Hello All.
First, I have been daily driving Linux(POP_OS) for nearly a year and outside of some frustrations, it has been a great experience. I expect a certain level of weirdness and quirks. I was using my Windows laptop to get some stuff done, and wanted to listen to some music over Bluetooth. This is where I messed up. I guess recent Windows updates just kind of break Bluetooth?? Every fix I have googled and tried failed to fix the problem. I kind of expect this behavior from Linux. I don’t expect it from an OS developed by a For Profit company.
Long story short, recommend me a distro that runs well on an Asus laptop with an Integrated and Discreet GPU. If Windows breaks functionality, then there isn’t a big reason to keep a Windows Machine around. If you say Arch, I intend to bully you but I’m open to any suggestions. Microsoft isn’t worth keeping around, even as a backup/standby.
I appreciate you <3
If you’re willing to run arch-based but not vanilla arch cachyOS is amazing in my experience.
If not that fedora is pretty ok. Could just run PopOS too if you like it.
Thanks for your thoughts. My experience with Arch has been weird. I can get everything mostly working, but sound has always been an issue on my current hardware. Black Arch was fun to mess around with because I didn’t necessarily care if sound output was borked. I will look into cachyOS and spin up a VM. Thank you friend!
Arch defaults to pipewire I think even if you select pulseaudio in archinstall (might have changed by now ofc) If your laptop is older pulseaudio might work much better (did for me)
I second cachy if they want an arch intro. It’s the “It just works” flavor of arch.
Garuda is pretty fucking awesome for an easy arch distro. Everything was installed correctly OOTB on my ASUS g733 with integrated/dedicated GPU so you don’t have to set Prime up yourself. Their KDE ricing in their dragonized version is the best I have found. Great gaming setup IMO. Easy beginner arch entry distro with all the bells and whistles. They have done a pretty good job with their garuda-update pacman wrapper and seems to handle most of the manual intervention during updates, uses reflector for mirrors on update too. Btrfs and snapper setup by default so rollback is easy as pie.
Been wanting to try catchy for a while though.
Fedora is a great option as well. Stable, well built and easy. Don’t really like flatpak that much but that’s just a personal preference. I really like dnf. Defiantly a good choice beginner distro.