I've been using Ubuntu as my daily driver for a good few years now. Unfortunately I don't like the direction they seem to be heading.
I've also just ordered a new computer, so it seems like the best time to change over. While I'm sure it will start a heated debate, what variant would people recommend?
I'm not after a bleeding edge, do it all yourself OS it will be my daily driver, so don't want to have to get elbow deep in configs every 5 minutes. My default would be to go back to Debian. However, I know the steam deck is arch based. With steam developing proton so hard, is it worth the additional learning curve to change to arch, or something else?
I'm currently struggling with Nobara and the growing amount of bugs with each new kernel update.
Otherwise I would have recommended that one, since it offers some great convenient features, like a graphical management tool for all sorts of Wine versions, which can be installed in parallel. The kernel supports fsync and is tuned for low latency. Game performance is decent and I also got all my games and launchers (native Linux and also Wine) working.
For the audio part, there is pipewire, which works like a charm. There is also a compatible flatpack for DSP/equalizer which I couldn't find it on Ubuntu's snap store: JamesDSP. Now, after some tuning, my rather flat-sounding headphones sound do super boomy.
It started with conflicts between the preinstalled gnome extensions - namely the desktop icons broke other extensions, like Pop!_shell for window tiling. So I had to disable desktop icons.
My latest installed kernel (6.5.11) breaks screen detection - The resolution is stuck at 1024x768.
My PC gets stuck (probably on self test) after reboot or switching it on, after Nobara has shut down. Solution: Pull the power plug, wait 10 seconds, reconnect and turn it on.
Alrighty then: Now I have a reason to switch graphics cards and install Nobara on my other SSD. I bought a Radeon RX 7600 for this setup, because of AMD's praised open-source drivers. My spare GPU is an RTX 3060, so I can actually test both worlds.
That's what folks over here tell me, and you are most probably right. There is still one more issue scratching my head though: RayTracing performance on Cyberpunk 2077: It works great on high settings with stable 50 FPS minimum on my Windows 10 + Nvidia build, but it's quite the opposite on this Nobara + AMD system. 5FPS and slowdowns are just unplayable. I expected the bad AMD performance being fixed by today. I think I should swap GPUs between both systems and test again.