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
Quick Edit: This received a lot more engagement than I thought. Thank you all for the recommendations. I’ll spin up some VM’s and test them out. Thank you all for the guidance. May your day/night/other be most excellent!
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.
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.
I second cachy if they want an arch intro. It’s the “It just works” flavor of arch.
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 have an ASUS ROG laptop with a dGPU and the dGPU is damaged, making it not run at all with Windows.
I used the Arch ISO, booted up with the “new nVidia…” option and installed it using the most straightforward process[1] as given in the Arch Installation wiki page.Works well. I use it for testing changes I make in KDE apps.
OK, maybe not “most”. I installed
dracutat first but then switched tomkinitcpio↩︎
My experience is very dated, but I bought a used windows Asus laptop in 2013 and put Ubuntu on it and experienced no problems. I had been using Linux for a long time, so maybe I remember this with rose glasses, but it was very straight forward. Also an integrated GPU, but of the 2013 era. I think the laptop was a 2012 model.
Config isn’t hard, it just takes time 🙂
Arch feels more like windows because I like keeping everything up to date, cachyos because I dont want to spend an hour finding the gaming packaged and I like the preinstalled apps + de options. Plus aur is great just need to add flathub support real quick and its great.
Lot of bootloader options too, I like limine since its clean and easy to swap lernels, also one click to setup btrfs snapshots after install which also show up in limine with no extra setup.
The best answer is always Ubuntu (Mint or Kubuntu). They just work. And they’re and they’re récent enough without running into problems. They have high compatibility and they have a lot of quality of life improvements.
Bazzite is stable and “just works” but it achieves that by being a bit less conventional under the hood. Great for gaming and general computing.
If you like tinkering around, you might want to pick something else though.
Well, if you’re not going to go with Arch, might I suggest Gentoo?
(kidding… mostly…)
On a more serious note, Mint will run on most systems well, and Just Work for the most part, with the caveat that if you have really new hardware you might need to use a version with current Linux kernels (if they’re still doing that, I’m not seeing it at the moment though).
The main downside is they keep to stable LTS builds, which means software is often a bit behind, but for most things, if you need the most up to date, there’s always flatpak. The upside, though, is updates tend to not be as big or numerous or frequent as in a more up to date distro like Fedora or a rolling release like Arch. It also means updates are less likely to cause issues and your system is less prone to developing quirks.
Anyway, Mint is what I’ve been using, though I’ve also been using Fedora some at work… Both are solid, but I like Mint better. Could just be personal taste though so take that for what it’s worth.
Mint has the downside of not coming with mainstream desktop environments. Otherwise a great distro, but the message it gives to newcomers is that Linux still looks like it looked 10 years ago. Still very worth for some installs, and op is not a newcomer, but anyway.
I always recommend Mint to wundows converts. It looks like the windows UI, just works out of the box 99% of the time, and has a huge user base that is happy to provide assistance
Love Mint. I have LMDE on my archival machine. It’s good stuf
I’ve been a Pop stan since I started using Linux so I’ll always recommend it, and it helps that you already like it. But if you specifically want something different (and that isn’t arch), I’d say Fedora KDE
I was trying to make the leap but I’m now stuck without sound on Linux Mint. Just be aware that if you have some critical need (I’m job hunting and need to do some video conference interviews) that things can and do go past shaped and it’s not always straight forward to fix it.
Go dual boot until you’re confident that you can rely on it.
I’ll try to find some time to fix the sound and I’ll switch back to it or another distro.
Fedora is good. It gets regular updates and all the new tech. Once you set it up make sure to enable the non foss repos if you want stuff like discord
Arch is sweet but you’ll want some miles under your belt first. Pop is great, if you want boring but just works debian is the goat
I eouldnt recommend debian to anyone but corporate work due to gow out of date its packages get. Ends up causing more work for the end user.
I landed and Pop OS and love it.
I happen to have an Asus laptop with an intel igpu (one of those flippy 2-in-1), and Fedora Workstation works for me since I like the look of GNOME. Fedora also has a KDE version if you prefer that. Keep in mind that Fedora uses “dnf” and “.rpm” instead of “apt” and “.deb”. Lots of people also like to use Mint (which is based on debian like Pop_OS) but I haven’t tested that with my laptop.
I might check out Fedora. Is switching between the iGPU and dGPU relatively straightforward?
I don’t have a dGPU to test that, sorry. One thing about the intel igpu though, I had to install a few drivers to get hardware acceleration to work with OBS
I went to Pop_Os! From Arch after running it for a decade so I support not running Arch. I prefer the simplicity of Pop.
