I just cant seem to leave Windows behind

Framework Laptop 16 Linux
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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.

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Maybe you could try to use Wine to run Voicemeeter on Linux, I don’t know how difficult it would be but it’s an option

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That might work but that seems like a lot for what I need, all I really need out of voicemeeter is a good per-device parametric eq

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did you test this software:

(I don’t … so may be not relevant…)

and/or Fedora Jam Lab | The Fedora Project

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Replying to myself here just to update.

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.

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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.

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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.

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I recently tried out IoT LTSC and I have to say I am loving it.

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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!

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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.

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https://www.protondb.com/app/823500

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good to know

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My recommendation - dual boot linux and windows

Start installing the games you want to play via steam - setting proton version when needed.

Use protondb to find the compatibility before buying anything.

I have windows on a 250gb expansion card. I use it for 1 game only… the rest I play, work in linux just fine.

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Here’s my 2 cents on my linux experience. Arch is very good because it is always up to date, so it avoids a lot of pitfalls that make other distros like debian and fedora sometimes more brittle than arch. I personally haven’t had much trouble with arch in the last 4 years, but the main arch problem is that compatibility is never 100% complete and (more relistically) out-of-the-box. I’m a big fan of complex and choice-friendly systems such as arch and gentoo but my pick for a work-related or gaming system is currently bazzite. Luck you, it has official framework support. Its based on fedora immutable, has both KDE and gnome versions, boasts great steam support (haven’t had any issues running games with 0 tweaks required as they are all already applied out of the box) , tailscale and wine support are also great. It has sane defaults (btrfs filesystem, possibility to encrypt drive, swap by default, wayland, flatpak-first) and just works for everything. If you’re unsatified with arch, I would suggest you to try it out, I’ve been a huge distro hopper for many many years before bazzite settled me. Whenever there’s something that breaks, rollout the last snapshots that it keeps by default, knowing that it won’t affect your user data or apps that are on another partition and enjoy a working system again.

For your needs:

  • Windows app compatibility with wine is excellent, performance is as good as it get
  • Same for steam and games
  • Reliable for work purposes

Concerning your DE, KDE 6 is a mess. If you’ve only used this, try KDE 5, laugh a bit at how KDE 6 really made kde unsuable (was a huge KDE fan and because of the bugs it pushed me back to GNOME which I hate but I gotta have soemthing that works), and switch to GNOME or KDE 5 while they fix the new version. KDE 4 all again I swear… anyways. Hyperland should be great because there’s very few bugs in there as it’s relatively simple compared to KDE and GNOME and other massive DEs, but its not easy to use or configure and takes a whole lot of time. Maybe COSMIC will save us all from going back to GNOME when KDE breaks everything again in version 7… Just know it’s not your fault that your DE broke (if you did install all packets related to the DE, which in itself is pretty hard).

Linux windows (wayland / x) and sound (pipewire / alsa / pulseaudio) system is a mess and always has been, it’s a shame but it’s free at least. I understand if you’re a pro audio user you might not find what you need on linux. If you can try to use something open source so you have the option to use it on any system you want in the future but I know some software is just fundamentally broken in wine due to linux’s limitations, I experienced that first hand.

Arc browser seems like a closed-source, AI-infused mess that I would rather stay away from but who am I to tell you what to use. It’s true that on linux (and almost everywhere for that matter) the browser market is also depressing. Firefox is corrupt to its core with CEO pay going up and 400M$ deals with Google and is currently undergoing a hostile takeover by the board of directors, acquiring ad companies and putting tracking toggles on by default (Shared post - Firefox Money: Investigating the bizarre finances of Mozilla, Shared post - Mozilla 2023 Annual Report: CEO pay skyrockets, while Firefox Marketshare nosedives, Shared post - Mozilla Firefox Goes Anti-Privacy, Pro-Advertising, and most importantly this for the hostile takeover by the board of directors Shared post - Mozilla Sued for Discrimination by Former CEO-To-Be), webkit is a fork of a fork of a fork, Chromium is riddled with google tracking tech and bad choices code-wise and let’s not even talk about Chrome… But this time we have hope with the recent announcement of a truly independent browser (not based on chromium, webkit nor gecko!!!), ladybird. However it’s not usable or even a pre-alpha for now, it is currently worked on and will be able to end this mess in the future.
So arc browser it is? Well bazzite can run it two ways: first one is obsivously wine, second one is through brew! Bazzite includes brew supports by default. See this page to install it: arc — Homebrew Formulae

Anyways, it seems to me that you’ll enjoy much more another distro, not that arch is not for beginners (it’s an incredible learning experience about linux and for not work-related purposes). I would deeply regret seeing you going back to windows however, so don’t hesitate to see if ubuntu, pop OS (maybe try the new cosmic alpha and stick to it until it becomes the 1.0?), or any other linux distro fits for you. And if you must, well you maybe can dual boot and stick to linux for its awesomeness and its principles. Because, in the end, linux is getting by the day while Windows is only getting worse, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

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This sentence alone would have been enough to get me to switch to Bazzite a few days ago when I made this thread and it almost is now however there are a few things stopping me.

  1. I fixed all my issues with my DE, I did a full re-install of arch (atp it takes like 20 mins lol) and installed the ml4w dotfiles for hyprland and I have sort of used that as a base to make my own modifications to. As for gaming on Arch I did manage to install steam without nuking my os like Linus and surprisingly Cyberpunk has a native steam version (as does my other main game, minecraft but everyone already knew that). Despite everything currently working on Arch I know that at any moment I could easily break my entire OS and have to figure out how to fix a problem with a new update and some obscure package that I have installed that nobody has ever seen before.

  2. I don’t like setting up new operating systems, I have always found it a pain to get all my stuff installed (even more so to remember what I have to install). This is probably the main thing keeping me from trying different distros. Having to reinstall all of that stuff (especially browser extensions) is such a pain.

  3. As cool as Bazzite is I really like having the freedom that Arch and Hyprland provide, literally anything that I don’t like I have been able to change.

Anyways there is absolutely no way I could go back to windows, Linux is my main OS now. Sadly I do still need to keep windows around because there is no official Linux support for FL Studio and any solution using wine is going to be a nightmare to get properly working. So my system will remain dual booted, although I will probably try to swap the drives currently windows on a 2tb and Arch is on a 1tb.

(also just installed homebrew I had no idea that it had Linux support thanks for letting me know about that)

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Welcome to the club haha! Have a nice journey, btw I understand the appeal of hyprland trust me.

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Welcome!

Even I have Windows in case I need to boot into it, but I have noticed I don’t need it as much anymore. Most of my games work in Linux, EasyEffects work well (still wish Framework EQ’d their audio better in firmware), and I even have Thincast for RDPing for work (RDP with RDG, RDCB, and RemoteApp support). I can never get Remmina to work well even though that seems to be the most recommended app for RDP whenever I do a Google search.

The only time I boot into Windows is for COD due to their anti-cheat, but I haven’t played that in a while. I don’t like any of the new ones.

My Linux journey was ZorinOS, Mint, Manjaro, Arch, PopOS, now Fedora.

In the begining I was hoping around trying to stick with Ubuntu-based distros thinking they’d be easiest to find support and documentation. Then I wanted to check out Arch but too afraid to use the vanilla one, so checked out Manjaro. Decided to check out Arch, and ended up loving it, but hated how much work I had to do to reinstall (and it breaks if you don’t update often), so I wanted a distro that is kept relatively up-to-date for hardware support but isn’t as fragile as Arch. That lead me to PopOS. I still love PopOS for how well supported it is, but wanted something more “vanilla” and went with Fedora. I think Fedora is a nice compromise between Arch and PopOS for me. Still relatively up-to-date and vanilla Gnome.

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How do you get access?

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Google it.

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There are two topics on this

and for the older Win 10

It would be ‘nice’ if Framework could work LTSC as an option.