I can recommend running it on new hardware. I love that it runs great on old hardware, but it is a bit of a disservice to Linux distros that people always experience it on raspberry pies and other old laptops or otherwise relatively slow hardware.
I actually had my most difficult time ever setting up Linux on my 5800X3D and 3070 recently.
PopOS wouldn’t save my resolution on reboot, and then after fixing it all of my games were running at the wrong resolution or breaking in various frustrating ways. All Linux native games too. Jumped to Fedora and every single game flickered like mad and then once I got that fixed my package manager inexplicably broke. I was about to install Ubuntu before saying fuck any chance of instability and going to Debian.
I had to manually install way more than any of the other distros, but everything just worked once I got my graphics driver installed. I was really disappointed given I’ve been using Linux on and off for 8 years, and my Steam Deck has been nothing but solid. I’m honestly just disappointed things have trended in a bad direction, and I hope this was just a one off experience and not the norm now.
Even in the past I’ve had nowhere near as many non-GPU related issues. Some GUI elements in Gnome just did not work, and at one point I was getting low USB power errors even though the USB drive and port were known good. The amount of workarounds I had to attempt to implement before settling on Debian was insane.
My primary laptop is a Lenovo T495s. I’m a big fan because my requirements for a laptop aren’t particularly demanding, but while a 5 year old Ryzen 7 is a bit aged, I’d hardly consider it underpowered, at least for my (and many others) needs. Laptops like this can easily be found in great condition and under $200. I spent a little more after a new nvme and maxing out ram.
I see what you’re saying, but I also think it’s actually a mark in Linux’ favor that is continues to run so well on older or underpowered hardware. It’s how I really got into it, being broke and able to eke out years more life on older computers when I could ill afford upgrades. These days, I’m happy that I can get off the upgrade treadmill for longer. The most demanding games I’ve installed are the Final Fantasy I-VI Pixel Remasters and Grandia. I’m not a programmer, don’t have to render graphical stuff for work, etc, so it’s pretty great that I don’t have to worry about my budget desktop being unusable in 4 years because the OS devs have made it a practical impossibility to run on older hardware. I’ve got 32GB of RAM, and my biggest threat to usability is leaving Firefox running with a ton of open tabs for weeks on end, which can conveniently be solved by closing Firefox and watching my RAM use plummet.
Not everyone is going to be a gamer, graphics designer or programmer that really needs the latest and greatest in hardware. In fact, I’d wager the majority of people won’t notice an improvement outside of a few cases. Upgrading from an HDD to an SSD, <16GB of RAM to >16GB of RAM and from an older graphics card to a newer one that supports 4K are pretty easy differences to note in normal use. Those aside, I think most people would be hard-pressed to identify an objective difference in the quality of their browsing and word processing experiences. Depending on how flexible people are with adapting to different workflows, even those could be minimized, to an extent. I have a desktop I bought second hand twenty years ago that served as my main computer into and beyond my initial forays in university. It has a whopping two cores, and I think I might have managed to get 16GB of RAM into it. It’d probably suck for web browsing and wouldn’t be terribly efficient for power use, but I bet you if I reinstalled things, it would work just fine for serving up my music library via mpd, playing it with ncmpcpp and writing term papers in Auctex, same as it did back then. Even if I put an older version of Windows on it like Windows 7, I bet it would struggle to run those same programs on top of the base OS. That’s legitimately impressive, when you think about it.
Thank you for the nice write-up. I agree that it is great and whatis very impressive. Also to see old hardware not going to a landfill. I have definitely “fixed” up friend and elderlies computers by installing Ubuntu, and more lately I tried fedora silver blue for a friend. And I too have second hand ThinkPads, a P53 6 core, 64gb, rtx3000 and a t440 and then my work machine is a xps13 (not secondhand). It runs great on all of these and linux is a real workhorse.
I think my point of view come from windows “techies” that seem to be completely oblivious to Linux outside of running it on a Raspberry pi or the like, and linux is only as a way to “save” a computer because windows can’t run on it anymore. To me, Linux is a first choice for server, workstations, home use, gaming… really anything, but I might be biased… like most of us in this forum 😅😉
I’m actually a little scared of running Linux on modern, fast hardware.
How is multi-GPU driver support?
My main machine is a 900 TFlops compute monster (4 GPUs) running ROCM on Windows, and the last time I’d tried Manjaro on Desktop, it seized up for unknown reasons.
I’ve got asynchronous monitors - 1440p@165Hz main display and 4K@85Hz flipped vertical for a side monitor. Occasionally, I plug in a projector which is 1080p, mirrored to the 4K, but flipped horizontal.
I’m not sure what I’d done wrong because it works perfectly on my 11 year old Z575 (Debian+KDE there).
What distro would you recommend for an extremely fast/high RAM machine? I’ve got 128GB of main system memory, and 4TB of M.2 for a system disk running at 7.6 gigabytes/second actual/real-world RW I/O.
I would suggest if you want some up-to-date awesomeness, try OpenSUSE Tumbleweed!
Rolling release sounds scary, but even aside from enabling BTRFS snapshots by default, it’s surprisingly stable, and has proprietary NVIDIA drivers!
Granted, I don’t game (that’s all my Win10 partition is for right now lol), but I do Blender and other creative tasks snd it’s amazingly snappy and fun.
Wayland is “getting there” on a user experience level, but as for buttery smooth frame rates and stuff, it feels like a new machine on my 144hz / 60hz dual monitor setup.
I’m running a single 3090, but I’m sure it could handle dual-GPU!
Tumbleweed is a bit of a spooky name for a distro implying that a gentle breeze sends it, but y’know
Linux Mint as someone suggested, I’ve ran a long time ago for college on an ancient laptop, and it’s an extreme stable OS, similar to Windows 2000 Pro. I can’t remember it crashing or freezing even once on me, and the Thinkpad T42 has an anemic processor., which I ran with the Conservative Governor
Totally feel ya on Mint. I put it on my X230 just now because I wasn’t planning on booting it up too often and didn’t want a massive update causing issues down the line. Super stable, super user friendly. I always recommend it to newcomers. Lovely experience!
Haha yeah Tumbleweed is an interesting name. Suppose it’s because it’s always “rollin’ rollin’ rollin’”. Constantly in motion!
I’d caution against it on low-data capped internet plans for instance, because it updates fairly often, sometimes 1GB or more. But also plenty of people update like once a week and it’s good. I update pretty much every day. It’s kinda compulsive for me and I like to see if anything is fixed or new. :p
So that’s one cool thing it has over *buntu and friends: Newest and shiniest features, but they’ve been tested a bit more thoroughly than on something like Arch, and if it does go bad, you can boot into a “snapshot” and wait until a newer update hopefully fixes whatever borked it.
But I haven’t had to roll back in ages. :)
I like keeping on the edge of KDE6 right now because it’s improving very quickly. Same with Wayland, even though some programs are still fussy with it. (You can have X11 and Wayland both, and choose which to use upon login)
I’ve installed it on my (single) AMD GPU (I thought it was for something else) on EndeavourOS (which is, obvs, arch btw :D).
I’ve been using endeavourOS for about 1y now, after a few years of Mint (and 20years of everything else. Yes, I’ve used gentoo as well back when it was only install from stage1). It does feel faster (on the same hw) but I’ve never done any real benchmarking, so it could be just “new shiny feeling faster”. I’ve found an article a few weeks ago comparing boot/compression speeds of different distros. In your particular case I wouldn’t be using Debian as I feel you’d need quite up-to-date drivers, and Debian is conservative (and that’s a good thing personally, I use it on my servers).
Just install Linux Mint and be done. Just a side note but there is no such thing as “drivers” like there are on Windows. Everything is baked into the kernel. If you run Nvidia you will need to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers. These aren’t like Windows drivers but they are external.
Uh, if they want to use ROCm (kinda like CUDA, but for AMD), they do have to install it manually. It is available for some distros, so that hopefully shouldn’t be a problem.
I can recommend running it on new hardware. I love that it runs great on old hardware, but it is a bit of a disservice to Linux distros that people always experience it on raspberry pies and other old laptops or otherwise relatively slow hardware.
Linux on a brand new hardware is insanely good.
Edit: software => hardware
Sorry to be that gal but other slow hardware not software
Thanks 😅
Ehhhhhh I wouldn’t say brand new hardware. A lot of times Linux still needs a few months to properly support a new Gen of graphics cards or processors
Though it generally at least works which is a huge improvement over back in the day
I actually had my most difficult time ever setting up Linux on my 5800X3D and 3070 recently.
PopOS wouldn’t save my resolution on reboot, and then after fixing it all of my games were running at the wrong resolution or breaking in various frustrating ways. All Linux native games too. Jumped to Fedora and every single game flickered like mad and then once I got that fixed my package manager inexplicably broke. I was about to install Ubuntu before saying fuck any chance of instability and going to Debian.
I had to manually install way more than any of the other distros, but everything just worked once I got my graphics driver installed. I was really disappointed given I’ve been using Linux on and off for 8 years, and my Steam Deck has been nothing but solid. I’m honestly just disappointed things have trended in a bad direction, and I hope this was just a one off experience and not the norm now.
Nvidia has always been a pain and that’s really Nvidia’s fault not Linux’s
Even in the past I’ve had nowhere near as many non-GPU related issues. Some GUI elements in Gnome just did not work, and at one point I was getting low USB power errors even though the USB drive and port were known good. The amount of workarounds I had to attempt to implement before settling on Debian was insane.
My primary laptop is a Lenovo T495s. I’m a big fan because my requirements for a laptop aren’t particularly demanding, but while a 5 year old Ryzen 7 is a bit aged, I’d hardly consider it underpowered, at least for my (and many others) needs. Laptops like this can easily be found in great condition and under $200. I spent a little more after a new nvme and maxing out ram.
I see what you’re saying, but I also think it’s actually a mark in Linux’ favor that is continues to run so well on older or underpowered hardware. It’s how I really got into it, being broke and able to eke out years more life on older computers when I could ill afford upgrades. These days, I’m happy that I can get off the upgrade treadmill for longer. The most demanding games I’ve installed are the Final Fantasy I-VI Pixel Remasters and Grandia. I’m not a programmer, don’t have to render graphical stuff for work, etc, so it’s pretty great that I don’t have to worry about my budget desktop being unusable in 4 years because the OS devs have made it a practical impossibility to run on older hardware. I’ve got 32GB of RAM, and my biggest threat to usability is leaving Firefox running with a ton of open tabs for weeks on end, which can conveniently be solved by closing Firefox and watching my RAM use plummet.
Not everyone is going to be a gamer, graphics designer or programmer that really needs the latest and greatest in hardware. In fact, I’d wager the majority of people won’t notice an improvement outside of a few cases. Upgrading from an HDD to an SSD, <16GB of RAM to >16GB of RAM and from an older graphics card to a newer one that supports 4K are pretty easy differences to note in normal use. Those aside, I think most people would be hard-pressed to identify an objective difference in the quality of their browsing and word processing experiences. Depending on how flexible people are with adapting to different workflows, even those could be minimized, to an extent. I have a desktop I bought second hand twenty years ago that served as my main computer into and beyond my initial forays in university. It has a whopping two cores, and I think I might have managed to get 16GB of RAM into it. It’d probably suck for web browsing and wouldn’t be terribly efficient for power use, but I bet you if I reinstalled things, it would work just fine for serving up my music library via mpd, playing it with ncmpcpp and writing term papers in Auctex, same as it did back then. Even if I put an older version of Windows on it like Windows 7, I bet it would struggle to run those same programs on top of the base OS. That’s legitimately impressive, when you think about it.
Thank you for the nice write-up. I agree that it is great and whatis very impressive. Also to see old hardware not going to a landfill. I have definitely “fixed” up friend and elderlies computers by installing Ubuntu, and more lately I tried fedora silver blue for a friend. And I too have second hand ThinkPads, a P53 6 core, 64gb, rtx3000 and a t440 and then my work machine is a xps13 (not secondhand). It runs great on all of these and linux is a real workhorse.
I think my point of view come from windows “techies” that seem to be completely oblivious to Linux outside of running it on a Raspberry pi or the like, and linux is only as a way to “save” a computer because windows can’t run on it anymore. To me, Linux is a first choice for server, workstations, home use, gaming… really anything, but I might be biased… like most of us in this forum 😅😉
I’m actually a little scared of running Linux on modern, fast hardware.
How is multi-GPU driver support?
My main machine is a 900 TFlops compute monster (4 GPUs) running ROCM on Windows, and the last time I’d tried Manjaro on Desktop, it seized up for unknown reasons.
I’ve got asynchronous monitors - 1440p@165Hz main display and 4K@85Hz flipped vertical for a side monitor. Occasionally, I plug in a projector which is 1080p, mirrored to the 4K, but flipped horizontal.
I’m not sure what I’d done wrong because it works perfectly on my 11 year old Z575 (Debian+KDE there).
What distro would you recommend for an extremely fast/high RAM machine? I’ve got 128GB of main system memory, and 4TB of M.2 for a system disk running at 7.6 gigabytes/second actual/real-world RW I/O.
I would suggest if you want some up-to-date awesomeness, try OpenSUSE Tumbleweed!
Rolling release sounds scary, but even aside from enabling BTRFS snapshots by default, it’s surprisingly stable, and has proprietary NVIDIA drivers!
Granted, I don’t game (that’s all my Win10 partition is for right now lol), but I do Blender and other creative tasks snd it’s amazingly snappy and fun.
Wayland is “getting there” on a user experience level, but as for buttery smooth frame rates and stuff, it feels like a new machine on my 144hz / 60hz dual monitor setup.
I’m running a single 3090, but I’m sure it could handle dual-GPU!
Sure, I’ll try OpenSUSE!
Tumbleweed is a bit of a spooky name for a distro implying that a gentle breeze sends it, but y’know
Linux Mint as someone suggested, I’ve ran a long time ago for college on an ancient laptop, and it’s an extreme stable OS, similar to Windows 2000 Pro. I can’t remember it crashing or freezing even once on me, and the Thinkpad T42 has an anemic processor., which I ran with the Conservative Governor
Totally feel ya on Mint. I put it on my X230 just now because I wasn’t planning on booting it up too often and didn’t want a massive update causing issues down the line. Super stable, super user friendly. I always recommend it to newcomers. Lovely experience!
Haha yeah Tumbleweed is an interesting name. Suppose it’s because it’s always “rollin’ rollin’ rollin’”. Constantly in motion!
I’d caution against it on low-data capped internet plans for instance, because it updates fairly often, sometimes 1GB or more. But also plenty of people update like once a week and it’s good. I update pretty much every day. It’s kinda compulsive for me and I like to see if anything is fixed or new. :p
So that’s one cool thing it has over *buntu and friends: Newest and shiniest features, but they’ve been tested a bit more thoroughly than on something like Arch, and if it does go bad, you can boot into a “snapshot” and wait until a newer update hopefully fixes whatever borked it.
But I haven’t had to roll back in ages. :)
I like keeping on the edge of KDE6 right now because it’s improving very quickly. Same with Wayland, even though some programs are still fussy with it. (You can have X11 and Wayland both, and choose which to use upon login)
well ROCM is supported in Linux https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/install-on-linux/en/latest/
I’ve installed it on my (single) AMD GPU (I thought it was for something else) on EndeavourOS (which is, obvs, arch btw :D).
I’ve been using endeavourOS for about 1y now, after a few years of Mint (and 20years of everything else. Yes, I’ve used gentoo as well back when it was only install from stage1). It does feel faster (on the same hw) but I’ve never done any real benchmarking, so it could be just “new shiny feeling faster”. I’ve found an article a few weeks ago comparing boot/compression speeds of different distros. In your particular case I wouldn’t be using Debian as I feel you’d need quite up-to-date drivers, and Debian is conservative (and that’s a good thing personally, I use it on my servers).
Just install Linux Mint and be done. Just a side note but there is no such thing as “drivers” like there are on Windows. Everything is baked into the kernel. If you run Nvidia you will need to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers. These aren’t like Windows drivers but they are external.
Uh, if they want to use ROCm (kinda like CUDA, but for AMD), they do have to install it manually. It is available for some distros, so that hopefully shouldn’t be a problem.
Fedora now ships with ROCm. I don’t think it is completely ready yet but its a start.
Linux on the t430 is such a smooth experience though