MSI Laptop, i7 8th Gen, RTX 2060.

Heavily customized windows with WSL, or Arch?

Fook me.
I have the i7 gtx1060.

But that thing runs smooth as hell on windows.
Haven't attempted to switch it to *nix with those NVIDIA drivers 😐

@C0D4 in all honesty, the Nvidia drivers for Linux are pretty good, last I checked...

The main issue is that they give the Linux foundation their middle finger...

@chabad360 I'm half tempted to try to jump over, but I can't fault windows on this thing... "yet", so haven't had a major reason to do it so far.

Porque no los dos?

@C0D4 I don't either...

But about half a year ago I got a laptop which had Linux on it already, and switched it to Manjaro. I loved it. So now I need to decide what I want to do (I'm heavily leaning towards arch)...

@irene and what are you running/suggest?

@irene that's my issue here... I don't have enough room for both...

@irene same, but my SSD is 128gb... if I had 256gb I'd probably do both...

@chabad360 that's the downside to msi. Such a small system drive and windows enjoys filling that thing up sadly, I Cruze on 60-80GB used, with weekly clean up.

@C0D4 it's my only complaint about this laptop...

Boot from a USB?

@nicbe not a bad idea actually, but I would have to put the bulk of my install on said USB... And it's not so practical...

@chabad360 I know right.
Once I'm out of warranty, I'm slipping a larger drive in.

@irene I've got everything possible programs, games, docs, downloads, projects, ect on the 1tb, but some software just refuses to work or install on a second drive - this grinds my gears the most.

@irene is really tho? Have you ever heard of steam mover?

My main issue with a dual setup is that I want to have my user on both OSs to have the same home...

@irene yea that's when I hit the 100+ 😥
I can scale it back to about 60Gb or so.

@C0D4 why wait? The warranty barely covers anything anyway...

I should be getting a $100 rebate from them for Newegg, I think I'm gonna buy a bigger SSD...

Debian

@-red why?

@chabad360 Harvey Norman are a pain in the ass when it comes to their warranty - but they had stock so 🤷‍♂️

Otherwise would happily drop it in already.

@irene look it up...

It basically copies a folder (in the designed usage, a steam game folder) to a specified location (i.e. another drive), and then symlinks it back to the original spot, and leaves windows (/everybody) none the wiser...

@chabad360 Because since I installed it on my ThinkPad T470, I have NEVER had a complaint.
What I do on my computer:

1. 3D graphics processing (OpenGL).
2. Point cloud rendering.
3. Have atleast two x265 video instances running at a given time.
4. Internet browsing with tabs going up to atleast 20.
5. Atom always running.
6. Never had issues with repository packages, drivers, etc.
7. I use LXDE so there's minimal RAM footprint.
8. I use a Windows XP VM to play aoe2. No problems there.

And other stuff ..

I'm recommending it because it worked for me. You may try it once. It 'might' just work for you too. But for every Linux distro, you'll have to get your hands dirty atleast a little bit if you want you PC a certain way.

@-red so why not arch? Your reasons are very compelling, but I've basically lived off arch for more than half a year, and it worked excellent for me.

P.s. I'd recommend you try it too ;)

@chabad360 Arch is great too. But I've found my perfect setup and I see no reason to change. So maybe you should continue with Arch too ? 🙂🙂

@-red fair point (but I still greatly encourage you to try arch).

So let me get this straight, you suggest I use Linux not Windows?

I got Legion Y530 i5 GTx1050 working fine for me. I am too afraid if I dual boot I am gonna fuck up the boot timing as it usually takes 3seconds to boot on SSD.

Windows 10 LTSC for games that don't work with Proton or Wine and Arch for development and games that work with Proton and Wine

@irene true, but it can move the whole .steam folder (which I'm pretty sure steam won't do), plus you can use it for pretty much anything else

@inaba what's LTSC?

@irene good for you :), but my SSD is a bit small...

@chabad360 Like regular win 10 but without all of the crap. No store, none of the default apps, and most importantly no god damn cortana.

@C0D4 @irene @nicbe @-red @GurvirBhogal @inaba Thanks for the responses, I did it... I took the plunge... I installed Arch, no regrets!

@irene yea as if you are not a virgin!

@irene prove it bro!

@irene Having at least one (1) device with Arch or Gentoo would be proof enough

@irene I'm coming from Manjaro tho...

@irene We're gonna have to compromise with a virtual machine then

Fedora