arch, BTW,” but I think it has mostly died as enough people have pointed out that Arch isn’t really hard-mode Linux or something. It is a barebones start but 1) very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes 2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki” Eventually I switched to Ubuntu for some reason, it has given me more headaches than Arch.
  - W3zzy 9mo ago
    I've started my Linux journey a decent year ago. It's been fun but I'm happy that they're such a great community to troubleshoot along with me. Never tried Arch but I do love a barebones no fuzz system.
  - GeoAtreides 9mo ago
    >the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki” if GenZ knew how to read they would be very disappointed right now in the age of tablets and tiktok, basic literacy is quite a big ask
    - piperswe 9mo ago
      That's what they said about GenX, Millennials, and probably every other generation before them. Something something, "OK boomer."
      - GeoAtreides 9mo ago
        they absolutely did not say that tiktok and tablets are destroying basic literacy about GenX or Millenials if anything, they said the kids were good with technology
        9mo ago
the_arun 9mo ago
I would love to switch from Mac. But Mac hardware is so resilient & haven't seen that in PC world.
- tremarley 9mo ago
  You can run Linux on Apple Silicon with Asahi Linux
  - k2enemy 9mo ago
    There's a whole lot of asterisks that you're leaving out of that statement.
  - fcantournet 9mo ago
    M1&2 yes with slight caveats, m3-5 not really (at least yet)
- gambiting 9mo ago
  What do you mean by that? As a long term windows user I've never had any issues running my laptops and PCs for years and years.
- pimeys 9mo ago
  I just got a new work laptop: the ThinkPad X1 Carbon gen13. It's gorgeous: weighs a bit over 900 grams, has an amazing matte OLED screen, Intel Lunar Lake that sips power (1-2W idle) and is fast enough to compile Rust if needed, amazing keyboard, touchpad is great but I just use the trackpoint, everything works from the box on Linux (they even deliver it with either Fedora or Ubuntu, but I installed CachyOS). Suspend: works always. Battery life: great, the whole day. Wifi: works always, connects fast, works fast. The build quality is really nice, especially the carbon fiber body that doesn't feel so cold/hot to touch.
- newsoftheday 9mo ago
  Dell, HP and Lenovo have been phenomenally resilient for us, going back more than 2 decades.
- 9mo ago
mrln 9mo ago
Yeah, yay works until it doesn't anymore, because the pacman library dependency it uses was updated but yay was not... and then you need to recompile yay manually. I mean, I'll still use it (or rather paru, which works basically the same way), but it's very annoying, when it happens every few months.
- fsmv 9mo ago
  I don't understand, yay updates itself. I've never once had this problem.
  - Levitating 9mo ago
    That's assuming you do system upgrades through paru/yay. However, you may not want to upgrade the packages you've obtained from the AUR and so you upgrade using pacman. That may cause the updated libalpm to become incompatible with the installed yay/paru.
    - nicce 9mo ago
      yay used to be in the official Arch Linux repository for some time, wonder why it was removed.
      - morserer 9mo ago
        Iirc it was to force the extra step necessary for the user to acknowledge that the AUR can bootstrap malware if used blindly. This seems to be a relatively consistent discussion surrounding AUR helper development; for example, adding UX to incentivise users to read PKGBUILDs, lest the AUR becomes an attractive vector for skids. No one wants the AUR to become NPM, and the thing that will incentivise that is uneducated users. Having the small barrier of not having helpers in the main repos is an effective way of accomplishing that.
      - Levitating 9mo ago
        https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_helpers https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_helpers AUR helpers like yay are not supported officially. The other commenter sheds some light as to why.
Zambyte 9mo ago
> if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them. So much this. People like to moan about "oh game XYZ doesn't run so it's not reasonable for gaming". More games run on GNU / Linux than any gaming console. There are simply too many games that do run to give a second thought about the ones that don't, and it's been that way for years.
- nightski 9mo ago
  I run both operating systems. But I have to say it either runs the game you want to play or it doesn't. This is especially true if you play games with friends.
  - neogodless 9mo ago
    > But I have to say it either runs the game you want to play or it doesn't Can you elaborate on this? For example, it was convoluted getting StarCraft 2 to run. Then it did eventually work, though it felt ever so slightly laggy. Anno 1800 ran though it occasionally slowed way down, occasionally crashed, and multiplayer never worked. Hogwart's Legacy ran but crashed, and ran massively slower / lower quality settings than on the same hardware but in Windows. All of those were not binary "runs / doesn't".
    - nightski 9mo ago
      That's not what I am saying, sorry if it was confusing. The parent was implying that if it doesn't run a game just pick a different game. But I was pointing out that isn't always an option, and some times you just want to play a specific game.
      - ozim 9mo ago
        I do understand the premise but … people want to play the games they want to play. For example I am a good customer for streaming services because I don’t care about specific titles - I will watch a series or a movie because it is available. I will most likely not go through a hassle to watch some specific show if it is not on streaming I already have. Gaming doesn’t really work like that for me. I usually want to play specific titles - not just some game. But I fully understand someone has the same approach to games as I have for movies/series.
Muromec 9mo ago
This was me in 2005. I cant believe people say that M$ started to suck in 2025. It always did.
- chris_wot 9mo ago
  Yes, but it took some time before the suck became so bad too many people started to notice, and those people weren’t tech people. Most people had never even heard of Linux. It has taken a lot of very bad things on Windows for it to get to this point. It’s classic frog in a slowly heating up pot territory.
  - otherme123 9mo ago
    >Most people had never even heard of Linux. My experience is that people fear linux, rather than not knowing. I am the lonely Linux user since c. 2005, and people see half my screen is always a console, the other half a browser. So they fear linux is for console wizards, not for regular users. Nothing will convince them otherwise, even when they are 100% of the time using online webapps. I have some coworkers using browser + VS code + WSL2 all the time, but they don't switch because they fear the console-to-config-everything instead of Control Panel.
    - vladvasiliu 9mo ago
      I don't know, man. In my experience, people make no difference between "windows" and "the pc". I think the vast majority of "regular people" have no idea there are alternatives to "windows", other than "macs".
    - a_vanderbilt 9mo ago
      So much of it is a problem of execution. If people could use Linux without ever having to know what a terminal is (much like the average Windows user doesn't know what PowerShell is), then it would actually be quite successful. It has gotten better over the past decade, but it still suffers from endless paper cuts and the odd issue that requires a shell session to fix. I will say that Valve's SteamOS has come the closest to avoiding this trap. You can use a deck without ever having to touch a CLI.
thewebguyd 9mo ago
> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro They largely have now, archinstall. It's still text based/TUI but it's pretty simple and intuitive, anyone already familiar with installing a Linux distro (especially any sort of -server variant) will be comfortable with the archinstall script.
- simgoh 9mo ago
  > anyone already familiar with installing a Linux distro (especially any sort of -server variant) will be comfortable with the archinstall script. To be fair, thats not _generally_ the audience we tend to think about when we talk about the enshittification of Windows. We're usually talking regular consumers / computer users and "gamers" the latter of which is a wide range of people that can fend for themselves with instructions to people that cannot.
  - thewebguyd 9mo ago
    Fair enough, but I wouldn't generally direct that audience to vanilla arch linux as "gamers first distro" anyway. I'd direct them to something like Bazzite (Immutable), or CachyOS for staying arch-based but providing a GUI installer and tools, Endeavor OS, even Fedora, etc.
    - simgoh 9mo ago
      Agreed. I know in some circles it's a meme, but if the Steam Gaming Console actually makes a debut any time soon, I think we'll see more of a jump from the "Gamer" crowd away from Windows. My (some say naive) hope is that it will make game devs try to design games that aren't only locked in on Windows and have more Proton support.
  - theYipster 9mo ago
    It's really a (good IMHO) sign of the times that us old hats have to remind ourselves that most new comers to Linux today aren't necessarily adept at installing another OS, let alone using the command line. The first time I installed Arch was maybe four years ago, but the very first dual boot setup I made was between Win 3.1 and OS/2 2.1 in 1993 when I was 10, and I've been playing with Linux since the mid-late 90s. When I first installed Arch the "hard way" I said to myself--"I don't understand why it has this reputation... this is all stuff I've done before countless times." Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out the distribution graph of Linux knowledge and how to engage with different skill levels.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
Levitating 9mo ago
> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro Simplicity, among other reasons. Installers force the users hand and need maintenance. Having no installer but rather a detailed installation guide offers unlimited freedom to users. Installation isn't difficult either, you just pacstrap a root filesystem and configure the bootloader, mounts and locale. ArchLinux does now have an installer called archinstall, but it's described more as a library than a tool. It allows you to automate the installation using profiles.
- BoxOfRain 9mo ago
  Also if you want 'Arch with sensible defaults' CachyOS is basically that, people think of it as a 'gaming distro' but that's not an accurate characterisation. I use it as a daily driver on my personal machine mostly for non-gaming work and it's an excellent distro.
- muthuh 9mo ago
  There is though the TUI installer, not like it used to be where the commands were typed in following the wiki. Not that there was anything wrong with the 'manual' mode, it gave you insight into the basic building blocks/configurations right from the start.
  - vladvasiliu 9mo ago
    It's been a very long time since I moved to Arch, but I swear that something like 12 years ago it did have some form of menu-driven installer. Nowadays, there are so many ways to partition the drive (lvm, luks, either one on top of the other; zfs with native encryption or through dm-crypt), having the efi boot directly a unified kernel image or fiddle with some bootloader (among a plethora of options)... One of the principal reasons why I love Arch is being able to have a say in some of these base matters, and would hate to have to fight the installer to attain my goals. I remember when Ubuntu supported root on zfs but the installer didn't it was rather involved to get the install going. All it takes with Arch is to spend a few minutes reading the wiki and you're off to the races. The actual installation part is trivial. But then again, if you have no idea what you want to do, staring at the freshly-booted install disk prompt can be daunting. Bonus points for it requiring internet for installation. I would have to look up the correct incantation to get the wifi connected on a newer PC with no wired ethernet, and I've been using the thing for a very long time.
kuerbel 9mo ago
I installed fedora yesterday. Instead of steam i am hoping that GOG with heroic games launcher will work nicely. Idk, I want to support drm free software so if it's on gog, I buy it there.
- byronic 9mo ago
  [obviously YMMV, take me with a grain of salt etc] I actually tried Fedora first (thinking dev-first workflows) but ended up switching to Ubuntu w/x11 for gaming. A lot of that had to do with Fedora's release schedule (rather than Ubuntu's 2-year LTS) breaking working GOG/steam/wine-based apps on a rotating basis. Since switching to a defaults lifestyle / Ubuntu with x11 I deal with NVIDIA driver compatibility issues every 6 months or so instead of once/month. The 22 -> 24 upgrade was better than I expected and I didn't lose more than a couple of hours of life to appease the shell gods. In any case Fedora and a once/month problem would still beat the Windows update nonsense, which I am still supporting since my spouse hasn't switched yet :/
  - newsoftheday 9mo ago
    I've used Ubuntu since 2006 and started using Kubuntu (I prefer KDE) about 2 years ago. Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) are very solid for gaming. It puzzles me how often I see highly customized distros like Bazzite and CachyOS touted for gaming after looking into some of the wild tweaks those distros do; it's amazing to me that they run at all. PS I keep Snap disabled.
    - Happily2020 9mo ago
      What wild customisations are you talking about? As someone who used Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, Arch) exclusively from 2010 and recently moved to bazzite, I only see positives from the switch. Most of my usecases work OOTB, and for everything else I use a container workflow. I like that there are fewer ways to mess up upgrades. I like that flatpaks are well integrated.
- Iolaum 9mo ago
  Fedora Silverblue user here. Lutris (from flatpak) can play GoG games fine (*). (*): Apparently achievement support even on single player games requires the gamestore client (GoG client in my case) and Lutris doesn't support that yet. Am old enough to not care :p
zamadatix 9mo ago
> I know its a "meme" to talk about how great Arch is, but when you want the latest of something, Arch has it I love my Arch installs to death, but I feel like I'm the oddball out about the mess that is AUR. The main repositories have a lot of things but I always end up getting pushed to AUR and then it just feels like I bolted on a hack rather than pacman/the arch base just supporting AUR more like a different package source normally.
mock-possum 9mo ago
You spent $2000 on a new machine but wouldn’t shell out another $20-30 for a windows pro key? You’re willing to burn a bunch of time fiddling with getting a completely new operating system setup, but you’re not willing to spend a few minutes fiddling with setting up an offline windows account? I get that maybe that was the final straw or something, but come on, “I switched to Linux because I didn’t want to take an hour to set up Windows” really sounds like you never really wanted Windows in the first place, you were just looking for an excuse.
- manuelabeledo 9mo ago
  The main difference, in my opinion, is that to set up Linux one doesn't need to work around the expected behaviours of the OS. And why would anyone put so much effort into making Windows usable now, when there is not knowing what Microsoft will do next?
7bit 9mo ago
> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro Because Arch maintainers are a bunch of elitist gatekeepers that don't accept any level of knowledge that is lower than theirs. You can see that through every forum interaction generally and any discussion about the installation process specifically. Arch is great btw. It could be greater, if all maintainers would quit.
DrBazza 9mo ago
I've been using Fedora+KDE for over a decade, Windows 8 was last version of Windows I had installed at home, and we all know what a squarified mess that was. Gnome is fine, but it's just not for me. For everyone on here that complains about Windows requiring an 'online' account, MacOS does as well, but the perception is different. MacOS, just kind of quietly does it, with no ceremony, but Windows does a Ballmer-esque right-in-your-face demand. I couldn't possibly comment on Windows 11 as I've yet to use it, but Win10 felt a lot worse than Windows 7 which was probably the last high water mark for Windows after Windows 2000.
- scoodah 9mo ago
  Afaik, you can choose to not sign into icloud when creating an account on your mac. It's not a hard requirement like it is on Windows, though they do obviously strongly nudge you to login to icloud.
  - DrBazza 9mo ago
    I didn't know that. Thanks. Setting up my mac once in 5 years means it isn't a screen I've seen very often!
- cogman10 9mo ago
  Plasma 6 is really polished and simple. I think anyone familiar with windows would be able to grab and run with it immediately. No hate for anyone that likes other desktop environments, I as a long time windows user just really appreciate how familiar KDE feels.
  - connicpu 9mo ago
    The familiarity is great but the thing that really draws me to Plasma over Gnome is that the KDE developers seem to have an attitude of just implementing the features people want even if it's not perfect yet. Gnome is polished, but it's missing so many basic configuration options out of the box.
    - 9mo ago
xattt 9mo ago
> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro It could be a deliberate measure to set the bar high and filter out people who don’t want to troubleshoot themselves.
- cogman10 9mo ago
  The arch advantage is that your system gets setup exactly how you want it and you have to consciously choose the software set you want to work with. That minimalism is somewhat the point of the OS.
  - wiredpancake 9mo ago
    [dead]
grepfru_it 9mo ago
> Steam and Proton work perfectly I am a hardcore DayZ player. DayZ does not work on Proton[0]. I cannot use Linux as my main gaming platform. Battlefield 6 does not work. Latest Call of Duty does not work. You can talk about voting with your wallet, but when millions of people are buying the game, your one non-vote means nothing. So either you punish yourself and refuse to play with friends, or you punish yourself and install windows. It’s a damned situation regardless of your choice [0] point me to as many compatibility databases as you want, the game will not start on my vanilla Ubuntu build
- Zekio 9mo ago
  this is why a lot of people run arch and why valve based steamOS on arch instead of debian as the previous version was, you need a newer kernel and other packages to really play games on linux with the least friction possible
  - AuthAuth 9mo ago
    thats not a kernel issue its an anti cheat issue. No kernel except the windows kernel is going to allow him to play battlefield and cod.
- Mond_ 9mo ago
  Sounds like it might be an issue with your setup, considering that other people have no problems running it. Hard to tell what the problem is, but definitely a frustrating situation.
- tapoxi 9mo ago
  This is really just a subset of competitive shooters. Arc Raiders, The Finals, Hunt Showdown, Halo Infinite all play fine. I have a Windows drive for Battlefield but I stopped booting into it after interest in the game waned. Playing on console is also an option. Most games allow you to alternate between keyboard/mouse and controller. Discord works fine, and every game is cross-play.
  - grepfru_it 9mo ago
simgoh 9mo ago
Not that this is going to matter to you because you've left Windows behind, but I refuse to buy License Keys any more and I try to steer people away from buying "Gray Keys" to avoid the ridiculous costs. Using the MS Activation Scripts[0] is the much better go-to. [0] - https://massgrave.dev/ https://massgrave.dev/
- godzillabrennus 9mo ago
  Given the push to monetize user data it seems Microsoft is demphasizing their focus on key piracy. I bought a computer with a 55" touch screen. The company selling it said it was a Windows 11 computer. The computer was a 14 year old Intel CPU/Mobo that was never designed to run Windows 11. The company selling it had hacked Windows to run on this old computer. They didn't have a license key. I report it to Microsoft and crickets. The company ghosted me on the issue. In 2003, with XP in it's prime, they were cracking down hard on piracy... now it's part of the business model...
  - simgoh 9mo ago
    Absolutely. I would also think that the amount of money "lost" on license keys specifically on the "regular consumer" side pales in comparison to the data that they get once you're on their operating system. How many non-power users bother with disabling telemetry and other data that MS collects through their operating system? How many people bother configuring a Local Account? All of that is probably worth way more than a ~$200 license key. On the business side, businesses make it a focus to be in compliance with licensing agreements so they still see whatever oodles of money from companies that have fleets of computers that run Windows.
tyjen 9mo ago
The only game I regularly play refuses to pay their anti-cheat for Linux support. After Windows 10 support ends, my gaming days are probably over.
runjake 9mo ago
I use Arch but don't want to fiddle with stuff anymore. Installing via the archinstall command was pretty easy. Not quite as easy as a Fedora or Ubuntu install, but for someone familiar with Linux, it's negligible.
- unclad5968 9mo ago
  Yeah, my last arch install was my last. It was fun to rice my system and setting up everything from scratch 4 or 5 times taught me a lot about operating systems and computers. Ultimately my setup is not significantly different than any other distro, it's just that I installed the packages and did configs myself. I'll be fine with a minimally riced system, if I ever even need to install an OS again.
newsoftheday 9mo ago
> if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them. Agree 1000% and recently Steam Community Support pissed me off so I am now looking into GOG (I have my first GOG game now and playing it), Epic and Luna. In fact, the GOG game I got was free through Luna ironically. Even more ironic, the excellent Heroic game launcher lets you mark the game to show up in Steam, then when you start steam run it from there and it uses the config settings from Heroic but you can use screenshots, etc. in Steam. The gaming landscape on Linux is great, except for those companies that refuse to support anti-cheat. I run Kubuntu btw (and Ubuntu since 2006). PS I keep Snap disabled.
- drillsteps5 9mo ago
  While you _can_ use their launcher, you don't _have_ to. Once you buy the game, you can just download the installer and run it to install on your box. If you want you can save the install package somewhere if you think you'll enjoy the game for years to come and don't want to be dependent on GOG. I also found out that they have quite a few fairly recent games. Maybe not the top-10 big budget (however they partner with RedProject so they do have Cyberpunk) but they have plenty of solid indy games from 2015 - 2020, and some more recent.
  - newsoftheday 9mo ago
    That's a good point about downloading it. The game I got was Fallout 3. I'd played Fallout 4, 76 and New Vegas and am finding 3 to be fun too. Probably won't get the older isometric (?) Fallout games, I prefer first person.
godelski 9mo ago
> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro Because its supposed to be stripped down. To serve as a base to create things like Endeavour, Manjaro, or Cachy. There's still a lot of utility to doing things the hard way. I do suggest people that want to actually learn Linux install Arch and live in the terminal. You learn a lot very fast because you're forced to. But it's not for everyone and that's totally okay too. That's the beauty of Linux after all. That's the beauty of computing. You can't build a product for everyone but you can build an environment that can become what anyone needs. But I'll second your point. I've been on Endeavour on my main machine for about 3-4 years now and only had one problem where I just got a mismatch in a new kernel and new Nvidia driver so I couldn't load the desktop. Easy rollback (from the cache) and a day or two later the issue was solved so I could upgrade without a problem. Took no more than 10 minutes to solve and that's the worst problem I've had the entire time. I will also give the advice that if you have an Nvidia card give your boot partition like 5GB instead of 1GB
- Jnr 9mo ago
  I don't think it is because they can't do it or that they want to be a base for other distros. They simply let the user choose what the user wants. And if you don't know what you want then you learn it. I switched to arch 15 years ago to learn Linux. And it is by far the best way to understand it. Having used Arch I can easily maintain almost any distro out there, but it doesn't work the other way around.
  - godelski 9mo ago
    > Having used Arch I can easily maintain almost any distro out there, but it doesn't work the other way around. I think this is an important thing to recognize. It's exactly why I tell people that want to learn Linux to do it (but not people who want to use Linux). The struggle is real, but the struggle is part of the learning process. The truth is that distros are not that different from one another. The main difference is in the package manager and the release schedule of their package databases. I'd also like to tell any Linux newbies, the Arch Wiki is your best friend. It doesn't matter if you're using Ubuntu, Mint, or whatever. The Arch Wiki is still usually the second place I go to for when I need help. The first is the man pages (while there's some bad documentation out there it is quite surprising how well most man pages are written. Linux really has shown me the power and importance of writing good documentation)
morshu9001 9mo ago
My spare PC runs Win10. Was able to install it without internet and thus get an offline account. Since they stopped full updates for it, it's a lot less annoying. Almost all the nags were at reboot time, usually triggered by the update giving it a new thing to nag about. Only thing now is it'll ask me once a month about either OneDrive or Win11, which is bad but tolerable.
cyberpunk 9mo ago
What kinda graphics card do you have in there? I’m considering building one soon.
- simoncion 9mo ago
  With the absurd price of RAM and flash storage (and still-fairly-high price of video cards) now is quite a bad time to purchase a new computer. Having said that, I'm not the OP, but I currently have a Radeon 9070 (non-XT), and previously had a Radeon 5700 XT. Both work great.
commandersaki 9mo ago
If I am understanding correctly, you were using Windows without a licence? I think that's more the problem here, as Windows does provide a way to have offline accounts, you just didn't want to pay for it.
bastardoperator 9mo ago
How do you figure out Arch but not OOBE?
Der_Einzige 9mo ago
Pacman -syyu One command. That's why I won't use arch. This one command will fuck your system up, but only if you wait to long in-between doing it.
MSFT_Edging 9mo ago
> (idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro) Trust me it was far more involved of a process 10 years ago, and that's why people liked it. The modern install process is paired down to something like 10 steps. Start the ISO, configure your partitions, mount your root and boot, and use the delightful arch-chroot tool to enter and install in those partitions. Set up your user, configure your boot manager, exit the chroot, reboot, remove the install media, and boot into your bare bones system. The install ISO has all the networking drivers and other tools you may need to bootstrap your new install, you just need to remember to do it. It's obviously not for total newbies but it's no gentoo, lfs, or even old arch.
- giancarlostoro 9mo ago
  My first distro was Slackware, which I setup all myself. I just don't see any true value in what could be a simple GUI.
  - MSFT_Edging 9mo ago
    I've had graphical installs inexplicably lock up or silently fail before, so it could be nice on a minimal system. Personally, I get joy out of setting up a new machine exactly how I want. I haven't broken an arch install bad enough to require re-installing in almost 10 years so its rare I'm actually installing it anyway. If I want a system up quick I'll pick another distro.
- timw4mail 9mo ago
  I'm too invested into Gentoo at this point to really consider Arch, but hey, arch-chroot does make modern Gentoo installs just a bit quicker.
Wojtkie 9mo ago
I'm currently on Pop, but have an install of Cachy ready once I have some time and a stable connection. My main gripe of Pop (other than the COSMIC issues) was mostly audio issues with how they set up PipeWire and regressions with some releases. Do you find Arch to be a bit less of a headache when dealing with drivers?
ziml77 9mo ago
There actually is an installer for arch. I haven't tried it myself, but there should be an application included on the ISO called archinstall which helps with basically everything that's part of the install guide on the Arch wiki.
amputect 9mo ago
I switched my gaming laptop over to CachyOS (which is more or less "Arch with some good defaults for gaming and a curated runtime environment") because I literally couldn't play Stellaris on my $1800, year-old gaming laptop without regular hard crashes that locked up the entire system and required a hold-the-power-button-down hard reboot. This is apparently a rare but known issue on the Paradox forums, affecting many of their games, and it seems to be due to some problem with the 24h2 windows update on some machines, but there's no clear resolution. Eventually I got mad enough to just pave my entire gaming laptop and switch wholly over to Cachyos. Since switching, I have not experienced a single problem with Stellaris, even running larger galaxies in longer games with more mods. I haven't had any compatibility issues or bugs or anything with my other games either. It was so painless that I switched my desktop over as well, and I no longer have a windows device. I've been really pleasantly surprised by how many games support Linux now.
ActorNightly 9mo ago
> gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows Pro in order to make an "offline" account, I spent $2000+ for a gaming rig, If you are spending 2000 for a gaming rig, a pro windows is like $200. Makes no sense. Also, Apple is no better than Windows, so your post doesn't make sense.
xtracto 9mo ago
Mu gaming needs are more than fulfilled with Steam/Proton and Xbox Live. Both of them work in Linux (Mint is my flavour of choice) and Mac.
rekabis 9mo ago
> I gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows Pro in order to make an "offline" account You quit without even trying. Windows 10 and 11 can have all local accounts by using RUFUS to create the install media. And if your PC comes with Windows already installed, there are still commands - even with 25H2 - that allow you to bypass the Microsoft Account requirement during setup and configure a local account. And this is with both Home and Pro.
- washadjeffmad 9mo ago
  It's the same amount of effort to install Linux and never have to question who the owner of your computer is again.
  - rekabis 9mo ago
    > It's the same amount of effort to install Linux and never have to question who the owner of your computer is again. In many ways, Linux is a complete paradigm change away from what is familiar and known in Windows, requiring a complete re-training from top to bottom. Modifying the OOBE to bypass Microsoft Account requirement and permit a local account is a pebble in the road compared to the alpine pass that is switching to Linux. And just installing Linux isn’t the issue. Learning from scratch an entire OS that behaves and is structurally very differently than Windows, and requires hundreds of hours to get equally as comfortable and knowledgeable in, is the issue. Don’t get me wrong. I love Linux. But to say it’s “the same amount” is deeply disingenuous and borderline anti-reality.
btreecat 9mo ago
>idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro Because in reality, you should be able to use the wiki for installing. Because if you can't, you might not be able to use the wiki to support yourself in the future. The issue most people have with slapping some paint on arch then riding the coat tails is the eternal September effect. Arch community prefers folks who try to help themselves _first_ and reading an install wiki is a good indicator you're going to do that.

dgritsko 9mo ago

What made you switch from Pop OS? I just installed it on a couple of old PCs I had lying around for my kids to play around with/learn from.

condensedcrab 9mo ago
Probably same reason most folks who are capable of running Linux don't stay on Ubuntu, etc.
- dgritsko 9mo ago
  I'm genuinely curious as to what the key differences are (especially those that would cause someone to switch), as someone who is pretty tech savvy but whose use of Linux as a daily driver is admittedly pretty weak.
  - giancarlostoro 9mo ago
    I would say EndeavourOS is the "Ubuntu" to "Arch" if you will. The installer is easy, and it comes with "yay" out of the box which is a frontend to Pacman which holds your hand in just the right ways. If I want to update my OS I type "yay" into a terminal, hit enter and confirm the packages needing updating (or select which ones I want) and type my password, and that's it. In the past with Manjaro I did a system update with Pacman, and problems ensued.
  - Lex-2008 9mo ago
    not OP, but for some it might be availability of latest versions packages (say, you've heard about new major version of Bash or Vim being released today, and wondering how soon it might be available in your distro packages), and, as someone else mentioned, less update stress due to lack of "major version bumps" - just remember to subscribe to https://archlinux.org/news/ https://archlinux.org/news/ and watch out for entries requiring "manual intervention".
  - wafflemaker 9mo ago
    You usually try a few distros, until you find the one that does whenever you needed, and then you stick with it for 15 years ;) From my own experience: 15 years ago, when (except for academia), Linux was very nisje, it was hard to use it. Random rare errors would pop up. On Windows you would know someone who knew what to do, but with Linux? So I chose Ubuntu, because it had the most support. Solution to any error could be found on askubuntu (?) forums. But if you had a friend, you would choose his system and get help from him. I once had university admins very happy to help me with something and even give me some tips. Nowadays it really doesn't matter that much, other than extra easy (with an LLM everything is already easy) installation of drivers (POP os?)/initial programs you used on Windows (on Mate it takes 10min due to a special GUI appstore). BUT there are reasons to switch. Like Ubuntu's pushing of very annoying snaps, making it very hard to get Firefox without a snap. Snaps are annoying, because they don't have a cleaning mechanism and old versions just clog your hard drive. They take forever to launch and it's just not a good idea for a browser. Don't mind snaps for other things. There is also Desktop Environment support and support for hidpi monitors and such. Other than that, there is a little of philosophy. Like super FOSS and idealistic like Debian (i guess? Pls correct me if I'm wrong). Or more business aligned, like Redhat/Fedora. Or elitist that like to waste their users time and make them read manuals for fdisk like Arch, where you have to format your hard drive without GParted or any other GUI. I'm no pro, but that's a little that came to mind if you wanted to know what mattered in the past.
- hamdingers 9mo ago
  Folks capable of running linux pick the best distro for the job at hand. They are tools, there is no progression like you're implying. My homeserver is Ubuntu, my gaming PC is Arch.
giancarlostoro 9mo ago
There was some 3D printer slicer software I needed that wouldnt run, when I finally figured out why it had to do with GLIBC being out of date. I have used Debian since like 2008, and Ubuntu since the mid 2010s so I am accustomed to doing PPA's and what not, but something in me broke and I wanted to finally try something more bleeding edge. I nearly went for Fedora but the version I wanted to try didn't even boot (I don't like to waste any time with command line incantations anymore) so I looked up EndeavourOS I don't remember how I found it, I think a friend said someone they knew used it (turns out they dont LOL) so I gave it a shot. I had bad experiences with Arch before because of Manjaro, but in hindsight, I think the main issues I had were more to do with how Pacman can get insanely nuanced. When you update packages you have to know what you're doing, it will update all weird, its not like Debian or Ubuntu upgrades where it installs / uninstalls what you do and don't need unless you tell it to be that nuanced.
hamdingers 9mo ago
Long term stability is less important for gaming computers than having the most cutting edge (and theoretically highest performance) drivers. That's why the community leans so heavily towards arch.

W3zzy 9mo ago

''By the way, I use Arch''

bee_rider 9mo ago
The meme was “I use Arch, BTW,” but I think it has mostly died as enough people have pointed out that Arch isn’t really hard-mode Linux or something. It is a barebones start but 1) very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes 2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki” Eventually I switched to Ubuntu for some reason, it has given me more headaches than Arch.
- W3zzy 9mo ago
  I've started my Linux journey a decent year ago. It's been fun but I'm happy that they're such a great community to troubleshoot along with me. Never tried Arch but I do love a barebones no fuzz system.
- GeoAtreides 9mo ago
  >the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki” if GenZ knew how to read they would be very disappointed right now in the age of tablets and tiktok, basic literacy is quite a big ask
  - piperswe 9mo ago
    That's what they said about GenX, Millennials, and probably every other generation before them. Something something, "OK boomer."
    - GeoAtreides 9mo ago
      they absolutely did not say that tiktok and tablets are destroying basic literacy about GenX or Millenials if anything, they said the kids were good with technology
      - 9mo ago

the_arun 9mo ago

I would love to switch from Mac. But Mac hardware is so resilient & haven't seen that in PC world.

tremarley 9mo ago
You can run Linux on Apple Silicon with Asahi Linux
- k2enemy 9mo ago
  There's a whole lot of asterisks that you're leaving out of that statement.
- fcantournet 9mo ago
  M1&2 yes with slight caveats, m3-5 not really (at least yet)
gambiting 9mo ago
What do you mean by that? As a long term windows user I've never had any issues running my laptops and PCs for years and years.
pimeys 9mo ago
I just got a new work laptop: the ThinkPad X1 Carbon gen13. It's gorgeous: weighs a bit over 900 grams, has an amazing matte OLED screen, Intel Lunar Lake that sips power (1-2W idle) and is fast enough to compile Rust if needed, amazing keyboard, touchpad is great but I just use the trackpoint, everything works from the box on Linux (they even deliver it with either Fedora or Ubuntu, but I installed CachyOS). Suspend: works always. Battery life: great, the whole day. Wifi: works always, connects fast, works fast. The build quality is really nice, especially the carbon fiber body that doesn't feel so cold/hot to touch.
newsoftheday 9mo ago
Dell, HP and Lenovo have been phenomenally resilient for us, going back more than 2 decades.
9mo ago

mrln 9mo ago

Yeah, yay works until it doesn't anymore, because the pacman library dependency it uses was updated but yay was not... and then you need to recompile yay manually. I mean, I'll still use it (or rather paru, which works basically the same way), but it's very annoying, when it happens every few months.

fsmv 9mo ago
I don't understand, yay updates itself. I've never once had this problem.
- Levitating 9mo ago
  That's assuming you do system upgrades through paru/yay. However, you may not want to upgrade the packages you've obtained from the AUR and so you upgrade using pacman. That may cause the updated libalpm to become incompatible with the installed yay/paru.
  - nicce 9mo ago
    yay used to be in the official Arch Linux repository for some time, wonder why it was removed.
    - morserer 9mo ago
      Iirc it was to force the extra step necessary for the user to acknowledge that the AUR can bootstrap malware if used blindly. This seems to be a relatively consistent discussion surrounding AUR helper development; for example, adding UX to incentivise users to read PKGBUILDs, lest the AUR becomes an attractive vector for skids. No one wants the AUR to become NPM, and the thing that will incentivise that is uneducated users. Having the small barrier of not having helpers in the main repos is an effective way of accomplishing that.
    - Levitating 9mo ago
      https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_helpers https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_helpers AUR helpers like yay are not supported officially. The other commenter sheds some light as to why.

Zambyte 9mo ago

> if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them. So much this. People like to moan about "oh game XYZ doesn't run so it's not reasonable for gaming". More games run on GNU / Linux than any gaming console. There are simply too many games that do run to give a second thought about the ones that don't, and it's been that way for years.

nightski 9mo ago
I run both operating systems. But I have to say it either runs the game you want to play or it doesn't. This is especially true if you play games with friends.
- neogodless 9mo ago
  > But I have to say it either runs the game you want to play or it doesn't Can you elaborate on this? For example, it was convoluted getting StarCraft 2 to run. Then it did eventually work, though it felt ever so slightly laggy. Anno 1800 ran though it occasionally slowed way down, occasionally crashed, and multiplayer never worked. Hogwart's Legacy ran but crashed, and ran massively slower / lower quality settings than on the same hardware but in Windows. All of those were not binary "runs / doesn't".
  - nightski 9mo ago
    That's not what I am saying, sorry if it was confusing. The parent was implying that if it doesn't run a game just pick a different game. But I was pointing out that isn't always an option, and some times you just want to play a specific game.
    - ozim 9mo ago
      I do understand the premise but … people want to play the games they want to play. For example I am a good customer for streaming services because I don’t care about specific titles - I will watch a series or a movie because it is available. I will most likely not go through a hassle to watch some specific show if it is not on streaming I already have. Gaming doesn’t really work like that for me. I usually want to play specific titles - not just some game. But I fully understand someone has the same approach to games as I have for movies/series.

Muromec 9mo ago

This was me in 2005. I cant believe people say that M$ started to suck in 2025. It always did.

chris_wot 9mo ago
Yes, but it took some time before the suck became so bad too many people started to notice, and those people weren’t tech people. Most people had never even heard of Linux. It has taken a lot of very bad things on Windows for it to get to this point. It’s classic frog in a slowly heating up pot territory.
- otherme123 9mo ago
  >Most people had never even heard of Linux. My experience is that people fear linux, rather than not knowing. I am the lonely Linux user since c. 2005, and people see half my screen is always a console, the other half a browser. So they fear linux is for console wizards, not for regular users. Nothing will convince them otherwise, even when they are 100% of the time using online webapps. I have some coworkers using browser + VS code + WSL2 all the time, but they don't switch because they fear the console-to-config-everything instead of Control Panel.
  - vladvasiliu 9mo ago
    I don't know, man. In my experience, people make no difference between "windows" and "the pc". I think the vast majority of "regular people" have no idea there are alternatives to "windows", other than "macs".
  - a_vanderbilt 9mo ago
    So much of it is a problem of execution. If people could use Linux without ever having to know what a terminal is (much like the average Windows user doesn't know what PowerShell is), then it would actually be quite successful. It has gotten better over the past decade, but it still suffers from endless paper cuts and the odd issue that requires a shell session to fix. I will say that Valve's SteamOS has come the closest to avoiding this trap. You can use a deck without ever having to touch a CLI.

thewebguyd 9mo ago

> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro They largely have now, archinstall. It's still text based/TUI but it's pretty simple and intuitive, anyone already familiar with installing a Linux distro (especially any sort of -server variant) will be comfortable with the archinstall script.

simgoh 9mo ago
> anyone already familiar with installing a Linux distro (especially any sort of -server variant) will be comfortable with the archinstall script. To be fair, thats not _generally_ the audience we tend to think about when we talk about the enshittification of Windows. We're usually talking regular consumers / computer users and "gamers" the latter of which is a wide range of people that can fend for themselves with instructions to people that cannot.
- thewebguyd 9mo ago
  Fair enough, but I wouldn't generally direct that audience to vanilla arch linux as "gamers first distro" anyway. I'd direct them to something like Bazzite (Immutable), or CachyOS for staying arch-based but providing a GUI installer and tools, Endeavor OS, even Fedora, etc.
  - simgoh 9mo ago
    Agreed. I know in some circles it's a meme, but if the Steam Gaming Console actually makes a debut any time soon, I think we'll see more of a jump from the "Gamer" crowd away from Windows. My (some say naive) hope is that it will make game devs try to design games that aren't only locked in on Windows and have more Proton support.
- theYipster 9mo ago
  It's really a (good IMHO) sign of the times that us old hats have to remind ourselves that most new comers to Linux today aren't necessarily adept at installing another OS, let alone using the command line. The first time I installed Arch was maybe four years ago, but the very first dual boot setup I made was between Win 3.1 and OS/2 2.1 in 1993 when I was 10, and I've been playing with Linux since the mid-late 90s. When I first installed Arch the "hard way" I said to myself--"I don't understand why it has this reputation... this is all stuff I've done before countless times." Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out the distribution graph of Linux knowledge and how to engage with different skill levels.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

Levitating 9mo ago

> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro Simplicity, among other reasons. Installers force the users hand and need maintenance. Having no installer but rather a detailed installation guide offers unlimited freedom to users. Installation isn't difficult either, you just pacstrap a root filesystem and configure the bootloader, mounts and locale. ArchLinux does now have an installer called archinstall, but it's described more as a library than a tool. It allows you to automate the installation using profiles.

BoxOfRain 9mo ago
Also if you want 'Arch with sensible defaults' CachyOS is basically that, people think of it as a 'gaming distro' but that's not an accurate characterisation. I use it as a daily driver on my personal machine mostly for non-gaming work and it's an excellent distro.
muthuh 9mo ago
There is though the TUI installer, not like it used to be where the commands were typed in following the wiki. Not that there was anything wrong with the 'manual' mode, it gave you insight into the basic building blocks/configurations right from the start.
- vladvasiliu 9mo ago
  It's been a very long time since I moved to Arch, but I swear that something like 12 years ago it did have some form of menu-driven installer. Nowadays, there are so many ways to partition the drive (lvm, luks, either one on top of the other; zfs with native encryption or through dm-crypt), having the efi boot directly a unified kernel image or fiddle with some bootloader (among a plethora of options)... One of the principal reasons why I love Arch is being able to have a say in some of these base matters, and would hate to have to fight the installer to attain my goals. I remember when Ubuntu supported root on zfs but the installer didn't it was rather involved to get the install going. All it takes with Arch is to spend a few minutes reading the wiki and you're off to the races. The actual installation part is trivial. But then again, if you have no idea what you want to do, staring at the freshly-booted install disk prompt can be daunting. Bonus points for it requiring internet for installation. I would have to look up the correct incantation to get the wifi connected on a newer PC with no wired ethernet, and I've been using the thing for a very long time.

kuerbel 9mo ago

I installed fedora yesterday. Instead of steam i am hoping that GOG with heroic games launcher will work nicely. Idk, I want to support drm free software so if it's on gog, I buy it there.

byronic 9mo ago
[obviously YMMV, take me with a grain of salt etc] I actually tried Fedora first (thinking dev-first workflows) but ended up switching to Ubuntu w/x11 for gaming. A lot of that had to do with Fedora's release schedule (rather than Ubuntu's 2-year LTS) breaking working GOG/steam/wine-based apps on a rotating basis. Since switching to a defaults lifestyle / Ubuntu with x11 I deal with NVIDIA driver compatibility issues every 6 months or so instead of once/month. The 22 -> 24 upgrade was better than I expected and I didn't lose more than a couple of hours of life to appease the shell gods. In any case Fedora and a once/month problem would still beat the Windows update nonsense, which I am still supporting since my spouse hasn't switched yet :/
- newsoftheday 9mo ago
  I've used Ubuntu since 2006 and started using Kubuntu (I prefer KDE) about 2 years ago. Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) are very solid for gaming. It puzzles me how often I see highly customized distros like Bazzite and CachyOS touted for gaming after looking into some of the wild tweaks those distros do; it's amazing to me that they run at all. PS I keep Snap disabled.
  - Happily2020 9mo ago
    What wild customisations are you talking about? As someone who used Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, Arch) exclusively from 2010 and recently moved to bazzite, I only see positives from the switch. Most of my usecases work OOTB, and for everything else I use a container workflow. I like that there are fewer ways to mess up upgrades. I like that flatpaks are well integrated.
Iolaum 9mo ago
Fedora Silverblue user here. Lutris (from flatpak) can play GoG games fine (*). (*): Apparently achievement support even on single player games requires the gamestore client (GoG client in my case) and Lutris doesn't support that yet. Am old enough to not care :p

zamadatix 9mo ago

> I know its a "meme" to talk about how great Arch is, but when you want the latest of something, Arch has it I love my Arch installs to death, but I feel like I'm the oddball out about the mess that is AUR. The main repositories have a lot of things but I always end up getting pushed to AUR and then it just feels like I bolted on a hack rather than pacman/the arch base just supporting AUR more like a different package source normally.

mock-possum 9mo ago

You spent $2000 on a new machine but wouldn’t shell out another $20-30 for a windows pro key? You’re willing to burn a bunch of time fiddling with getting a completely new operating system setup, but you’re not willing to spend a few minutes fiddling with setting up an offline windows account? I get that maybe that was the final straw or something, but come on, “I switched to Linux because I didn’t want to take an hour to set up Windows” really sounds like you never really wanted Windows in the first place, you were just looking for an excuse.

manuelabeledo 9mo ago
The main difference, in my opinion, is that to set up Linux one doesn't need to work around the expected behaviours of the OS. And why would anyone put so much effort into making Windows usable now, when there is not knowing what Microsoft will do next?

7bit 9mo ago

> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro Because Arch maintainers are a bunch of elitist gatekeepers that don't accept any level of knowledge that is lower than theirs. You can see that through every forum interaction generally and any discussion about the installation process specifically. Arch is great btw. It could be greater, if all maintainers would quit.

DrBazza 9mo ago

I've been using Fedora+KDE for over a decade, Windows 8 was last version of Windows I had installed at home, and we all know what a squarified mess that was. Gnome is fine, but it's just not for me. For everyone on here that complains about Windows requiring an 'online' account, MacOS does as well, but the perception is different. MacOS, just kind of quietly does it, with no ceremony, but Windows does a Ballmer-esque right-in-your-face demand. I couldn't possibly comment on Windows 11 as I've yet to use it, but Win10 felt a lot worse than Windows 7 which was probably the last high water mark for Windows after Windows 2000.

scoodah 9mo ago
Afaik, you can choose to not sign into icloud when creating an account on your mac. It's not a hard requirement like it is on Windows, though they do obviously strongly nudge you to login to icloud.
- DrBazza 9mo ago
  I didn't know that. Thanks. Setting up my mac once in 5 years means it isn't a screen I've seen very often!
cogman10 9mo ago
Plasma 6 is really polished and simple. I think anyone familiar with windows would be able to grab and run with it immediately. No hate for anyone that likes other desktop environments, I as a long time windows user just really appreciate how familiar KDE feels.
- connicpu 9mo ago
  The familiarity is great but the thing that really draws me to Plasma over Gnome is that the KDE developers seem to have an attitude of just implementing the features people want even if it's not perfect yet. Gnome is polished, but it's missing so many basic configuration options out of the box.
  - 9mo ago

xattt 9mo ago

> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro It could be a deliberate measure to set the bar high and filter out people who don’t want to troubleshoot themselves.

cogman10 9mo ago
The arch advantage is that your system gets setup exactly how you want it and you have to consciously choose the software set you want to work with. That minimalism is somewhat the point of the OS.
- wiredpancake 9mo ago
  [dead]

grepfru_it 9mo ago

> Steam and Proton work perfectly I am a hardcore DayZ player. DayZ does not work on Proton[0]. I cannot use Linux as my main gaming platform. Battlefield 6 does not work. Latest Call of Duty does not work. You can talk about voting with your wallet, but when millions of people are buying the game, your one non-vote means nothing. So either you punish yourself and refuse to play with friends, or you punish yourself and install windows. It’s a damned situation regardless of your choice [0] point me to as many compatibility databases as you want, the game will not start on my vanilla Ubuntu build

Zekio 9mo ago
this is why a lot of people run arch and why valve based steamOS on arch instead of debian as the previous version was, you need a newer kernel and other packages to really play games on linux with the least friction possible
- AuthAuth 9mo ago
  thats not a kernel issue its an anti cheat issue. No kernel except the windows kernel is going to allow him to play battlefield and cod.
Mond_ 9mo ago
Sounds like it might be an issue with your setup, considering that other people have no problems running it. Hard to tell what the problem is, but definitely a frustrating situation.
tapoxi 9mo ago
This is really just a subset of competitive shooters. Arc Raiders, The Finals, Hunt Showdown, Halo Infinite all play fine. I have a Windows drive for Battlefield but I stopped booting into it after interest in the game waned. Playing on console is also an option. Most games allow you to alternate between keyboard/mouse and controller. Discord works fine, and every game is cross-play.
- grepfru_it 9mo ago

simgoh 9mo ago

Not that this is going to matter to you because you've left Windows behind, but I refuse to buy License Keys any more and I try to steer people away from buying "Gray Keys" to avoid the ridiculous costs. Using the MS Activation Scripts[0] is the much better go-to. [0] - https://massgrave.dev/ https://massgrave.dev/

godzillabrennus 9mo ago
Given the push to monetize user data it seems Microsoft is demphasizing their focus on key piracy. I bought a computer with a 55" touch screen. The company selling it said it was a Windows 11 computer. The computer was a 14 year old Intel CPU/Mobo that was never designed to run Windows 11. The company selling it had hacked Windows to run on this old computer. They didn't have a license key. I report it to Microsoft and crickets. The company ghosted me on the issue. In 2003, with XP in it's prime, they were cracking down hard on piracy... now it's part of the business model...
- simgoh 9mo ago
  Absolutely. I would also think that the amount of money "lost" on license keys specifically on the "regular consumer" side pales in comparison to the data that they get once you're on their operating system. How many non-power users bother with disabling telemetry and other data that MS collects through their operating system? How many people bother configuring a Local Account? All of that is probably worth way more than a ~$200 license key. On the business side, businesses make it a focus to be in compliance with licensing agreements so they still see whatever oodles of money from companies that have fleets of computers that run Windows.

tyjen 9mo ago

The only game I regularly play refuses to pay their anti-cheat for Linux support. After Windows 10 support ends, my gaming days are probably over.

runjake 9mo ago

I use Arch but don't want to fiddle with stuff anymore. Installing via the archinstall command was pretty easy. Not quite as easy as a Fedora or Ubuntu install, but for someone familiar with Linux, it's negligible.

unclad5968 9mo ago
Yeah, my last arch install was my last. It was fun to rice my system and setting up everything from scratch 4 or 5 times taught me a lot about operating systems and computers. Ultimately my setup is not significantly different than any other distro, it's just that I installed the packages and did configs myself. I'll be fine with a minimally riced system, if I ever even need to install an OS again.

newsoftheday 9mo ago

> if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them. Agree 1000% and recently Steam Community Support pissed me off so I am now looking into GOG (I have my first GOG game now and playing it), Epic and Luna. In fact, the GOG game I got was free through Luna ironically. Even more ironic, the excellent Heroic game launcher lets you mark the game to show up in Steam, then when you start steam run it from there and it uses the config settings from Heroic but you can use screenshots, etc. in Steam. The gaming landscape on Linux is great, except for those companies that refuse to support anti-cheat. I run Kubuntu btw (and Ubuntu since 2006). PS I keep Snap disabled.

drillsteps5 9mo ago
While you _can_ use their launcher, you don't _have_ to. Once you buy the game, you can just download the installer and run it to install on your box. If you want you can save the install package somewhere if you think you'll enjoy the game for years to come and don't want to be dependent on GOG. I also found out that they have quite a few fairly recent games. Maybe not the top-10 big budget (however they partner with RedProject so they do have Cyberpunk) but they have plenty of solid indy games from 2015 - 2020, and some more recent.
- newsoftheday 9mo ago
  That's a good point about downloading it. The game I got was Fallout 3. I'd played Fallout 4, 76 and New Vegas and am finding 3 to be fun too. Probably won't get the older isometric (?) Fallout games, I prefer first person.

godelski 9mo ago

> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro Because its supposed to be stripped down. To serve as a base to create things like Endeavour, Manjaro, or Cachy. There's still a lot of utility to doing things the hard way. I do suggest people that want to actually learn Linux install Arch and live in the terminal. You learn a lot very fast because you're forced to. But it's not for everyone and that's totally okay too. That's the beauty of Linux after all. That's the beauty of computing. You can't build a product for everyone but you can build an environment that can become what anyone needs. But I'll second your point. I've been on Endeavour on my main machine for about 3-4 years now and only had one problem where I just got a mismatch in a new kernel and new Nvidia driver so I couldn't load the desktop. Easy rollback (from the cache) and a day or two later the issue was solved so I could upgrade without a problem. Took no more than 10 minutes to solve and that's the worst problem I've had the entire time. I will also give the advice that if you have an Nvidia card give your boot partition like 5GB instead of 1GB

Jnr 9mo ago
I don't think it is because they can't do it or that they want to be a base for other distros. They simply let the user choose what the user wants. And if you don't know what you want then you learn it. I switched to arch 15 years ago to learn Linux. And it is by far the best way to understand it. Having used Arch I can easily maintain almost any distro out there, but it doesn't work the other way around.
- godelski 9mo ago
  > Having used Arch I can easily maintain almost any distro out there, but it doesn't work the other way around. I think this is an important thing to recognize. It's exactly why I tell people that want to learn Linux to do it (but not people who want to use Linux). The struggle is real, but the struggle is part of the learning process. The truth is that distros are not that different from one another. The main difference is in the package manager and the release schedule of their package databases. I'd also like to tell any Linux newbies, the Arch Wiki is your best friend. It doesn't matter if you're using Ubuntu, Mint, or whatever. The Arch Wiki is still usually the second place I go to for when I need help. The first is the man pages (while there's some bad documentation out there it is quite surprising how well most man pages are written. Linux really has shown me the power and importance of writing good documentation)

morshu9001 9mo ago

My spare PC runs Win10. Was able to install it without internet and thus get an offline account. Since they stopped full updates for it, it's a lot less annoying. Almost all the nags were at reboot time, usually triggered by the update giving it a new thing to nag about. Only thing now is it'll ask me once a month about either OneDrive or Win11, which is bad but tolerable.

cyberpunk 9mo ago

What kinda graphics card do you have in there? I’m considering building one soon.

simoncion 9mo ago
With the absurd price of RAM and flash storage (and still-fairly-high price of video cards) now is quite a bad time to purchase a new computer. Having said that, I'm not the OP, but I currently have a Radeon 9070 (non-XT), and previously had a Radeon 5700 XT. Both work great.

commandersaki 9mo ago

If I am understanding correctly, you were using Windows without a licence? I think that's more the problem here, as Windows does provide a way to have offline accounts, you just didn't want to pay for it.

bastardoperator 9mo ago

How do you figure out Arch but not OOBE?

Der_Einzige 9mo ago

Pacman -syyu One command. That's why I won't use arch. This one command will fuck your system up, but only if you wait to long in-between doing it.

MSFT_Edging 9mo ago

> (idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro) Trust me it was far more involved of a process 10 years ago, and that's why people liked it. The modern install process is paired down to something like 10 steps. Start the ISO, configure your partitions, mount your root and boot, and use the delightful arch-chroot tool to enter and install in those partitions. Set up your user, configure your boot manager, exit the chroot, reboot, remove the install media, and boot into your bare bones system. The install ISO has all the networking drivers and other tools you may need to bootstrap your new install, you just need to remember to do it. It's obviously not for total newbies but it's no gentoo, lfs, or even old arch.

giancarlostoro 9mo ago
My first distro was Slackware, which I setup all myself. I just don't see any true value in what could be a simple GUI.
- MSFT_Edging 9mo ago
  I've had graphical installs inexplicably lock up or silently fail before, so it could be nice on a minimal system. Personally, I get joy out of setting up a new machine exactly how I want. I haven't broken an arch install bad enough to require re-installing in almost 10 years so its rare I'm actually installing it anyway. If I want a system up quick I'll pick another distro.
timw4mail 9mo ago
I'm too invested into Gentoo at this point to really consider Arch, but hey, arch-chroot does make modern Gentoo installs just a bit quicker.

Wojtkie 9mo ago

I'm currently on Pop, but have an install of Cachy ready once I have some time and a stable connection. My main gripe of Pop (other than the COSMIC issues) was mostly audio issues with how they set up PipeWire and regressions with some releases. Do you find Arch to be a bit less of a headache when dealing with drivers?

ziml77 9mo ago

There actually is an installer for arch. I haven't tried it myself, but there should be an application included on the ISO called archinstall which helps with basically everything that's part of the install guide on the Arch wiki.

amputect 9mo ago

I switched my gaming laptop over to CachyOS (which is more or less "Arch with some good defaults for gaming and a curated runtime environment") because I literally couldn't play Stellaris on my $1800, year-old gaming laptop without regular hard crashes that locked up the entire system and required a hold-the-power-button-down hard reboot. This is apparently a rare but known issue on the Paradox forums, affecting many of their games, and it seems to be due to some problem with the 24h2 windows update on some machines, but there's no clear resolution. Eventually I got mad enough to just pave my entire gaming laptop and switch wholly over to Cachyos. Since switching, I have not experienced a single problem with Stellaris, even running larger galaxies in longer games with more mods. I haven't had any compatibility issues or bugs or anything with my other games either. It was so painless that I switched my desktop over as well, and I no longer have a windows device. I've been really pleasantly surprised by how many games support Linux now.

ActorNightly 9mo ago

> gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows Pro in order to make an "offline" account, I spent $2000+ for a gaming rig, If you are spending 2000 for a gaming rig, a pro windows is like $200. Makes no sense. Also, Apple is no better than Windows, so your post doesn't make sense.

xtracto 9mo ago

Mu gaming needs are more than fulfilled with Steam/Proton and Xbox Live. Both of them work in Linux (Mint is my flavour of choice) and Mac.

rekabis 9mo ago

> I gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows Pro in order to make an "offline" account You quit without even trying. Windows 10 and 11 can have all local accounts by using RUFUS to create the install media. And if your PC comes with Windows already installed, there are still commands - even with 25H2 - that allow you to bypass the Microsoft Account requirement during setup and configure a local account. And this is with both Home and Pro.

washadjeffmad 9mo ago
It's the same amount of effort to install Linux and never have to question who the owner of your computer is again.
- rekabis 9mo ago
  > It's the same amount of effort to install Linux and never have to question who the owner of your computer is again. In many ways, Linux is a complete paradigm change away from what is familiar and known in Windows, requiring a complete re-training from top to bottom. Modifying the OOBE to bypass Microsoft Account requirement and permit a local account is a pebble in the road compared to the alpine pass that is switching to Linux. And just installing Linux isn’t the issue. Learning from scratch an entire OS that behaves and is structurally very differently than Windows, and requires hundreds of hours to get equally as comfortable and knowledgeable in, is the issue. Don’t get me wrong. I love Linux. But to say it’s “the same amount” is deeply disingenuous and borderline anti-reality.

btreecat 9mo ago

>idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro Because in reality, you should be able to use the wiki for installing. Because if you can't, you might not be able to use the wiki to support yourself in the future. The issue most people have with slapping some paint on arch then riding the coat tails is the eternal September effect. Arch community prefers folks who try to help themselves _first_ and reading an install wiki is a good indicator you're going to do that.