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stevecrox ,
@stevecrox@kbin.social avatar

What is your goal?

There are 3 main distributions

  • Arch which aims to take the latest cut of everything. If you have time to keep your desktop updated and need that extra 1fps in a game, its a great choice.
  • Debian aims for stability, this means your drivers and text editor might be .. 2 years old! But if it works on install it will stay working
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux aims for stability but will try to backport drivers. I honestly believe its packaged to always pull in gtk. It aims to provide tools to encourage people into support contracts.

Almost everything else is downstream of those with a twist. For example

  • Ubuntu is downstream Debian with 6 month release schedule, non-free enabled by default and other deviations to encourage people into support contracts.
  • Mint is downstream Ubuntu with the deviations removed.

Stuff that isn't downstream tends to have a highly specific purpose. Fedora started life as upstream RHEL, now it seems to be Red Hat's research plaything (e.g. immutable sounds cool, lets try it in Fedora).

My advice is go to one of the big 3, try them and only bother with one of the million down stream distributions if there is a Unique Selling Point for something you actually care about.

DarkThoughts OP ,

My goal is to have a functional desktop with good gaming capabilities.
EOS / Arch was that until it nuked itself, something that not even Manjaro managed to do, which, for all its bad reputation, had much less issues in a much longer time frame of use. It's not really about having "that extra 1 FPS in a game", but to ensure actual game compatibility, including for titles that aren't 2 years old.

FaeDrifter ,

I recommend Tumbleweed. It updates almost as fast as Arch, sometimes faster, but super stable with automated testing and in a pinch, snapper rollbacks. Great KDE integration.

Yast looks outdated but it’s fine for what it is - a GUI for what’s usually command line administrator operations.

DarkThoughts OP ,

Probably my worst experience yet. Couldn't even change my resolution to 1080p and it would also not install a bootloader on my old test laptop. Idea is nice, but the critical bugs and antique software really speak against it.

rocketeer8015 ,

Try opensuse tumbleweed. It is a bit like arch(rolling release and such) but has more testing and less breakage. It has pretty good KDE support, a very good configuration tool and is one of the most secure distros in its base installation. Also good for gaming imho.

DarkThoughts OP , (edited )

@FaeDrifter
Tried to install it on my old laptop for testing and the installer just gives me this warning before installing:

"Boot from mbr does not work together with btrfs filesystem ang gpt disk label without bios_grub partition. To fix this issue, - create a bios_grub partition, or - use any Ext filesystem for boot partition, or - do not install stage 1 to MBR."

I really have no idea what it wants. I used the guided partitioning so I would expect it to handle that for me? Also, why do they not have a working live environment to test it before installation? Honestly not a great start.

Edit: Oof. So I just tried to install it on my desktop, first one failed tremendously and didn't boot. Tried again and wiping the partitions proper instead of "on demand" of the garbage installer. Got a system, try to switch down to 1080p and it gives me this super stretched pancake resolution instead. Hell no.

rocketeer8015 ,

You booted in bios legacy mode and tried to install to a gpt formatted disk without a dedicated /boot partition would be my guess.

It’s messed up, probably a bios setting related to uefi. Aeon is still in beta and doesn’t handle edge cases that well.

As for your second issue sounds like a waylaid issue with switching resolutions, usually simply relogging fixes that.

You make it sound as if these are distribution issues, these are either weird bios settings or post install issues with a very recent compositor version. Do you think opensuse ships its own drivers or window managers?

DarkThoughts OP ,

I booted in bios legacy mode?
What "weird bios options" could an old 2009 laptop bios possibly have, that are used by default on top of that and never caused any sort of issues with any other Linux distro before? The only ones that didn't run on that thing were both Nobara variants, which is likely more of an old gpu issue.

I've had many wayland issues on other distros before, but never this specific one. It's usually the same on every one, like blurry scaling, scaling affecting games, fsync causing frequent few seconds long blackscreens, or just a lot of game specific stuff. The issue here did not fix itself even after a reboot. I really don't care where the issue stems from, I can only say that this was very unique to OpenSUSE.

rocketeer8015 ,

Well the fact that you don’t understand the issue is part of it. See there are several ways disks can be partitioned and several ways a bios can go about finding kernels to boot on said disks, all of this applies to windows as well btw.

  1. Bios legacy + MBR partitioned with a bootloader written into the first 512 bytes of a disk and the bios being directed to that disk. This is the old way of doing it.
  2. UEFI + GPT partition scheme. Here you have one or more partition marked as bios+uefi, formatted in fat32, that the bios will comb for boot entries. It’s the modern way of doing this.

What you have is probably a mix of the two. It’s likely that one of your linux installs partitioned your disk as GPT while your your system still boots in bios legacy. The installer is now getting mixed signals, one one hand the bios is detected as legacy mode, on the other it’s looking at a GPT partition table. Now technically you probably could write the bootloader just like in option 1., but if you ever change your bios to uefi mode, which is required for modern operating systems like windows you would end up with an non bootable system. And not just in a “oopsie, I need to boot a rescue disk and fix this”-kind of way but a “we need to nuke the entire partition table and start over”-kind of way.

So what the Suse installer is telling you is that you really should use a /boot partition if installing on a GPT partition table.

Btw if you check the correct option at install time(the one about using the entire harddrive) it should automatically create a MBR partitioned disk for you which avoids this issue as it’s not a ungodly mix of 1. and 2.

This error isn’t a bug, it’s a feature pointing out a serious problem with your machines setup(the one below the OS level). Yes you can probably ignore it, as other distros might or might not, but it’s generally not a good idea. SuSE has a couple of these hang ups since it has an enterprise background and takes some things more serious than other distros. For example having closed ports for printers in the active on default firewall being one stellar example of this. It cause no end of issues for people struggling to setup their printers, that being said it is a security issue and opensuse decided it wasn’t going to sacrifice security of every system because some people want to use a printer.

DarkThoughts OP ,

So what the Suse installer is telling you is that you really should use a /boot partition if installing on a GPT partition table.

Why is it telling ME that when I trusted the partitioning to the installer? I really don't understand how that should be my fault for the partitioner to act faulty. And btw. there's only two options: 1) to erase the disk if needed and 2) erase the entire disk anyway. I selected the second one because the first one didn't even work at all, so from my perspective it should have not used any potential GPT partitions that the previous distro could've potentially created, but erased the entire thing and start from scratch with everything it would need, including a valid boot partition. If OpenSUSE, for some reason, requires me to wipe my drive clean BEFORE I even start the installer, then they should specify that beforehand - or provide a less antique installer that can actually do it itself.

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