That's what I've gathered: to go with Mint. I saw somewhere that I might, however, need to get something tweaked to the gpu card that I have? For reference, I just bought a Lenovo Legion Slim 5 (Ryzen 7 7840HS; NVIDIA RTX 4060). Apparently Linux struggles with NVIDIA cards?
I've also heard of Proton. Do games take a performance hit played through that? I just figured I'd boot Windows for games, to remove a challenge from this transition. But if it's not much of a challenge, and performance doesn't take a hit, I'm certainly willing to give it a shot.
The NVIDIA thing has been answered elsewhere in the thread, so I'll answer the other one: ... It depends, but usually there's a minor performance hit. Other times it works just as well, and there are some edge cases where it actually works better.
There's also the issue of compatibility: in general, if anti-cheat software is involved, expect to have problems. This website is a database for Steam games with reports from users about what works, what doesn't work, and what can be done to fix or at least mitigate what doesn't work. You can sync your Steam library to it to see how well the games you have are supported at a glance.
NVIDIA works fine for regular use (including gaming and training ML).
Mint makes changing to the propriety drivers easy, as you just search for and open the drivers screen, and then select the latest propriety driver. Mint will take care of the rest.
Now, I haven’t used AMD in a long time, so I’m not sure what it has that NVIDIA doesn’t since I haven’t experienced any NVIDIA problems, other than open source drivers.
I doubt you’re going to get many responses here that aren’t basically ” you don’t need Windows at all, proton is magic that will solve all of your problems"
I’m going to give the opposite advice. I can tell you from experience, if you dual boot Windows and Linux, you’re going to find that over time, while in Windows to use the stuff that only works there, you’ll ask yourself “do I really need to shut down Windows and boot into Linux just for that one thing I need to use real quick?”, and you’ll just do it in Windows. You’ll do that more and more, until you realize you have that Linux install sitting on your drive for no reason, because you don’t use it.
My advice is to either test out a gaming-centric Linux distro, and see if EVERYTHING you want to use works fully(and I do mean try it for yourself, doubt just assume it works because other people say it does, Google a setup guide for the thing you want, and actually try it), or if you have anything you want to use that MUST run on Windows, just stick to Windows for the time being. You can always keep an eye on the status of the thing you want to run, and when it works properly on Linux, have another look at switching fully.
One exception would be if you really only spend a very small amount of time gaming, and so would only need to be in Windows occasionally. If you really will spend the vast majority of your time in Linux, then it makes sense to dual boot. But if you plan to spend any real amount of time doing stuff in Windows, you’re going to find it really obnoxious to have to go back and forth.
I appreciate this input, thank you. You make a valid point. I don't game much, so there wouldn't be too much back and forth. This is also just about learning what it's like to use Linux. I have a backup apple device, which is the OS I'm used to, and it would remain my daily driver for all essential tasks. For now, at least. So I have the luxury of trying stuff out on the pc laptop but not being bound by it.
Update: m/LinuxHardware is now listed on r/LinuxHardware's sidebar as the alternative fediverse destination, we will continue to work closely to strenghten this new partnership.
It looks like the article's answer to the question in the title is essentially "yes, but someday, eventually, it won't."
Personally, I look forward to the day when "Wayland-and-Pipewire-and-Portals" is a mature platform, and I can switch over to it without too much fuss. Until that day comes, though, I'll be sticking with Xorg.
Are you using services running on the OS, Docker or VMs?
With Docker you can set the Network and have some containers traffic egress on the vpn while others have no WAN or direct access. You can have a container join multiple networks to have the best of both worlds.
With VMs, you can set the network interface
With the OS, you might be able to set network interface for each service, but I don’t know how
I have a few PinePhones and its nice to have that kinda access to the hardware and the OS's are good, but they would not be something a normal person would use. Too much choice.
If you want to do a proper color calibration, lookup “color management” for your distro or desktop environment. You can load an ICC color profile, but you will need a colorimeter or spectrometer to create one.
If you’re using NetworkManager, I’d recommend you to use it to create a VPN profile instead and connect to that on startup through the unprivileged nmcli.
You can make sudo password-less for a single command (including using specific arguments) though, so even if using sudo were the only solution, it wouldn't be that bad. For example, I have a sudoers entry that allows my user to decrypt my ZFS pool by executing a root-owned script (with permissions 700), but everything else requires a password.
That looks pretty straightforward. I'll look into doing that. And if I can;t make it work I'll go with the cron job option suggested by @Andromeda above
Actually OP, for the easiest, safest option to your system I would say @Supermariofan67 hit the nail on the head. Use your network manager settings: forum.manjaro.org/t/…/46298
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