I hate Windows, especially in recent years with Microsoft implementing a ton of extra telemetry for AI. A couple days ago I installed arch Linux on a secondary ssd to dual boot my system. I planned on using arch as my daily driver and windows as a gaming os but I just cant seem to leave behind some of the tools that I am used to on windows Voicemeeter being a huge one, I tried Pulsemeeter but it isn’t even close to the real thing. Another one is my browser, I use arc and there is no good Linux alternative for it.
I have tried to deal with the alternatives but everything feels so janky and weird to use (the settings app in my DE doesn’t even work, which is probably my fault). Weirdly enough switching from windows to arch is harder than installing arch in the first place.
Arch is usually not the recommmendation for new Linux users. Or those that like polish & things “just working” / not having to solve issues. Was it pure Arch, or one of the more user friendly Arch-based distros?
Normally I’d suggest Mint, but that’s not current one of the officially supported FWL16 distros. So I’d suggest picking one of those, frame.work/linux
I went for pure arch because I wanted to see if I could do it, I am using it with hyprland and this config file because I didnt feel like setting it up myself. I also have KDE installed and I had been using that until this morning. I have also used linux before just not in a desktop environment, I end up using a lot of servers running ubuntu (i usually choose 20.04 for these).
I guess if anything I just dont know what to do with myself because I have spent all my time just trying to get everything to work and now that its in a usable (yes I count this as usable lol) state I’m not sure what to do with it.
I probably wont swap to another distro (unless I break arch and cant fix it) because I feel like I have put way too much time into getting this working to not use it.
Just took 30 to reinstall arch and my hyprland config to check if the broken settings would work on a fresh install, they were still broken so it probably isn’t my fault. Gonna do another reinstall tmr cause the install script for that hypr config install so many dependencies that its easier for me to reinstall the os than to remove them all. I’ll probably use KDE because I do really like it even though its not quite as nice looking as hyprland can be.
You are new to Linux so it is not recommended to use Arch as your “daily driver”. If you like the Arch style of distro, you should start with Manjaro or EndeavourOS. Maybe install Arch as a third OS to mess around and learn from.
I would say install Windows as a vm inside Linux if you still had some windows only tools you needed, but gaming in Windows doesn’t work that well. Until you decide to move gaming to Linux as well, you might as well just stick with Windows to be honest.
I want to encourage you to try out some Linux distros to find the one you like.
My story with different distros
I myself started moving from windows to linux ~2 years ago. First I tried Garuda Linux, which is arch based, nice looking (in my opinion) and quite nice for gaming.
But the (maybe) inevitable happened and I managed to break my package management and on other ocassions a package update would just break something.
I then tried Tuxedo OS, which was pretty nice and stable but had some Tuxedo Utilities that I didnt need on my FW16.
This way I ended up with a frankenstein mixture of KDE Neon, Kubuntu and Tuxedo OS, which works quite well for me.
And this also works great for gaming! A bit of fiddling with certain games, but protondb.com is reallly helpful!
Enough about my story though. I too had some programs that I couldnt use on Linux. But because I despised Windows so much, I found other ways to solve my requirements (playing music from my nextcloud instead of Foobar2000, just now found out there is fooyin).
I just had a look at Voicemeeter and indeed, Pulsemeeter seems to be unmaintained and not a real alternative.
Regarding Arc, would you like to specify what you need from arc? Maybe someone has an idea on how to substitute it?
Sadly from what I can find there is just no alternative for voicemeeter that come anywhere close to the feature set of voicemeeter which sucks but I can probably learn to live without it. as for arc I found this repo that has an arc theme for firefox that I might end up using, mainly what I liked from arc was the theming settings and the way that it was a keyboard shortcuts based browser.
In terms of exploring other distros, I’ll think think about it, I just set a really nice hyprland theme. I definitely wouldnt say that I am new to linux, I have a lot of experience using it server-side and I’m not super worried about being in over my head with arch, the only part of my setup that I would say that I might have trouble fixing if it broke is hyprland and even then it seems pretty difficult to break in a way that I would have a hard time fixing it.
If I’m going to look at other distros I would look mostly into the ones that would give me close to as much control over my DE/WM as stock arch does, I’m the type of person that likes to be given the ability to change every possible parameter and truly make my stuff work exactly how I want it to.
Since I dont need the audio routing features in voicemeeter I am able to use easyeffects to do eq, only 1 problem: easyeffects only supports pipewire. luckily there is an easy solution, pipewire makes a drop in replacement for pulse audio called pipewire-pulse and that will work with easyeffects.
Now that I have that all working there really isnt anything keeping me on windows anymore, except gaming. I have no plans to move to linux gaming anytime soon (thats why I dual booted) but other than gaming arch is now my main os.
This mostly looks like music production software, and I unfortunately will continue to use windows for that because I use FL Studio and there is no way I can move to a different DAW easily (the biggest blockade for that is my own muscle memory lol) after using FL for the past 3 years.
If you aren’t doing competitive multiplayer, Steam Proton works pretty well. I actually switched my living room gaming machine over to Bazzite. However, it’s only used for single player games. There is a areweanticheatyet.com to check for some main stream games. However, it is more hoops than some people are willing to go through to get other titles working on Linux.
I’d love to as well, BUT the licensing scheme around it makes it pretty difficult. If there is a straightforward legal way to get a key for LTSC I would really love to hear it!
I did actually install steam today to check which of my games would run and I was very surprised to se that cyberpunk was a native Linux game, after installing it worked just fine with ray tracing and everything. unfortunately, even though I can play my main 2 game (cyberpunk and minecraft) natively I dont think any vr title has support (official or community) for linux so I wouldn’t be able to play beat saber or boneworks or any of the other vr games that I am addicted to.