TL;DR: I’m a true Linux noob, and now love and appreciate Linux thanks to openSUSE Tumbleweed. :)
In all seriousness, as a Linux noob, openSUSE Tumbleweed made me actually start to really enjoy using Linux as my main OS. I’ve fucked up plenty of times, and at that point I would’ve had to reinstall most other distros, but Snapper came in and saved the day. I’m sure there are plenty of other distros that do snapshots just as well, but this is coming from someone who last tried running Linux 5-6 years ago, and was still fucking my shit up somehow. I’ve never had the best of luck with Linux, which is why I always stayed on Windows.
Then came Microsoft’s ever increasing enshittification, and I saw openSUSE Tumbleweed on the distrowatch website, downloaded it, and here we are 8 months later, and openSUSE has remained my main OS. I only got a desktop for gaming, and it fit the bill almost perfectly. I had to learn some things, that’s for sure, but what got me to stay was the stability! I had never used a Linux distro up until that point that made BTRFS and system snapshots the default. This was crucial for someone like me who only dabbled in Linux because I love the idea behind it, I could just never get too far into using it before fucking my shit up!
There are plenty of options that are similar, or maybe even better than openSUSE, but they won my interest and respect for getting a noob like me to truly envelope themselves into Linux.
I’m still nowhere near anything that might resemble your common Linux user, but damn do I really love my computer again now. It’s like when I was kid again, and first started using computers, fascinated by what I could do.
Out of curiosity, do you have an Nvidia graphics card? I tried migrating to Linux at the beginning of this year, but I couldn’t get my favorite games to run, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Kingdom Come Deliverance, so I ended up bailing.
EDIT: I don’t recommend using the flatpak version of Steam, because it gets buried in folders that aren’t human-readable. I installed the openSUSE version, and chose a sane folder name like how it is on windows where all my games are stored.
Yes! I had a 2080ti that I replaced with a 5080 two months ago.
I had no issues whatsoever when I first installed openSUSE, because the graphics card was probably old enough to be supported fully by the time I made my way into this OS.
When I upgraded from the 2080ti to the 5080… I did not have a good time for a few days as I had to learn (the hard way) that nvidia switched from whatever drivers I was using to some “open-driver” that they are going with moving forward (I think, don’t quote me).
I messed up plenty of times trying to get this new graphics card working, but let me tell you, thanks to snapper and BTRFS, I felt confident that no matter how many things I tried, I would always have a snapshot to return everything back to “before swapping cards” is what I named the snapshot through YaST System Snapshots.
After I found the correct terminal commands to install the new open-drivers on the openSUSE website, I was good to go again!
Since then, I’ve played and beaten DOOM: The Dark Ages (came with my card, had to sign into Windows and use a fucking chromium browser for whatever god awful reason…), System Shock Remake, and just a few days ago, Prey (2017).
When playing games through Proton (or even on windows!), I highly recommend going to pcgamingwiki.com, finding your game you want to play, and reading some of the great tips they have on there (ini config, for example on System Shock, because enemies were appearing way way to close to me instead of being able to see them from a distance) and the most important bit to me since I like to edit my saves or back them up to my own server, is the location of your save file in proton compatibility prefix. So, on KDE, I can copy whatever prefix number (System Shock being 482400) and copy that number, open up KDE Runner (windows key+spacebar for me) paste the number in, and go into the compatdata folder.
Needless to say, I’m almost positive that your nvidia graphics cards will be supported in some way, but you just may need to study up a bit before you have it working. Once it is working though, it is working great! :)
My laptop has an nvidia gpu. It never really worked right on Bazzite, basically could not game unless the igpu could run the game. I switched it over to Garuda (which I had been running on my desktop for a couple of years) and the gpu drivers all just worked. It now plays games just as easily as my desktop. The above comment could basically be exactly my experience, just replace openSUSE Tumbleweed with Garuda. I am unlikely to hop distros because I (luckily) found one that “just works” for me.
Honestly, that is kind of the beauty of Linux to me, and why I hate all of the “distro recommendation” threads. If someone only tries one distro, they might never stay because they got unlucky. I’d love for them all to truly work just as well as any other, like so many posts claim, but it just isn’t the case (out of the box, at least). We all have so many varied experiences that drive those recommendations.
Same bro, Nvidia and Linux don’t play very nice together. I had horrible framerates in browser animations for example, so even videos ran at 3fps or so with audio glitches.
Not to mention 3d gaming. I’ll try again in a few years, see if it changes.
TL;DR: I’m a true Linux noob, and now love and appreciate Linux thanks to openSUSE Tumbleweed. :)
In all seriousness, as a Linux noob, openSUSE Tumbleweed made me actually start to really enjoy using Linux as my main OS. I’ve fucked up plenty of times, and at that point I would’ve had to reinstall most other distros, but Snapper came in and saved the day. I’m sure there are plenty of other distros that do snapshots just as well, but this is coming from someone who last tried running Linux 5-6 years ago, and was still fucking my shit up somehow. I’ve never had the best of luck with Linux, which is why I always stayed on Windows.
Then came Microsoft’s ever increasing enshittification, and I saw openSUSE Tumbleweed on the distrowatch website, downloaded it, and here we are 8 months later, and openSUSE has remained my main OS. I only got a desktop for gaming, and it fit the bill almost perfectly. I had to learn some things, that’s for sure, but what got me to stay was the stability! I had never used a Linux distro up until that point that made BTRFS and system snapshots the default. This was crucial for someone like me who only dabbled in Linux because I love the idea behind it, I could just never get too far into using it before fucking my shit up!
There are plenty of options that are similar, or maybe even better than openSUSE, but they won my interest and respect for getting a noob like me to truly envelope themselves into Linux.
I’m still nowhere near anything that might resemble your common Linux user, but damn do I really love my computer again now. It’s like when I was kid again, and first started using computers, fascinated by what I could do.
Out of curiosity, do you have an Nvidia graphics card? I tried migrating to Linux at the beginning of this year, but I couldn’t get my favorite games to run, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Kingdom Come Deliverance, so I ended up bailing.
EDIT: I don’t recommend using the flatpak version of Steam, because it gets buried in folders that aren’t human-readable. I installed the openSUSE version, and chose a sane folder name like how it is on windows where all my games are stored.
Yes! I had a 2080ti that I replaced with a 5080 two months ago.
I had no issues whatsoever when I first installed openSUSE, because the graphics card was probably old enough to be supported fully by the time I made my way into this OS.
When I upgraded from the 2080ti to the 5080… I did not have a good time for a few days as I had to learn (the hard way) that nvidia switched from whatever drivers I was using to some “open-driver” that they are going with moving forward (I think, don’t quote me).
I messed up plenty of times trying to get this new graphics card working, but let me tell you, thanks to snapper and BTRFS, I felt confident that no matter how many things I tried, I would always have a snapshot to return everything back to “before swapping cards” is what I named the snapshot through YaST System Snapshots.
After I found the correct terminal commands to install the new open-drivers on the openSUSE website, I was good to go again!
Since then, I’ve played and beaten DOOM: The Dark Ages (came with my card, had to sign into Windows and use a fucking chromium browser for whatever god awful reason…), System Shock Remake, and just a few days ago, Prey (2017).
When playing games through Proton (or even on windows!), I highly recommend going to pcgamingwiki.com, finding your game you want to play, and reading some of the great tips they have on there (ini config, for example on System Shock, because enemies were appearing way way to close to me instead of being able to see them from a distance) and the most important bit to me since I like to edit my saves or back them up to my own server, is the location of your save file in proton compatibility prefix. So, on KDE, I can copy whatever prefix number (System Shock being 482400) and copy that number, open up KDE Runner (windows key+spacebar for me) paste the number in, and go into the compatdata folder.
Needless to say, I’m almost positive that your nvidia graphics cards will be supported in some way, but you just may need to study up a bit before you have it working. Once it is working though, it is working great! :)
My laptop has an nvidia gpu. It never really worked right on Bazzite, basically could not game unless the igpu could run the game. I switched it over to Garuda (which I had been running on my desktop for a couple of years) and the gpu drivers all just worked. It now plays games just as easily as my desktop. The above comment could basically be exactly my experience, just replace openSUSE Tumbleweed with Garuda. I am unlikely to hop distros because I (luckily) found one that “just works” for me.
Honestly, that is kind of the beauty of Linux to me, and why I hate all of the “distro recommendation” threads. If someone only tries one distro, they might never stay because they got unlucky. I’d love for them all to truly work just as well as any other, like so many posts claim, but it just isn’t the case (out of the box, at least). We all have so many varied experiences that drive those recommendations.
As someone with two separate computers that have nvidia cards, I can only recommend hopping distros until one works.
(I’m not going to admit that manjaro worked out of the box on both of them and I ended up staying on it out loud on the internet)
Same bro, Nvidia and Linux don’t play very nice together. I had horrible framerates in browser animations for example, so even videos ran at 3fps or so with audio glitches.
Not to mention 3d gaming. I’ll try again in a few years, see if it changes.