I have no experience with Linux, but I’d like to give it a try. I’m looking at the System76 Meerkat and Thelio with the Pop!_OS option.
I don’t see myself gaming on it because I have a Windows machine for just that. I’d mostly be using it for learning Linux and doing basic things like web surfing and word processing (Libreoffice perhaps).
Any recommendations or advice? Thanks!
I found Pop! quite good for gaming, since it has a fairly recent kernel and the drivers built in. (Not as good as Arch, which I’m using now - it has cutting-edge everything and great documentation, but is not for newbies - some of its derivatives sand off the rough installation edges.) I do find the Gnome3 interface infuriating, but speaking as a Linux dev at a Linux company, there’s loads of my colleagues that have no problems with it, so YMMV.
Before shelling out on a laptop, I’d get yourself a Virtual Machine setup on Windows (VirtualBox works for me) and try out a few Linux instances. Dead easy to set them up, test various distros, and throw them away again, and if you foul it up, then no harm is done. Installation and setup will teach you a lot. Completely free, as well.
Documentation - the Debian adminstrator’s handbook is available free online, and the Arch documentation is extremely comprehensive and up-to-date.
And good luck!
Why is Arch better for gaming than Pop?
I find the main thing that’s important for gaming is having the latest kernel and drivers - for me with AMD, that means the open-source mesa ones. Pop! is excellent for having the cutting-edge version of these, Arch is superb, but really, that’s not much to quibble about, they’re both very good choices.
I’d rate these as ‘why Arch is better than Pop!’ for gaming; note that they are all pretty minimal improvements:
doesn’t install anything you don’t want it to. The Arch ‘installer’ is basically a utility script that installs the packages you’d like on your new instance - doesn’t even include the kernel, in case you’re intending to run containerised. That’s not very friendly, but it does mean that I know what every running service does, because I chose to install it myself. It’s exactly the way I want it. That may matter to you for a gaming machine.
I’ve some slightly weird USB audio on my main machine; PipeWire supports it better than PulseAudio. Arch doesn’t include either by default, so I don’t have to uninstall Pulse to install something else.
similarly, I don’t like Gnome3, so I don’t have to uninstall it to install Cinnamon - Arch defaults to ‘neither’.
utterly superb documentation.
thank you for the explanation. I’ve been wanting to try something else for a while now so I’ll give it a go. :)