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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Little help here linux guys? Trying to figure out what distro to use (self.linux)

submitted 6 months ago by riccochet to c/[email protected]

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Yeah. It's another one of these. But! Here me out! So I have some experience using Linux. Run some VMs for services I run in my home, I switched my surface book 3 (funnily enough) to ubuntu for my work computer as I was getting more and more frustrated by windows 11 and it turned out really good. Was able to completely get off windows and i didn't miss out on anything. Now. Ive been trying to migrate my gaming rig to Linux with... Not a lot of success. I have 3 monitors plugged into it, a Samsung crg49 and then 2 small no name brand monitors I like for websites and discord and stuff while I play on the Samsung monitor. On windows it works flawlessly. No Linux distro I've used has been able to handle it and I'm not sure how I should be approaching this. Running games has been fine. I use lutris and have been able to play pretty much everything I've wanted to with some tweaking. But whether a few hours or a few days, eventually I start having issues with the displays. Monitors will black out. Not boot. Eventually the whole system just stops working in a way that I can figure out. I have a ryzen 3700x, and a Nvidia 2080ti. 64GB of RAM. all my storage is nvme. I have tried most major distros. Mostly Ubuntu is what I have experience with. I have tried some others like nobara, but performance was awful, and display management was an issue. Ive never really installed other desktop environments other than what comes with those distros, so if it's a matter of "use distro x, but you need to install weyland" then sure. Just let me know that's something I need to do. 😋 So... What do you suggest I run? I really dont want to go back to windoze. It's just awful these days.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Can you list the distros that you tried?

Monitor handling will mostly depend on the desktop environment and X11/Wayland, but different distros will ship with different defaults for these.

Ubuntu and Nobara both come with the GNOME desktop environment, which uses Wayland by default.

If you've tried anything with e.g. KDE Plasma as the desktop environment, that would already tell us a bit more...

[–] riccochet 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Ive tried nobara, I've tried Ubuntu, I've tried popOS, and I think also tried mint. I'm not 100% sure on that one tho... I feel like alot of my attempts have just blurred together at his point...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Well, Pop!_OS uses COSMIC, which is a customized GNOME, and Linux Mint uses Cinnamon, which is kind of GNOME under the hood, too. (In technical terms, Cinnamon is a "fork" of GNOME.)

So, yeah, that doesn't allow ruling out that you're always running into the same bug.
You should still try what the others are suggesting, though, before you go reinstalling or installing a different desktop environment. You're certainly not the first person to use GNOME et al with 3 monitors. This should work.

[–] riccochet 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Honestly the desktop environments is where I kinda get spacey with linux. The cli makes sense to me. Installing different desktops hasn't been very successful for me. Which distros use KDE plasma?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

You can kind of think of a desktop environment as everything that's needed to turn a server OS (which has only a CLI interface) into a desktop OS.

So, it contains (or pulls in) all the stuff for displaying any graphics at all, but then also a panel/taskbar, audio support, icons, global keyboard shortcuts like Alt+Tab, a settings menu and some utility programs like a file manager, a text editor, a calculator etc..

Switching desktop environments is kind of like switching between Windows 7 and Windows 8.
You can still run the same programs, all the CLI stuff and OS internals work the same, but the UX for interacting with that is different. Admittedly, though, different desktop environments usually have more differences than there are between Windows 7 and 8.

As for KDE Plasma, it's available on lots of distros, but to name a few:

Kubuntu is just Ubuntu with KDE preinstalled.
Nobara has a KDE version.
Personally, I'm on openSUSE. It is a somewhat more niche distro, relatively different from Ubuntu and Fedora. They really make KDE shine, though (with lots of detail work).