The beloved lightweight distro
Congrats on making the change!
One piece of gaming software I have not seen mentions yet that I really like is Lutris. It is a unified launcher (steam, gog, epic...) that really helps to keep game installations organized and also helps to manage wine prefixes. I recommend checking it out.
Oh this seems great, definitely checking this one out
Congrats on the successful install! Arch is pretty tricky to get working (especially the first time) but it's totally worth it! Anyway, here are some package recommendations, idk how many of these you already know about but here are some that were useful for me!
I'm also not a pro by any means, and please google these before installing them to make sure they are actually useful for your usecase. More advanced users: please do correct me if something is wrong or a bad idea because I started off not that long ago and I would love to learn more!
edit: fixed grammar and stuff
edit 2: I kinda assumed you had this but I forgot to mention, don't forget an aur helper like paru so you can install stuff easily from the aur!
Thanks for the recommendations! I’ve looked into (and set up) a few of these, but there are a few I definitely need to look into more! Need to learn more about sandboxing apps as well.
Me too, honestly. I recently discovered flatpak and so far it's been great for my proprietary apps like discord and spotify. Flatseal has also been invaluable for managing those without having to dig into cli commands!
Such a long post and not a single "BTW". Welcome and have fun! It's such a great feeling not having to worry about the horrors Microsoft comes up with next.
inching towards making the same jump.
Currently the things holding me back are music production stuff (mainly vst/vst3 plugins and their draconian drm). If anyone has any first hand experiences with eg. iLok and the plugins working under wine, it would be grand <3
Games wise... does raytracing in games work under linux? eg. Cyberpunk 2077, gog -version.
there are folks that do audio stuff on linux and from what i can tell it is a lot of work and your workflows will change a bit.
Check out Unfa on youtube, my man does everything using linux apps.
Trying to do live audio stuff in wine may be a struggle, from what I gather most audio production folks switch to a realtime kernel build which may chip away performance on the very top end but prevents lost samples because of competing resources. With that in mind I don't know how windows apps would perform for live audio. BUT if you're just processing already captured stuff then you might be fine.
All that to say take a peek and see if ardour can support the plugins you want or has an alternative that can meet the same goals. It probably won't be as easy but I bet you'll find something that works.
I also run Arch.....BTW
Awesome! I made the jump as well a couple of weeks ago. Struggled hard with the installation because I was being dumb during some parts. When everything worked I got this nagging feeling that I must have forgot something or done something wrong, which is why after I was done with everything, I installed EndeavourOS. Still an arch distro and I went through the installation, so I'll just pretend I'm one of the gang.
No shame in that. I considered myself a pretty proficient Linux user until I installed arch lol
I am an Arch gamer too. Use the zen kernel for slightly better performance. I installed most of the stuff the steamdeck brings. So gamemode, mangohud, protonup qt. I tweaked some settings for better performance. There is that one Tool for Steam Deck that sets some performance tweaks, I forgot the name but should be easy to find.
If you have no sound in older games make sure you have lib32-pipewire installed
The AUR is the best part of Arch.
Congrats on finally using a real OS! Arch is fantastic and teaches you a lot of skills down the road.