I’ll go first, I took my mom’s college textbooks which came with discs for a couple distros and failed to install RHEL before managing to get Fedora Core 4 working. The first desktop environment I used was KDE and despite trying out a few others over the years I always come back to plasma. Due to being like 12, I wanted to run my games on it, and man wine was not nearly as easy to use (or as good) as it is nowadays. So I switched back to windows until around 2015 or so when I spent the next few years trying to replace windows as much as I could. Once valve released proton, I switched fully and have t looked back, unless my still there windows partition tries to take over my computer when I restart it at least.
I can’t remember if my dad sent me up an Ubuntu server on an azure hosted VM or if we installed it on an old laptop that was shitting out but either way, I’ve always gone back and forth since I was like 13 or 14.
For servers, I use Linux exclusively. I don’t see a need for windows on them and as such have just always used either Ubuntu or RHEL for anything that I need to treat as a server. For laptops, I generally started with windows and then installed Linux a few years later but if I get a new one it’s gonna be Linux out of the gate.
My desktop, on the other hand, is different. I’ve always used windows on my gaming desktops due to compatibility but a few years ago I tried Linux as my only OS for a bit. I loved using it at first, but then I ran into all the issues with trying to run a beefy gaming PC on Linux. Fan curves were a nightmare to set and half the time they couldn’t find my fans so they were either at full blast or off, and I hated the idea of using the bios because I don’t want to turn my PC off to set them. RGB was okay but some of my stuff didn’t get found, and all I wanted was a solid color but it was very hard. Some games didn’t work and they were the ones I wanted most.
Ultimately, I went back to windows but then a year or two later the steam deck came out, so gaming has come a long way. I’m very much considering it again but I have to do my research beforehand to see what tools I’ll need. If anyone has any suggestions, I’ll take them!
I’m not sure what fan issues you were hitting, but I’ve been gaming on linux (with nvidia on manjaro) for the last couple of years just fine. Steam/proton has made so much possible that wasn’t before.
Can’t recommend manjaro btw. EndeavourOS is my new go-to.
Wild. Maybe I did something wrong but I tried finding a simple interface to set fan curves and most places I found were terminal-based, and as much as I love the terminal, I don’t like it for things like fan curves.
Also for OS, last time I went with Pop!_OS and I have that on my laptop now, but I’m not that picky. I just liked that Pop!_OS had drivers built in for Nvidia.
I do plan on trying again, but my #1 priority is standing up this Poweredge R720XD I have sitting behind me. Server racks are too expensive.
To be clear, I haven’t messed with my fan curves on linux, I’ve just never had an issue with my fans being on “full blast or off”.
I know manjaro and endeavour both have tools that handle proprietary nvidia driver installation, but I’ve only tried manjaro’s so far (
mhwd). It works fine, but running updates are a bit of a manual chore. Completely defeats the purpose of the tool imo.Ah okay, I get you now. When I said “full blast or off” what I meant was using the tools I found, I could either turn them on or off, I couldn’t find the granular controls to set like, “at +10 degrees go to 25% power” type thing. And again, maybe I was doing it wrong, but I’m pretty fluent with Linux and just had no idea what I was doing.