This won’t be interesting for any longtime user but maybe it’ll give someone on the fence the courage to switch. This post includes every problem I ran into and how I solved it
I settled on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed but I downloaded a couple more distros and loaded them into a Ventoy USB stick.
Good thing I did because despite partitioning the drive itself, the opensuse installer kept saying it said was out of space and no fix I found worked. So I booted up TempleOS for advice and the good lord whispered through my speakers, “try the Fedora KDE iso…”
The Fedora live environment booted right away. And unlike OpenSUSE, it recognized my 32:9 resolution so it looked good, too. I clicked through the installer and it rebooted. I was up and running in about 5 minutes.
The “app store” had a Steam and Discord flatpak so I could brag about my superior OS to my friends immediately. Do not install Steam this way, though (see below) EDIT: This apparently wasn’t a mistake, see viktorz’s comment below
The biggest problem I faced was with my audio interface (Focusrite Scarlett 18i8) which was recognized but hardware muted. Had to install alsa-scarlett-gui to unmute them…this was admittedly a huge pain in the ass but it’s a niche problem and it was solved.
The best biggest problem was the video drivers. My resolution maxed out at 32:9 1080@119.97hz and the screen would not wake from sleep. I ran two commands to download and install the Nvidia drivers and it worked - 1440&240hz with HDR and it wakes properly
A minor problem I ran into was Steam not creating shortcuts for games. I learned that this was because the flatpak version is siloed. Installing it “normally” solved this problem. I had already downloaded some games but was able to move them from the original folder in /var to the new one in /home. EDIT: In the comments, viktorz said a symlink would have accomplished the same thing. See what he wrote for more info
Another minor “problem” (I was prepared to lose the functionality) was my crappy Corsair mouse/keyboard. I mainly wanted to disable the default RGB rainbow but was thrilled to find CKB-Next which allowed me to change the colors and map the extra keys on my keyboard.
Anyway, I don’t know why I wrote all this. I guess I was just surprised to find how easy it was and wanted to share. I’m sure I’ll run into some headaches once I try to actually use the computer for stuff but for now, I’m quite happy with the experience.
The thing that really blew me away wasn’t just the ease but the SPEED of it. Can’t believe I had a functional operating system in under 10 minutes. I swear it took an hour just to get to the desktop on my last Windows install.
That was one of my first impressions too. I’m a long time linux user when it comes to servers and CLI, but I have been using a Windows PC for years as my main desktop. I finally installed linux on my desktop again and I did a literal double-take when double clicking folders to open them in Dolphin. It finishes loading before I even release the mouse button. I thought it was opening on a single click, but it’s just that fast and I got used to a few 100ms delay on Windows Explorer.
EVERYTHING feels like 100ms+ delay on Windows nowadays. There’s even a delay opening the start menu (because apparently it’s HTML5 in a wrapper now??)
Also, a year or two ago, I installed Windows XP (the one from 2001) on a relatively modern computer with an SSD. (The hardware was supported, as it wasn’t too modern.) I expected the whole thing to be like 5 minutes compared to an hour it was back then. Turned out, it took about an hour! Why? I couldn’t get it, Ubuntu or Fedora took like 5 mins for that very PC with an SSD.
The funny thing, installing Arch Linux to a relatively old computer, if you did the install pretty often, to the point of knowing what to do, the installation takes like a minute or two, completely depending on the internet speed.
Technically, other distros with modern SSDs and powerful processors, are in the same league. As there’s little difference in what they do upon installing. It’s really cool! I stopped bothering backing up some important system data beyond some configs and the list of installed apps, purely because reinstalling the whole thing is just non-issue, a couple of minutes.