Had a slow day yesterday so thought, why not wipe the gaming PC and put Linux on it.

I work with Linux every day for work so I wanted a debian-based distro as that’s what I’m most familiar with. After a short impulsive-driven search, I picked pika-os. Never heard of it but thought I’d give it a go.

Picked KDE, installed the OS, booted first time and immediately regretted it. No network. I have a 2.5G Realtek 8125 nic and whilst it was detected, it was showing RX packets as “dropped”. Couldn’t install firmware-realtek as it conflicted with linux-firmware. Tried the Realtek website, what a mess that is, compiled a driver, couldn’t get it to load. Ended up finding a git repo that created .deb packages for all realtek drivers.

Got network up and running and its all been great from there. Last time I tried this in 2021 I had loads of issues but so far, other than having to download a later version of Proton and select it in a game, or add some command-line arguments in Steam, its been great!

I’m so surprised that every app I normally use on Windows is either available as a Linux native app, works with emulation (bottles) or there is a decent alternative.

Definitely, 100%, the Linux desktop is ready.

  • vogi@piefed.socialEnglish
    5·
    10 hours ago

    Oh wow I never heard of PikaOS but of seems great, even though you had some difficulties. I love Debian and have it on my Server, Laptop and now also on my older Gaming (Nvidia) PC.

    I feel like Debian really only needs a couple of (hardware specific) tweaks to be a great out of the box experience and it seems PikaOS tries to do that. I don’t like that most other desktop first distros opt into using Ubuntu as their bases. But that is only because I’m willing to invest some time to fix stuff and understand how my PC works.

    • lazynooblet@lazysoci.alOPEnglish
      2·
      8 hours ago

      Yeah I’m enjoying pikaos. I use chrony for time-sync and their “pika-base” package absolutely required systemd-timesync and I wanted to remove it. I asked in their discord and they changed the package for me right there and then so that it was “systemd-timesyncd” OR “chrony”. I did “apt update” 10 minutes later and it was resolved.