> if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.

So much this. People like to moan about "oh game XYZ doesn't run so it's not reasonable for gaming". More games run on GNU / Linux than any gaming console. There are simply too many games that do run to give a second thought about the ones that don't, and it's been that way for years.

I've been using Fedora+KDE for over a decade, Windows 8 was last version of Windows I had installed at home, and we all know what a squarified mess that was.

Gnome is fine, but it's just not for me.

For everyone on here that complains about Windows requiring an 'online' account, MacOS does as well, but the perception is different. MacOS, just kind of quietly does it, with no ceremony, but Windows does a Ballmer-esque right-in-your-face demand. I couldn't possibly comment on Windows 11 as I've yet to use it, but Win10 felt a lot worse than Windows 7 which was probably the last high water mark for Windows after Windows 2000.

> if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.

Agree 1000% and recently Steam Community Support pissed me off so I am now looking into GOG (I have my first GOG game now and playing it), Epic and Luna. In fact, the GOG game I got was free through Luna ironically. Even more ironic, the excellent Heroic game launcher lets you mark the game to show up in Steam, then when you start steam run it from there and it uses the config settings from Heroic but you can use screenshots, etc. in Steam.

The gaming landscape on Linux is great, except for those companies that refuse to support anti-cheat.

I run Kubuntu btw (and Ubuntu since 2006).

PS I keep Snap disabled.

This was me in 2005. I cant believe people say that M$ started to suck in 2025. It always did.

> Steam and Proton work perfectly

I am a hardcore DayZ player. DayZ does not work on Proton[0]. I cannot use Linux as my main gaming platform. Battlefield 6 does not work. Latest Call of Duty does not work. You can talk about voting with your wallet, but when millions of people are buying the game, your one non-vote means nothing.

So either you punish yourself and refuse to play with friends, or you punish yourself and install windows. It’s a damned situation regardless of your choice

[0] point me to as many compatibility databases as you want, the game will not start on my vanilla Ubuntu build

> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro

They largely have now, archinstall.

It's still text based/TUI but it's pretty simple and intuitive, anyone already familiar with installing a Linux distro (especially any sort of -server variant) will be comfortable with the archinstall script.

Yeah, yay works until it doesn't anymore, because the pacman library dependency it uses was updated but yay was not... and then you need to recompile yay manually. I mean, I'll still use it (or rather paru, which works basically the same way), but it's very annoying, when it happens every few months.

I switched my gaming laptop over to CachyOS (which is more or less "Arch with some good defaults for gaming and a curated runtime environment") because I literally couldn't play Stellaris on my $1800, year-old gaming laptop without regular hard crashes that locked up the entire system and required a hold-the-power-button-down hard reboot. This is apparently a rare but known issue on the Paradox forums, affecting many of their games, and it seems to be due to some problem with the 24h2 windows update on some machines, but there's no clear resolution. Eventually I got mad enough to just pave my entire gaming laptop and switch wholly over to Cachyos.

Since switching, I have not experienced a single problem with Stellaris, even running larger galaxies in longer games with more mods. I haven't had any compatibility issues or bugs or anything with my other games either. It was so painless that I switched my desktop over as well, and I no longer have a windows device. I've been really pleasantly surprised by how many games support Linux now.

  > idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro

There's still a lot of utility to doing things the hard way. I do suggest people that want to actually learn Linux install Arch and live in the terminal. You learn a lot very fast because you're forced to. But it's not for everyone and that's totally okay too. That's the beauty of Linux after all. That's the beauty of computing. You can't build a product for everyone but you can build an environment that can become what anyone needs.

But I'll second your point. I've been on Endeavour on my main machine for about 3-4 years now and only had one problem where I just got a mismatch in a new kernel and new Nvidia driver so I couldn't load the desktop. Easy rollback (from the cache) and a day or two later the issue was solved so I could upgrade without a problem. Took no more than 10 minutes to solve and that's the worst problem I've had the entire time. I will also give the advice that if you have an Nvidia card give your boot partition like 5GB instead of 1GB

Not that this is going to matter to you because you've left Windows behind, but I refuse to buy License Keys any more and I try to steer people away from buying "Gray Keys" to avoid the ridiculous costs. Using the MS Activation Scripts[0] is the much better go-to.

[0] - https://massgrave.dev/

Mu gaming needs are more than fulfilled with Steam/Proton and Xbox Live. Both of them work in Linux (Mint is my flavour of choice) and Mac.

I installed fedora yesterday. Instead of steam i am hoping that GOG with heroic games launcher will work nicely. Idk, I want to support drm free software so if it's on gog, I buy it there.

I'm currently on Pop, but have an install of Cachy ready once I have some time and a stable connection. My main gripe of Pop (other than the COSMIC issues) was mostly audio issues with how they set up PipeWire and regressions with some releases. Do you find Arch to be a bit less of a headache when dealing with drivers?

> (idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro)

Trust me it was far more involved of a process 10 years ago, and that's why people liked it.

The modern install process is paired down to something like 10 steps. Start the ISO, configure your partitions, mount your root and boot, and use the delightful arch-chroot tool to enter and install in those partitions. Set up your user, configure your boot manager, exit the chroot, reboot, remove the install media, and boot into your bare bones system.

The install ISO has all the networking drivers and other tools you may need to bootstrap your new install, you just need to remember to do it. It's obviously not for total newbies but it's no gentoo, lfs, or even old arch.

> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro

It could be a deliberate measure to set the bar high and filter out people who don’t want to troubleshoot themselves.

There actually is an installer for arch. I haven't tried it myself, but there should be an application included on the ISO called archinstall which helps with basically everything that's part of the install guide on the Arch wiki.

> gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows Pro in order to make an "offline" account, I spent $2000+ for a gaming rig,

If you are spending 2000 for a gaming rig, a pro windows is like $200. Makes no sense.

Also, Apple is no better than Windows, so your post doesn't make sense.

My spare PC runs Win10. Was able to install it without internet and thus get an offline account.

Since they stopped full updates for it, it's a lot less annoying. Almost all the nags were at reboot time, usually triggered by the update giving it a new thing to nag about. Only thing now is it'll ask me once a month about either OneDrive or Win11, which is bad but tolerable.

> I know its a "meme" to talk about how great Arch is, but when you want the latest of something, Arch has it

I love my Arch installs to death, but I feel like I'm the oddball out about the mess that is AUR. The main repositories have a lot of things but I always end up getting pushed to AUR and then it just feels like I bolted on a hack rather than pacman/the arch base just supporting AUR more like a different package source normally.

What made you switch from Pop OS? I just installed it on a couple of old PCs I had lying around for my kids to play around with/learn from.

If I am understanding correctly, you were using Windows without a licence? I think that's more the problem here, as Windows does provide a way to have offline accounts, you just didn't want to pay for it.

I would love to switch from Mac. But Mac hardware is so resilient & haven't seen that in PC world.

I use Arch but don't want to fiddle with stuff anymore.

Installing via the archinstall command was pretty easy. Not quite as easy as a Fedora or Ubuntu install, but for someone familiar with Linux, it's negligible.

The only game I regularly play refuses to pay their anti-cheat for Linux support. After Windows 10 support ends, my gaming days are probably over.

> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro

Simplicity, among other reasons. Installers force the users hand and need maintenance. Having no installer but rather a detailed installation guide offers unlimited freedom to users. Installation isn't difficult either, you just pacstrap a root filesystem and configure the bootloader, mounts and locale.

ArchLinux does now have an installer called archinstall, but it's described more as a library than a tool. It allows you to automate the installation using profiles.

What kinda graphics card do you have in there? I’m considering building one soon.

How do you figure out Arch but not OOBE?

Pacman -syyu

One command. That's why I won't use arch. This one command will fuck your system up, but only if you wait to long in-between doing it.

You spent $2000 on a new machine but wouldn’t shell out another $20-30 for a windows pro key? You’re willing to burn a bunch of time fiddling with getting a completely new operating system setup, but you’re not willing to spend a few minutes fiddling with setting up an offline windows account?

I get that maybe that was the final straw or something, but come on, “I switched to Linux because I didn’t want to take an hour to set up Windows” really sounds like you never really wanted Windows in the first place, you were just looking for an excuse.

''By the way, I use Arch''

> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro

Because Arch maintainers are a bunch of elitist gatekeepers that don't accept any level of knowledge that is lower than theirs. You can see that through every forum interaction generally and any discussion about the installation process specifically.

Arch is great btw. It could be greater, if all maintainers would quit.