The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Sneed Chuckson]

What is thee best version of Linux to use with a Ryzen 5 RTX4060 machine that is mainly used for video editing and playing games from 5 years ago?
Microslop "Upgrade" me to windows 11 while I wasn't looking and I have never had a system crash this much, ever.

My #1 tip is that if you don't like mint, try another version of linux before you go back to windows. Try something like fedora or arch if you drop mint.

and concluded that Wayland was the reason I was having difficulties

0:41

 

[Taser Confetti]

What is thee best version of Linux to use with a Ryzen 5 RTX4060 machine that is mainly used for video editing and playing games from 5 years ago?
Microslop "Upgrade" me to windows 11 while I wasn't looking and I have never had a system crash this much, ever.

Thanks.

Literally just install Bazzite Linux if you’re a normie. What video editor are you tied to? DaVinci Resolve can be a pain in the pass but you can just install it in a Podman container.

 

[Dread First]

What is thee best version of Linux to use with a Ryzen 5 RTX4060 machine that is mainly used for video editing and playing games from 5 years ago?
Microslop "Upgrade" me to windows 11 while I wasn't looking and I have never had a system crash this much, ever.

Thanks.

Hey @BubbaRobot887, please do yourself a favour and don't fucking listen to @Taser Confetti's retarded Bazzite recommendation. At all. He's a low effort threadshitter recommending you a Linux distribution that's better if you wanna turn your PC into an appliance instead of actually using it like a normal person. I won't bore you with a gigantic screed of technobabble against Bazzite and the broader Fedora Atomic ecosystem, please consult @Trans Fat 41g because he's inflicted it upon himself and can give you the granular, painstaking deep dive.

***

There are a few recommendations I have, but your RTX 4060 will ultimately be the big bottleneck. NVIDIA is such a shitty company to work with such that Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, publicly flipped them off. The drivers are adequate now, but just remember: to use NVIDIA hardware on Linux necessarily means that you'll have to roll your sleeves up and get your hands dirty. It's never a matter of "if," only "when," even on normie-friendly Linux distributions. I'm deliberately withholding technobabble because this is more for you to have a broad sense of what to try. If you have targeted questions, I'll gladly answer them.

FOR LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS THAT HANDLE NVIDIA OUT OF THE BOX

There are only two recommendations I have, and neither are entirely optimal. Highlighting their biggest pros (+), cons (-), and neutrals (~).

a) LINUX MINT

(+) It is, without exaggeration or hyperbole, "the" starting point for *all* Linux noobs over the last 20 years. Its reputation precedes itself for good reason. COUNTLESS good reasons. This includes, but definitely ain't limited to how graphics drivers, proprietary/patented/encumbered hardware+software codecs, everything's pre-configured,.
(+) Clem, the project's leader, specifically prioritises conservatism and consistency. Frequent major changes do not happen in Linux Mint. They would rather go out of their way to maintain older tooling at their own expense than to abandon newer stuff for the sake of making the developers' lives easier.
(+) Extremely low skill floor, more or less "indefinite" skill ceiling. Most newer Linux distros go out of their way to obfuscate the internals because they think the end user is a fucking retard who can't figure out how to do anything. Linux Mint gives you some nice graphical tools, but those tools map (almost) 1:1 with command line equivalents.
(+) Linux Mint itself, by virtue of being an Ubuntu variant, is part of the broader Debian family tree. All the fun proprietary software like Spotify, Chrome, most VPN clients, etc are Debian-forward. Furthermore, tons of fun homelab tooling (for when you decide to be a fancy guy) operate under Debian assumptions, most notably Docker Compose.

(-) The release cadence is slow. Linux Mint is, in essence, a rebuild of Ubuntu's long term support branch. New releases of Ubuntu LTS drop every two years, and Linux Mint never drops a new release immediately after. They heavily modify stuff in the process, and those modifications (while 100% justified) take a long time.
(-) You're also running older versions of tons of other software. Not just the user applications you point and click with, but low-level system libraries and tooling too. You can slot in third-party update repositories, but it gets really ugly and messy really quickly if you're chasing the latest kernel, Mesa (the non-driver low-level graphical stack), etc.
(-) Newer hardware tends to be "iffy" on Linux Mint because they use older LTS kernels by default. This is a problem I've personally encountered after building a new PC and finding out that my 9070XT is too damn new for Linux Mint 22 (released in 2024). It ain't just graphics cards, but other types of drivers and firmware affected by old kernels.

(~) You do have options to get newer kernels, and thus newer hardware to work on Linux Mint. Sometimes it works flawlessly, other times you win the battle but enter a nigh-unwinnable war because everything else except your kernel's outdated. I'm a stodgy old fart: either give me OOTB LTS kernel hardware support or I'll wait another two years. Other people ain't me, so who knows? Roll the dice at your own risk, but it is an option that's better to have and not need than to need and not have.

b) NOBARA

(+) Significantly newer package base than Linux Mint. Again, not just the graphical user applications but also the low-level system libraries, utilities, and other such tooling. This is on top of how graphics drivers, patented/proprietary/encumbered hardware+software codecs, and so on are shipped installed and preconfigured OOTB.
(+) This is very much applicable to your stated use case: Nobara itself is explicitly meant for "gaming, streaming, and content creation" (per the Nobara Project's home page). Without getting lost in the weeds of technobabble: this is pretty much plug and play in your case for tons of reasons. Read the Nobara Project Wiki and see for yourself.
(+) This is a minor touch that I personally really love: custom images for NVIDIA cards, and GloriousEggRoll (the project's creator and maintainer) has the decency to say "hey man, it ain't instant. Expect to twiddle your thumbs for a minute or two." I love that first boot disclosure. Spares you the anxiety of "is it borked?"

(-) Nobara is a heavily modified downstream rebuild of Fedora Linux. Fedora is not part of the Debian/Ubuntu lineage that Linux Mint descends from. Rather, Fedora is part of the Red Hat family tree with new releases every six months, each release only being supported for like 13 months tops. You will be upgrading frequently.
(-) Red Hat distros like Fedora don't have as many proprietary goodies to screw around with. Yeah, you have Steam and Google Chrome but Spotify doesn't work OOTB (there is a workaround but it's not intuitive), and VPN clients are more hit/miss with Fedora support.
(-) There will come a time when you have to Google what "SELinux" is, and when it happens, you will succumb to male pattern baldness out of pure frustration. That's just a Red Hat thing. Learn to live with it.

(~) Nobara is highly opinionated. GloriousEggRoll is remarkably transparent with the modifications he made, and also goes out of his way to say "oi m8 this shit was meant for me father and I. Use it if u want m8 but I ain't legally liable for crap if shit goes tits-up." I genuinely do appreciate that... but I'm also highly opinionated and many of Nobara's modifications irk me in that "too long-winded for a Linux distro recommendation post" sorta way. It's great for you, but "Really? You're doing it like X instead of Y? Why?!" for me.

 

[BubbaRobot887]

Thanks, I am going to give a shot in a couple of weeks, but first I have to get a new hard drive.

I was still duel booting so I could get some files off of my computer and Windows 11 bricked my hard drive after it updated its self without my permission.

I am now reduced to using an under powered old laptop with a copy of Linux Mint instead of my costume built desktop that I put a lot of work into.

I can't use the desktop that was running fine with Windows 1 before Microslop updated it to 11 while I was at work.

So after 30 years I am done with windows.

Thanks Microslop.

 

[acid_ra1n]

Ok so @Ferryman when I did guix install fastfetch I had to export my path every time I wanted to use it whereas adding it to my configuration.scm did add it

Was I doing that wrong or should some things be system packages or did i miss a step or something

Fedora Atomic ecosystem, please consult @Trans Fat 41g because he's inflicted it upon himself and can give you the granular, painstaking deep dive

Oh yeah I dailied bazzite for like a few months and it was ok but I learned a lot about containers and ended up using every single package manager they recommended to get my setup working the way it does on any other distro
At the end of it I was able to do all of my tasks but it was extremely convoluted to do it

 

[Big Lenny]

I recently switched because I had came across an extra drive I didn't know what to do with, I was having some issues getting stupid customization ideas created myself, I wanted to be able to make the screen shake for something, and concluded that Wayland was the reason I was having difficulties, today I was looking up videos explaining which was better, Wayland or X11 and found this gem of a guy. Personally I'm on X11 now, but I'm sure this guys opinion must be right (whatever the opinion was, Im not sure what he said) https://youtube.com/watch?v=s6e-xc4I2Zo

Don't worry, everyone hates Wayland. So. Many. Compatability. Issues.

 

[Sunset Ethernia]

Literally just install Bazzite Linux if you’re a normie.

>long time windows user wants to leave microsoft's shitty os
>recommend him an os owned by a microsoft employee

???

 

[Taser Confetti]

>long time windows user wants to leave microsoft's shitty os
>recommend him an os owned by a microsoft employee

???

It’s just Fedora Kinote layered with quality of life packages and Steam man. It’s not a grand conspiracy.

 

[acid_ra1n]

i dont recommend bazzite because containers are not something a new user should have to deal with and it overcomplicates things not because microsoft employees are unable to make software that works

 

[Taser Confetti]

i dont recommend bazzite because containers are not something a new user should have to deal with and it overcomplicates things not because microsoft employees are unable to make software that works

Gotta ask - what packages were you having to use containers for? Bazzite comes with homebrew installed so adding your favorite CLI tools is a no biggie. Stuff like Distrobox makes running a container pretty idiot proof anyways. Only reason I really bothered was it made tinkering with emacs easier when I decided to give it another chance.

 

[Stephanides]

Bazzite is only for people who know the basics of Linux but are too lazy to learn anything else instead of complete beginners. I vouch for Mint.

 

[Ferryman]

Ok so @Ferryman when I did guix install fastfetch I had to export my path every time I wanted to use it whereas adding it to my configuration.scm did add it

Was I doing that wrong or should some things be system packages or did i miss a step or something

Nah you're good, by default "guix install" installs packages into your profile at ~/.guix.profile/bin/, but that path doesn't get added to $PATH by default when you open a fresh shell, which is why it forces you to keep exporting manually. Installing stuff via config.scm sets them up at the system level and automatically makes them available to all users. All you gotta do is add:

GUIX_PROFILE="$HOME/.guix-profile"
[ -f "$GUIX_PROFILE/etc/profile" ] && . "$GUIX_PROFILE/etc/profile"

To your bash/zsh/fishrc. After that every new shell should inherit the path automatically.

Just a tip: you typically want to install only software that needs to run (or that you want to have) system-wide via config.scm. For instance, mine only ships swaylock, network-manager and network-manager-applet, podman, docker and the mullvad VPN daemon. Everything else, including your WM/DE, browsers and so on, would go in home.scm. Ofc you don't have to do it this way, you can absolutely stuff everything in config.scm, but it saves you a lot of restarting if you wanna tweak user-level packages, dotfiles or services without reconfiguring the entire system.

 

[acid_ra1n]

Gotta ask - what packages were you having to use containers for? Bazzite comes with homebrew installed so adding your favorite CLI tools is a no biggie. Stuff like Distrobox makes running a container pretty idiot proof anyways. Only reason I really bothered was it made tinkering with emacs easier when I decided to give it another chance.

Yeah that was the problem was I was trying to run an appimage made for Ubuntu which I needed distrobox for
I needed printer drivers which were in Rpm ostree
I needed ujust for davinci resolve and waydroid
I needed flatpak for most stuff
And I needed homebrew for something command line related, can't remember what.
I basically went on a full tour of bazzite just to get my system running everything I needed. Definitely not recommended for new users unless they just need steam and a web browser

 

[Dread First]

Gotta ask - what packages were you having to use containers for? Bazzite comes with homebrew installed so adding your favorite CLI tools is a no biggie. Stuff like Distrobox makes running a container pretty idiot proof anyways. Only reason I really bothered was it made tinkering with emacs easier when I decided to give it another chance.

Imagine using a Fedora variant meant for GAMERS(tm) built off the Atomic platform where you can't just sudo dnf install foo and have to jump through Flatpaks, Distrobox, and Homebrew like a fucking retard just to accomplish the same effect on mainline Fedora or variants built off the mainline platform like Nobara. Couldn't be me (he says running a Xorg-forward Fedora spin).

 

[wew lad]

Now that I'm four months in to replacing Windows on my desktop (the last device in my house running it, for gayman), the only pain in the ass parts of using Fedora have all come down to when I was using an Nvidia GPU. Since switching to a 9070 XT, it's been smooth sailing with the occasional Krash from KDE being a shitheap. Still better than Win11 though, and it still feels like Fedora KDE Workstation is a possible sweet spot for people after a distro that Just Werks* with slightly faster update frequency than Mint. All I really miss are the very small number of games using kernel anti-cheat that I was interested in, but playing Escape From Tarkov is bad for your mental health anyway.

 

[Stephanides]

Imagine using a Fedora variant meant for GAMERS(tm) built off the Atomic platform where you can't just sudo dnf install foo and have to jump through Flatpaks, Distrobox, and Homebrew like a fucking retard just to accomplish the same effect on mainline Fedora or variants built off the mainline platform like Nobara. Couldn't be me (he says running a Xorg-forward Fedora spin).

I hate rpm-ostree so much.

 

[DavidS877]

I always find the Nvidia problems funny. I've been using them for years, with the proprietary(now "open") drivers. Only problem is when I get one that's too new and I have to track the official Nvidia repo for a while.

 

[Dread First]

Now that I'm four months in to replacing Windows on my desktop (the last device in my house running it, for gayman), the only pain in the ass parts of using Fedora have all come down to when I was using an Nvidia GPU. Since switching to a 9070 XT, it's been smooth sailing with the occasional Krash from KDE being a shitheap. Still better than Win11 though, and it still feels like Fedora KDE Workstation is a possible sweet spot for people after a distro that Just Werks* with slightly faster update frequency than Mint. All I really miss are the very small number of games using kernel anti-cheat that I was interested in, but playing Escape From Tarkov is bad for your mental health anyway.

Homeboy, you and I both run 9070 XTs on Fedora 44 (shoutout to F44 enabling ntsync by default), but you settled on Fedora Plasma while I settled on Fedora Cinnamon? Bruv... with all due respect, why are you encouraging Fedora Plasma over Fedora Cinnamon? I'm not encouraging you to jump ship; not in the slightest. It's just... I remember demoing Fedora 42 and Fedora 43, both times using the Plasma edition, and I was bogged down with SIGSEGV errors just by logging in. Not to mention the poor multimonitor handling under Wayland that's now basically permanent because Plasma 6.7 nixed Xorg support (or was set to nix Xorg support; can't remember which).

If you don't mind my asking: how far down the Fedora rabbit hole did you go as of yet? There were some adjustments I had to go through when jumping ship from an RX Vega 64 to a 9070 XT, and then realising that Linux Mint couldn't support my GPU anymore. Fedora's honestly such a strange distro because I don't like Red Hat, I don't like the direction they take Linux into... but I can't deny having tons of fun doing obscure shit.

Did you do all the stuff outlined in RPM Fusion to enable software+hardware codecs and multimedia playback?
Did you succeed in enabling DVD and Blu-ray disc playback?
Did you have a chance to screw around with Ollama now that you have an AMD card that ROCM doesn't completely shit the bed on?
Did you try experimenting with Podman containers for self-hostable goodies like FreshRSS, complete with systemd --user services?
How have your Steam/Heroic(GOG/Epic/Amazon)/emulated video games played thus far?

The funny thing is that I have dual 1080p enterprise panels, and this 9070XT is basically able to render everything at ultra settings without breaking a sweat, so there's like no reason for me to even bother with FSR. In fact, FSR kinda looks worse than native 1080p. Plus why would I superscale with gamescope if 1080p is already perfect just basically brute forcing it? ntsync by default with RDNA4 is fucking nuts dude. It's not a night and day difference, but it's different enough for me to genuinely be taken aback by "something" being measurably better and not precisely being able to tell what it is.

 

[acid_ra1n]

Got a message from the eBay seller

 

[wew lad]

It's just... I remember demoing Fedora 42 and Fedora 43, both times using the Plasma edition, and I was bogged down with SIGSEGV errors just by logging in. Not to mention the poor multimonitor handling under Wayland that's now basically permanent because Plasma 6.7 nixed Xorg support (or was set to nix Xorg support; can't remember which).

I haven't hit any segfaults at all, and so far multi-monitor performance seems to be fine. My setup isn't anything special, I have an 165hz 1440p panel from some no-name Chinese brand I found on Amazon a few years ago, flanked by two Dell U2415s running at 60hz 1200p. Thus far, no issues with refresh rates or tearing or anything. The most annoying thing I've run into is sometimes games in WINE will try to default to the leftmost monitor which is in portrait mode, but sometimes that happened on Windows for me too. As for why KDE Plasma? I've used plenty of X11 DEs and WMs in the past mostly on my laptop, but I wanted to go for Wayland slop for futureproofing. I also wanted to see if Wayland was still as shit as people had claimed, and so far I haven't run into any issues.

If you don't mind my asking: how far down the Fedora rabbit hole did you go as of yet? There were some adjustments I had to go through when jumping ship from an RX Vega 64 to a 9070 XT, and then realising that Linux Mint couldn't support my GPU anymore. Fedora's honestly such a strange distro because I don't like Red Hat, I don't like the direction they take Linux into... but I can't deny having tons of fun doing obscure shit.

Did you do all the stuff outlined in RPM Fusion to enable software+hardware codecs and multimedia playback?
Did you succeed in enabling DVD and Blu-ray disc playback?
Did you have a chance to screw around with Ollama now that you have an AMD card that ROCM doesn't completely shit the bed on?
Did you try experimenting with Podman containers for self-hostable goodies like FreshRSS, complete with systemd --user services?
How have your Steam/Heroic(GOG/Epic/Amazon)/emulated video games played thus far?

When I still had my RTX 3080 I did the necessary RPM Fusion installs for the proprietary drivers, as well as the fixes for LUKS so the disk encryption password prompt doesn't hit a black screen. As far as the specifics you mentioned:

I've installed all the RPM Fusion codecs, haven't tried out DVD or Blu-ray playback but I do need to see if my LG reader/writer can still rip 4K UHD Blu-rays. Ollama might be a fun project for the desktop, but I leave all my hosted services to my dumpy little home server and its NUC cousin. So far every single game I've thrown at it runs at least as well as on Windows after the AMD card switch, and before that it was still at least as good as long as it used Vulkan. Most of my stuff runs through Steam, but I have EVE Online set up through Bottles. I know, Bottles sucks, but I have it working and I don't want to set it back up in Heroic Launcher.

Trust me, I know I'm using one of the most corposlop options for Linux and Wayland is trannysoft, but so far I haven't had a need to jump to anything more exotic or anything flashier. The issues I've had have all been KDE, and it's usually stupid shit like plasmashell freezing. And I wouldn't have finally wiped the last Windows holdout in my household if I wasn't experiencing that and worse on Windows 11. Overall, Fedora... Just Werks.