All of them? I’ve always liked (and preferred) Linux for dev work, as I’m just so comfortable around working with the commandline and installing packages that I might need. For that end, any of them would work, you’d just need to set them up with what you want. If you wanna be “cool” and “hacker” you could install Arch and install every last package manually handpicked, or you could go with the most bog standard Ubuntu or Fedora or OpenSUSE. All of them work, it’s only down to your tools. If you like Kali, stick with it.

well, good news is: it works. Bad news is, it borks my window manager. After so many attempts, I am forced to admit defeat. So, at least a few of my different methods that I tried did work, but with that comes a problem that my window manager does not want to run on my discrete GPU and then I get a bare desktop with no panels or proper windows.

Quake does launch correctly at that point but I rather have the rest of my DE actually function, and I did figure out how to set individual applications to launch on the second GPU. I’ll consider this solved for my use case… This combo of intel onboard graphics and AMD GPU was always my headache with this machine even in the times of windows.

Welcome to CompSci university! Hope you enjoy your stay. There will be lots of maths. When I did my degree, it was my first experience with Linux too, and it was great. They eventually taught me how to install it myswlf on my laptop, and all of the student network PCs ran Debian. I later became part of the sysadmin team as my internship work, and learned a lot there. Now, 11 years later, I’m still a Linux diehard and much prefer working on it, and have been transferring my gaming over to Linux too.

I tried certain iterations of those, and the usual result is that my session fails to initiate. I’m probably doing that wrong.

I was trying to figure this out until like 3AM last night. How do I set environment variables to be loaded into my X session when XFCE loads? I’m on Arch btw. I want to set DRI_PRIME=1 so that applications started from the launcher actually use the discrete graphics card by default. Right now it only works like that if I launch from the terminal.

I tried multiple potential config files to put it at, and the one time it actually worked, I lost my window manager… The other times, the desktop environment didnt even load or start the session. Undid everything and decided to come back later.

May I ask why? I’m a recent Arch user, and yay seems just fine for me so far. Haven’t looked into paru much yet. Is it because it’s made on Rust, or are there more/better features?

Yeah I checked it out, it was extremely lightweight, but I didn’t really like how it looked. I know it could be customized but if I was going to take that effort I might as well do it on an Openbox setup.

I’m on XFCE now, really enjoying it, as I should have done from the beginning.

Wait. Should you really do pacman -Sy for all of those? Won’t that cause problems? Shouldn’t it just be pacman -S <packages> or go -Syu?

Alright, thanks for that. I’ll take a closer look later today when I’m at the PC, but the plan today is to try out different minimal environments to see what I like. And this time I actually remembered to make a Timeshift snapshot ahead of time (my latest one was like a couple of weeks ago)

I’ve been hearing good things about it, makes me wanna try it.

This laptop does have a dedicated GPU and was quite decent for the time. It was my only gaming machine for quite some years. Now I want to keep it alive with Linux for other general uses or work. Said dedicated GPU has been the source of many issues even when it still was under issues. The setup of Intel i5 with integrated graphics + an AMD Radeon GPU is uh… shaky under most driver circumstances and applications never know which of the two to use (usually defaulting to the wrong one)

I’ve been running Wayland to “get used to” the newer technology, and I don’t think that in itself has much impact on performance… Even if I do turn off the effects on KDE, I still feel like it’s doing way way more than I need or want it to do, and it does have a very noticeable impact on the speed things happen. Slightly slower than Cinnamon was, although both are also still way faster than it’s last Windows install… lol

Right now the main “problem” I have is that KDE is handling a few things I want it to handle, and that there’s a lot of applications I installed alongside it that I’d have to remove to swap fully to another DE. Almost makes me think it’d be easier to do another clean Arch install, but that took me almost a week to fully set up. (as I’d start to find the things that I hadn’t yet configured or installed gradually)

I did like the Openbox part of LXQt. Might re-install that.

oohh that is nice, I think I’ll swap my nano to that.

It’s open, it’s free, and it’s fun! It’s got a ton of mods and custom games to make it whatever you want out of a voxel game. That’s everything I need.

Shoutouts to the Asuna game.

Love me playing some Minetest with the Asuna game. It’s the perfect expansion of the basic game formula and a beautiful world to put other mods on top of.

I had done the same, and did the upgrade. So far I haven’t seen any issues with audio. Just remember to reboot after the upgrade is done.

“Who has power to destroy something, is the one who holds true control over it.” Or something, I never conquered a planet. Thank you Paul Atreides, very cool.

That is a nice way of measuring control over your own devices and systems, though.