I have been using Arch Linux with i3wm for around 5 years for work, on my ThinkPad. I am fairly comfortable with pacman and setting up a distro. I have previously tried Mint, Manjaro, KDE Neon, Elementary, and MX Linux, all for the same use case (Work: where I need a browser, Slack, and a MongoDB GUI).
However, I have been using Windows on my desktop that I use for gaming and the Adobe suite (photoshop and illustrator mainly). With the increasing enshittification of Win11, I want to migrate full time to a Linux system on desktop as well. I prefer a more stable experience on this machine so I chose Pop OS (other suggestions are welcome. I like Plasma). I need some help getting started (I did some preliminary trials on a VM where I was able to run a small game off GOG, but the part I need help with needs some trickery wrt different disks).
PC specs:
- Ryzen 3 3300X
- 16 GB DDR4
- 1 NVMe boot drive, 1 SATA SSD for games, 1 HDD
- RX 570 8 GB
My copies of Photoshop and some of my games are pirated. I’m planning to run a Tiny10 VM for the Adobe stuff but the games will need to run on bare metal linux, off the NTFS formatted game drive. Edit : Most importantly, Content Manager and mods for Assetto Corsa need to work (not pirated), with my Thrustmaster T128
I would be grateful for a guide for this.
If you’re comfortable with Arch why not stick to it? Distro hopping is not bad but there are diminishing returns beyond the package manager and package release style. Eventually all distros run the same apps.
I’ve had instances where the system breaks,usually when I don’t update for a while. I don’t want to face that on my ‘stable’ machine
I’ve never seen Arch breaking by itself while updating, it may happen if you do “pacman -Sy” instead of “pacman -Syu”
Hm you can try Manjaro. It’s basically that, Arch for people who’d like rolling but don’t want the risks that go with it.
I haven’t had any failed update in the 4 years I’ve been using it. But it also has built-in update snapshots if you choose BTRFS for the root partition, so you can revert if something goes wrong.
The catch about Manjaro is that you have to trade some of the liberties of Arch for the stability. They hold back packages until they’re satisfied they’re stable (they have their own “stable” branch which doesn’t exist on Arch) and they strongly recommend sticking to LTS kernels. They also have GUI helper apps for important things (kernel version switch, hardware driver management and package installer) that they recommend to use.
You can use pacman and it’s still Arch inside but you have to behave in order to have a stable system.
Manjaro is a distro I’ve given up on. Broke itself twice for me. I much prefer Endeavour OS or Arco (shout-out to that excellent community)